Verdi, Opera, Women 9781107469013, 9781107043824

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V e r d i , O p e r a ,  ­W o m e n

Verdi’s operas – composed between 1839 and 1893 – portray a striking diversity of female protagonists: warrior women and peacemakers, virgins and courtesans, princesses and slaves, witches and gypsies, mothers and daughters, erring and idealised wives, and, last of all, a feisty quartet of Tudor townswomen in Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff. Yet what meanings did the impassioned crises and dilemmas of these characters hold for the nineteenth-­century female spectator, especially during such a turbulent span in the history of the Italian peninsula? How was opera shaped by society – and was society similarly influenced by opera? Contextualising Verdi’s female roles within aspects of women’s social, cultural and political history, Susan Rutherford explores the interface between the reality of the spectators’ lives and the imaginary of the fictional world before them on the operatic stage. s u s a n ru th e r f o r d is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Manchester. In addition to various essays on voice, performance and nineteenth-­century Italian opera, her publications also include The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914 (co-­editor, 1992) and The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge, 2006), which received the 2007 Pauline Alderman Award (IAWM) for research on women and music.

C AM B RID G E S T UDIE S  IN ­O PERA Series editor: Arthur Groos, Cornell University

Volumes for Cambridge Studies in Opera explore the cultural, political and social influences of the genre. As a cultural art form, opera is not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced, whether directly or in more subtle ways, by its social and political environment. In turn, opera leaves its mark on society and contributes to shaping the cultural climate. Studies to be included in the series will look at these various relationships including the politics and economics of opera, the operatic representation of women or the singers who portrayed them, the history of opera as theatre and the evolution of the opera house. Published titles Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna Edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner John Warrack Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture Camille Crittenden Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-­Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance Ian Woodfield Opera Liberalism and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-­Century France: The Politics of Halévy’s La Juive Diana R. Hallman Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in Così fan tutte Edmund J. Goehring Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini Emanuele Senici Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 Downing A. Thomas The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity Alexandra Wilson

The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 Susan Rutherford Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu Edited by Victoria Johnson,  Jane F. Fulcher and Thomas Ertman Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks Daniel H. Foster When Opera Meets Film Marcia J. Citron Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception Herbert ­Lindenberger Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life Benjamin Walton Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution Pierpaolo Polzonetti Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust Cormac Newark Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism David Charlton The Sounds of Paris in Verdi’s La traviata Emilio Sala The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage Suzanne Aspden Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama Stefano Castelvecchi Verdi, Opera, Women Susan Rutherford

Verdi, Opera, ­Women Susan Rutherford University of Manchester

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107043824 © Susan Rutherford 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Rutherford, Susan. Verdi, opera, women : premio internazionale: ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ / Susan Rutherford.   pages  cm. – (Cambridge studies in opera) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-04382-4 (hardback) 1.  Verdi, Giuseppe, 1813–1901. Operas.  2.  Women in opera.  3.  Opera--19th century. I.  Title. ml410.v4r78  2013 782.1092–dc23    2013015865 isbn 978-­1-­107-­04382-­4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Premio Internazionale: ‘Giuseppe Verdi’

­

­C o n t e n ts

List of figures  |  x List of music examples  |  xi Acknowledgements  |  xii Prologue: Verdi and his audience  |  1 1 War  |  25 2 Prayer  |  67 3 Romance  |  93 4 Sexuality  |  111 5 Marriage  |  142 6 Death  |  178 7 Laughter  |  198 Notes  |  212 Bibliography  |  263 Index  |  285

ix

­F i g u r e s

0.1 Roberto Focosi, Giuseppe Verdi e le sue opere, 1853 (courtesy of Museo Teatrale alla Scala, Milan)  |  7 0.2 Teatro Regio, Parma, 1909; photograph by Ettore Pesci (courtesy of Casa della Musica, Parma)  |  18 0.3 Teatro Regio, Parma, 1909; photograph by Ettore Pesci (courtesy of Casa della Musica, Parma)  |  19 1.1 Eugenia Tadolini as Odabella, Il cosmorama pittorico, 13 March 1847 (courtesy of Centro Internazionale di Ricerca sui Periodici Musicali, Parma)  |  52 5.1 Azucena, Il trovatore, Teatro di San Carlo, Naples 1853; figurino by Filippo Del Buono (courtesy of Biblioteca dal Conservatorio di Musica S. Pietro a Majella di Napoli)  |  168 5.2 Strega, Macbeth, Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, 1849; figurino by Filippo Del Buono (courtesy of Biblioteca dal Conservatorio di Musica S. Pietro a Majella di Napoli)  |  169 5.3 Strega, Macbeth; figurino by Roberto Focosi, 1847 (courtesy of Casa della Musica, Parma)  |  170 5.4 Placida Corvetti as Azucena, Teatro Comunale, Imola, 1856; lithograph by Annibale Marini (courtesy of Collezione Ragni, Archivi di Teatro Napoli)  |  171 7.1 Adolf Hohenstein, Falstaff, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 14 May 1893 (courtesy of Centro Internazionale di Ricerca sui Periodici Musicali, Parma)  |  210

x

M u s i c ­e x a m p l e s

1.1 1.2 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3

Les Vêpres siciliennes, Act i  |  39 Il corsaro, Act iii, scene ii  |  62 Rigoletto, Act i  |  107 Rigoletto, Act i  |  114 La traviata, Act i  |  115 Aida, Act ii  |  115 Don Carlos, Act iii (1884 version)  |  120 Stiffelio, Act iii  |  152 Otello, Act iv  |  195 Otello, Act iv  |  196 Otello, Act iv  |  196

xi

­Ack n owl e d g e m e n ts

I must first express my deep gratitude to the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani and the Rotary Club of Parma for awarding me the Premio Internazionale ‘Giuseppe Verdi’, which was the impetus for this book. The institute’s director, Pierluigi Petrobelli, and another member of the awarding panel, Julian Budden, were unstinting in their generous support and advice during the process of writing; I am grieved that neither lived to witness the book’s publication. Other members of the institute’s staff, led by its president, Maria Mercedes Carrara Verdi, also played a vital role, most notably Marisa Di Gregorio Casati, Anna Zuccoli, Michela Crovi and Maria Luigia Pagliani. I have benefitted enormously from the kindness of Roger Parker (an earlier recipient of the Premio Internazionale ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ in 1985); his guidance and scholarship have contributed more than I can say to the development of the following pages. All errors, of course, are my own. Much of the research on critical reception was undertaken at the Centro Internazionale di Ricerca sui Periodici Musicali (CIRPeM); I am especially grateful to its director Marco Capra, and to Cristina Trombella and Francesca Montresor of the Casa della Musica for making my frequent visits to Parma so productive and enjoyable. I owe sincere thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the funding that allowed me time to complete this book, and even more so to my colleagues at the University of Manchester – especially John Casken, Laura Tunbridge, Philip Grange, Rajinder Dudrah and Rebecca Herissone, all of whom have contributed invaluable support in various ways across the years. The eventual emergence of this manuscript into print owes to the superbly professional and helpful hands of Victoria Cooper, the series editor Arthur Groos, Rebecca Jones and their colleagues at Cambridge University Press, and to Christopher Feeney, Jamie Hood and Emma Wildsmith at Out of House Publishing Solutions. Short sections of this book were earlier published in three essays in Studi verdiani, Petrobelli’s edited volume Eroine tragiche ma non troppo and Nineteenth-­Century Music Review; I am grateful for permission to reproduce this material in revised form. Much of the following pages is about operatic love in times long past. It could not have been written without the very real and very present love of my family: my dear husband James, my parents, my sister and brothers, nieces and nephews. This book is dedicated to our newest arrivals, Alice, Millie and Holly, and to their much-­loved mothers, Helen and Ruth.

xii

P ro l o g u e : V erdi and his ­au dien c e

Another book on Verdi? The shelves of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani in Parma are already burdened with the accumulation of reviews, scholarly tomes, biographies, pamphlets, programme notes and assorted ephemera on his operas since Oberto in 1839. It seems ironic that so many words should be expended on a composer who displayed such little interest in ­analyses of his work. Praise embarrassed Verdi; criticism irritated him. Some comments in the musical press in 1874 provoked this characteristically testy outburst to Opprandino Arrivabene (a former journalist): ‘Do you believe that all or almost all [critics] can penetrate the guts of a composition and understand the intentions of the composer? Never and again never!’ 1 Nor, unlike Wagner, did Verdi himself theorise publicly about his works and methods. For Verdi, the liveness of the operatic event superseded discourse: words could not adequately substitute for music, or for the immediacy of performance. His ideas about opera were reserved primarily for his private correspondence with his librettists, editors and singers, where it is apparent that the greatest stimulus in his creative process was a desire to make the operatic event a compelling, intense experience for the spectator. That intensity, after all, was his own response to the act of composition: ‘When I am alone, and occupied with my notes, then my heart throbs, tears rain from my eyes and my emotion and pleasure are indescribable.’2 Verdi’s contract was not with the critic or the historian, but rather with audiences and the actuality, or the ‘presentness’, of the operatic event. How can we access that ‘presentness’ when it lies so far in the past? Paradoxically (and only partially), through the very discourses that Verdi distrusted. One of the more curious volumes of the epoch was written by an American soprano-­turned-­journalist, Blanche Roosevelt.3 Its cumbersome title – Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’: Being A Short Life of Verdi, with letters written about Milan and the new opera of Othello: represented for the first time on the stage of La Scala theatre, February 5, 1887 – none the less signals an unusual effort to capture the operatic experience in print. Embedding her account of the perform­ance in the broader background of the sights and sounds of late nineteenth-­century Milan – its people, customs, monuments and galleries – Roosevelt demonstrated a keen sensibility to the milieu of Otello’s première, and the way in which the reception of opera is shaped by a greater complex of interactions between art and society. My own book shares some of this territory, albeit from a different temporal perspective. Whereas Roosevelt sketched the cultural geography of a city in the present, I am tracing the artistic and social topography of a community in the past. Her book clamours with the commotion of contemporary life; mine strains to catch muffled 1

2

Verdi, Opera, ­Women

reverberations sounding distantly across the silence of more than a century. And my interest is not just in Verdi but also in Roosevelt herself  – or, rather, what she represents. As the first woman to write publicly about Verdi, Roosevelt provides a rare glimpse of how the work of the most influential Italian composer of the second half of the nineteenth century was perceived and evaluated by a female spectator. In short, my book is about women (and men) watching women – or rather, representations of women enacted by live performers. For his female audience, the long decades of Verdi’s operatic career from 1839 to 1893 produced an abundant diversity of heroines: warrior women and peacemakers, virgins and courtesans, princesses and slaves, witches and gipsies, mothers and daughters, erring and idealised wives, and, last of all, a feisty quartet of Tudor townswomen. To modern eyes, their portraits might appear faded and fixed, little more than an assortment of stiffly posed figurines in quaint costumes and elaborate coiffure, and all too distant from our own notions of personal and sexual freedoms. To the audiences of their day, however, Verdi’s heroines were often unsettling precisely because of their equivocal attitudes to the acknowledged codes of femininity. Even their moments of self-­sacrifice (and there were many) were criticised as either inadequate or excessive, or sometimes as an act of grace that they frankly didn’t deserve. Grouped together, these protagonists seem almost a kind of chorus, one that speaks – or in this case, sings – in Greek fashion about the travails and pleasures of their epoch, about women’s wrongs and sometimes (more obliquely) women’s rights. The proscenium arch separating these fictional characters from their spectators was in part a spurious division. Reality – in the form of the cultural and political mores of nineteenth-­century Italian society – lay not beyond the opera house, but within it. It crowded the benches in the auditorium, draped itself elegantly in the boxes, roared its approval and whistled its contempt. Backstage, it wrote itself into contracts, raised a hemline here or lowered another there, dictated who should have this role and who that, prompted a librettist’s hand, or whispered into a composer’s ear. The real world was both background and foreground to the operatic experience: the characters and their avatars, the singers, faced it in the auditorium and met it offstage. This is not to deny the individual agency of the artist, or indeed the multiple collaborations between composer, librettist, singer, designer, stage director, technician, conductor, orchestra, impresario and publisher that produced opera. Opera as art form had its own logic, responding to its own practices and conventions. The creation, production, perform­ ance and reception of opera was none the less rooted within specific social environments at specific times. Verdi’s heroines accordingly reveal (as Hamlet put it) the ‘form and pressure’ of their time, as much as they contribute new contours. To attribute these characters to Verdi, however, is only partly accurate. Almost all his operas were drawn from pre-­existing sources – poems, plays, novels, or earlier libretti designed for other composers – written

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

by a chronologically and geographically diverse range of authors, including Auguste Anicet-­Bourgeois, Felice Romani, Tommaso Grossi, Victor Hugo, Byron, Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Voltaire, Zacharias Werner, Joseph Méry, Émile Souvestre, Alexandre Dumas fils, Antonio García Gutiérrez, Ángel de Saavedra and Eugène Scribe. Their creations then passed through the hands of Verdi’s librettists, mainly Temistocle Solera, Francesco Maria Piave, Andrea Maffei, Salvadore Cammarano, Antonio Somma, Camille Du Locle, Eugène Scribe, Antonio Ghislanzoni, Joseph Méry and Arrigo Boito. Verdi himself took an unusually active role in the process of adaptation, sometimes sketching out the early scenarios and imposing an ever more rigorous pursuit of clarity and brevity in the dialogue. Julian Budden argues that what distinguishes Verdi from earlier Italian composers is his interest in reproducing the source narrative as closely as possible within the opera.4 Even given that aim, the compressed structure and formal conventions of opera demanded adjustments that inevitably impacted on the delineation of character and events. Particularly during Verdi’s early career, the convenienze (a series of accepted practices and rules governing the operatic stage and the status of the singers) prescribed the quantity and scope of arias and other numbers allotted to the singers and the musico-­dramatic relationships between them. Censorship on moral, religious or political grounds also determined what could and could not be shown, influencing both the choice and treatment of subject matter.5 Even where one theatre permitted the setting of a contentious subject (such as Giovanna d’Arco or Rigoletto) during the 1840s and 1850s, others implemented various amendments that could radically alter the nature of the text. The actions and words of Verdi’s characters were therefore the product of a process of negotiation between the source material, the conventions of opera and the operatic marketplace, censorship (either explicit or implicit) and the interventions of the composer and his librettists. Only the music, the way that word and action were embodied within patterns of sound, and also the mise-­en-­scène in most of his operas from 1847 on (when he began to assume increasing involvement in the stage direction) can be ascribed predominantly to Verdi’s own creativity – although here again, some of his decisions owed mainly to operatic traditions and audience expectations. To speak of ‘Verdi’s heroines’ therefore entails identifying the ways in which these characters were selected and subsequently shaped for the operatic stage through the adjustments of both composer and librettist. In many respects, Verdi’s choice of heroines from his eclectic array of sources does not reveal any obvious template. Certain similarities between heroines occur at different points in his output, but little that can be argued as typical across his long career. Attempts to fit them into a single mould labelled ‘Verdian’ invariably run into difficulty. The variety of characterisation might in itself appear a distinctive factor, but earlier, more prolific composers such as Rossini and Donizetti had similarly explored an extensive range of

3

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women

protagonists. Gilles De Van offers a couple of tempting maxims, suggesting, for example, that in Verdi’s operas ‘the more active a woman is, the less she is a heroine’.6 He is right – but only up to a point. Some heroines (particularly those of the 1840s, such as Abigaille, Giovanna d’Arco, Odabella, Lady Macbeth, Gulnara) show a remarkable zest for activity in comparison to their often hesitant male counterparts. De Van also identifies a fuller emotional expressivity (‘the area of inner richness, flexibility and complexity’) in the female roles, and the manner in which, especially in the later works, ‘woman has a privileged connection with reality that is denied to the hero, with his naïveté and lack of realism’.7 Yet many of Verdi’s male roles – even ostensibly unsympathetic characters such as Philippe II in Don Carlos – are correspondingly given to impassioned outpourings or anguished ruminations on their unhappy state. Similarly, Heather Hadlock’s comment that ‘the usual defining gesture for a Verdi heroine – her “primal scene” – is self-­sacrifice’ is certainly true of some characters (particularly of the 1850s), but much less so of others, as Hadlock herself observes in her perceptive discussion of Il corsaro.8 Nor was self­sacrifice exclusively a female preserve: Manrico in Il trovatore, for example, dares his life in an attempt to rescue his mother; Radamès (Aida) chooses death and eternal fidelity to the Ethiopian slave-­princess rather than accept Amneris’ offer of life by her side. In short, no sustained image of what ‘Woman’ was or indeed should be emerges from these operas. If anything, Verdi often showed less regard for the epoch’s concept of heroines and heroes per se (certainly within the parameters of role models or moral leadership) and rather more for the notion of complex, multifaceted characters. A critic of one of his earliest operas, I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843), made exactly this point, complaining that within the cast of patricides, fratricides, assassins, traitors, renegades and the wayward Giselda, there was no protagonist worthy of the name, and that therefore the opera was ‘headless’ (acefala).9 Verdi’s subsequent operas only confirmed his apparent disdain for the more simplistic archetypes then in vogue. The shaping of Verdi’s female protagonists was rather the consequence of the main driving forces in his compositional processes and, above all, his search for ‘effect’: character, conflict and innovation. For Verdi, opera as drama stemmed primarily from character, and his admiration for both Hugo and Shakespeare centred on their abilities to create conflicted and conflictual protagonists.10 He thus deliberately sought out characters who explored the outer limits of the epoch’s social restrictions as well as their own inner resources. The notion of confrontation – toward state, religion, family and social conventions – that was as evident in Verdi’s own personality as it was in his artistic strategy led him to narratives that constructed opposing planes of power, sentiment and action. These were the narratives he regarded as ‘musicabile’: that is, those which appeared to him as not only possible to set to music (in the literal meaning of the term) but which actively provoked his music in particular. (See, for example, his comments during the composition of Attila in 1845: ‘Oh, what a wonderful subject! And the critics can say what they want, but I say: Oh, what a wonderful libretto musicabile!’)11

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

His compositions encapsulated this emphasis on conflict in a wide chiaroscuro of sound, exploiting greater extremes of volume, pace, colour and effect than had been previously used in Italian opera. The search for originality was the other constant in Verdi’s approach. ‘I desire nothing other than to at least attempt new things’, he wrote to his librettist Salvadore Cammarano in 1849:12 it was no empty statement. The selection of source material for his operas was an immediate starting point.13 Some of Verdi’s sources were already familiar to Italian audiences in other forms, thus permitting the audience what Linda Hutcheon describes as the ‘interpretive doubling … between the work we know and the work we are experiencing’.14 Verdi’s emphasis on using mainly foreign dramas, however, meant that a number of his operas introduced subjects new to the Italian spectator (although audiences elsewhere in Europe presumably brought a more informed perspective to those based on works by Gutiérrez, Dumas, Schiller and Shakespeare). Above all, it was the opportunities these sources afforded of experimenting with new ideas in music’s relationship with drama that intrigued Verdi. He brought new sounds to the operatic stage (particularly in his later style), his operas created new vocal techniques and he facilitated the development of new voice-­types – the baritone and the dramatic mezzo-­soprano.15 If Verdi did not always succeed in his objectives for constant innovation,16 his efforts to explore the creative possibilities of opera none the less continued untiringly up until his very last opera, Falstaff. Guided by these imperatives of character, conflict and originality, Verdi’s selection and treatment of his female roles brought some distinctive protagonists to the operatic stage. Their room for manoeuvre was none the less circumscribed by the social constraints of the epochs of both their inception and, even more crucially, of their operatic incarnation. Verdi’s career, spanning the second half of the nineteenth century, witnessed considerable if sometimes subtle modifications in ideas of gender for Italian women, as the following chapters will reveal. Broadly speaking, however, during the 1840s notions of female emancipation stemming primarily from France found their way into some elements of the patriotic movement (mainly those of republican bent); yet the next decade, shaped by the restoration of power after the failed uprising of 1848, largely determined sharper distinctions between ideas of masculinity and femininity. The foundation of the new Italy in the 1860s provoked both conservatives and radicals to assert their positions in the building of the state – thus, the Codice civile italiano of 1865 (often referred to as the Codice Pisanelli) enshrined women’s subservience in the home, while Anna Maria Mozzoni produced the first solidly feminist tract (1864) arguing for greater legal rights. And finally the 1870s to the 1890s saw a gradual development of women’s experiences outside the home, with a rise in female employment in the cities, entry to certain professions, increased access to education and the emergence of ideas of the ‘nuova donna’, all accompanied by more sustained (yet always unsuccessful) attempts to obtain suffrage for women.17

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women

Although under increasing pressure, the conservative vision of women’s role none the less remained obdurately intact across the period. A good example of its articulation emerges from the pages of the Corriere delle dame – a periodical published for a female readership and edited by its proprietor, Giuditta Lampugnani and her son, Alessandro. In 1851, the Corriere printed an account of the first National Women’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850, which inaugurated a formal, active movement for women’s emancipation in the USA. Originally published in Cavour’s journal, Risorgimento, the article maintained a dismissive stance towards the proposals of the Convention’s architects: Women have their own sphere, they have a noble and sacred mission in which they need not fear any rivals; neither, by leaving a position so eminent and chasing men from theirs, will women ever be able to cast aside their disposition or ennoble more their nature. They are mothers, widows, daughters; they are the inspiration of men, the comfort of husbands in adversity, the samaritans of the wounded and infirm. Do women want to repudiate these titles in order to execute badly the arts of medicine, law and philosophy? Those that leave this sphere in order to launch themselves into the clouds demonstrate that they do not know in what their true power and superiority resides. 18

Here, the epoch’s main prescriptions on female behaviour are rehearsed in familiar form: the insistence on separate spheres, the emphasis on pleasing and caring for men, and the implicit warning that should women choose to compete with (rather than complement) men, they would assuredly be the losers. This code of womanhood was inscribed in various ways in other cultural discourses. One example is Roberto Focosi’s allegorical illustration of Verdi and his operas (see Figure 0.1). 19 Published in the early months of 1853 (before the première of La traviata), it presents various tableaux from Verdi’s works to date. A tableau is a loaded image: one in which absence is as revealing as presence. 20 Focosi’s choice and emphasis of context is illuminating. First, we might note the relative subservience of the women in the depictions of Verdi’s operas: in almost all the tableaux, they are positioned below or behind the male characters. Their poses are often in supplication – hands clasped in prayer or pleading, eyes raised either to heaven or to the earthly architects of their travails. In his reduction of the operas to a single visual ‘essence’, Focosi has concentrated on their titles. The only woman therefore given significant prominence is Giovanna d’Arco (to whom the king kneels), while both Alzira and Luisa Miller (again, the eponymous heroines of their respective operas) are positioned at the front of the picture and are of a size more equal to the men who frame them. We might note too the singularity of the women in these communities of men: most illustrations have several male figures in contrast to a solitary woman. How accurate was this crystallisation of Verdi’s operas? Certainly, his heroines ­f ulfilled aspects of the stereotypical brief advocated by the article in the Corriere delle

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

­ Figure 0.1  Roberto Focosi, Giuseppe Verdi e le sue opere, 1853 (Museo Teatrale, Teatro alla Scala, Milan)

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women

dame; they were daughters and mothers, wives and lovers. But Focosi has smoothed away their angularity and obstinacy. There is little here that demonstrates the substantive nature of Verdi’s heroines, who in both musical and dramatic terms often show resourcefulness, ingenuity and a sense of challenge to the social order that equals and at times even supersedes that of their male counterparts. Nonetheless, male rather than female roles do indeed figure more prominently in Verdi’s operas. His preferred voice is often cited as the baritone (a voice-­type he nurtured in what Budden describes as ‘his most striking single innovation’),21 who is the locus for politicised action.22 And as Focosi’s tableaux suggest, the world depicted in Verdi’s chosen narratives is essentially male-­dominated. Only five of his operas were entitled for the female protagonist (Giovanna d’Arco, Alzira, Luisa Miller, La traviata, Aida); the rest bear either the name of the central male role (Oberto, Nabucco, Ernani, Attila, Macbeth, Il corsaro, Stiffelio, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, Simon Boccanegra, Aroldo, Don Carlos, Otello, Falstaff ) or have names referring to two or more characters (I Lombardi alla prima crociata, I due Foscari, I masnadieri) or more general titles (Un giorno di regno, Les Vêpres siciliennes, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino). Many of Verdi’s operas further underline this masculine perspective by beginning with a male chorus, or male soloists: a common convention in both Italian and French opera in the first half of the nineteenth century. This custom had developed primarily in order to position the prima donna’s entrance for maximum effect. 23 Her subsequent appearance afforded her centre stage (both visually and aurally), by virtue of the contrast between her (often) solitary female figure and the male voices preceding her. Undoubtedly, this positioning brought certain advantages as regards the status of the prima donna, both in her own right and as dramatic protagonist. Tracy C. Davis argues that the allocation of stage space is a crucial element in the theatrical portrayal of gender, and that ‘Western culture reads the center as power. It reads the periphery as silence.’24 Nevertheless, the manner in which gender difference was used to procure the prima donna the superior position also constituted a pictorial and aural representation of the patriarchal social order in which the heroine was obliged to operate. Male discussion of female protagonists prior to their initial entry on stage heightens the impression that they are merely ‘objects’ in a male environment – to be lusted after (Rigoletto), or feared and hunted (Il trovatore), according to the needs of the plot.25 The extent to which the sense of a predominantly male society continued throughout the body of an opera depended in some degree on the gender balance of the cast and the amount of music devoted to individual characters. In all Verdi’s operas, male characters outnumber female ones: again, a common situation in opera of this period. This was an historical legacy of drama (particularly tragedy), as well as a reflection of the range of occupations available to men in the outside world. Diderot’s plans in 1758 for the reform of the French stage and the development of the ‘genre sérieux’ (which would later substantially influence the bourgeois drama of the Romantic playwrights,

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

and thus also much Ottocento Italian opera) list a range of male characters to be considered in contrast to the mythological or aristocratic heroes of classical French tragedy: ‘the scholar, the philosopher, the shopkeeper, the judge, the lawyer, the politician, the citizen, the magistrate, the financier, the aristocrat, the administrator’. 26 For women, however, the descent from the idealised plane of much eighteenth-­century drama with its imperious queens and sorceresses into the more ‘realistic’ environs of drame bourgeois did not produce a similar broadening of characterisation; rather, it meant a gradual narrowing of roles to the domestic categories of wives, mothers, daughters, confidantes, lovers or servants. This might have reflected to some extent the lives of middle-­ and upper-­class women, but (with the exception of servants) it ignored many other female experiences and occupations. It fell mainly to novelists (female and male) to depict the governesses, school-­teachers, shop-­g irls, factory workers, navvies, artists and writers that existed in the real domain: characters who would only slowly find space in serious drama during the latter decades of the century in the context of emerging ‘naturalism’. Comedy – and comic opera – operated across wider terrain, but even here opportunities were often still limited in comparison with those for male characters. And yet women were considered a vital part of theatrical representation. In 1845, having surveyed the works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Calderón and Quintana, the critic and dramatist Giacinto Battaglia concluded that ‘the principal source of so-­called dramatic interest, without which any theatrical work (however profoundly conceived and eruditely wrought) will always have a cold and sterile outcome, is woman’. 27 Without woman as the emotional centre of drama, embodying passion and affect, Battaglia argued, a playwright could not hope to interest his audience. Such qualities obviously chimed with the idealisation of women as the ‘heart’ of society as well as reflecting Romanticism’s privileging of feeling, but in more prosaic terms, theatre – and especially its lyric form, opera – was also dependent on the female audience. There were hard, economic reasons for providing characters who would speak to the interests of women spectators and offer performance opportunities for that most potent element at the box office, the prima donna.28 Verdi’s heroines similarly formed an important part of the emotional currency of his operas – although, as mentioned before, opera was if anything the place where both women and men sang what could not be said. The predominant catalyst for emotion in both sexes was the relationship that lay between them in either a romantic, sexual or family context, with all its inflections of unsatisfied desire and conflicting objectives, misunderstandings and provocations, rare joy and absolute despair. For much of his career, Verdi’s approach to such dilemmas and dialogues was poised between the legacy of idealism that governed the first decades of the nineteenth century and the emerging ideas of realism. To Verdi, ‘la vera arte’ (‘true art’) meant the mix of theatrical effect, heightened language, pathos and tragedy alongside prose, the quotidian, comedy and rusticity that marked the works of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. In terms of

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realism, he wanted to depict aspects of human experience hitherto denied the operatic stage (Rigoletto’s deformity, Violetta’s disease); he increasingly pursued a more fluid relationship between music and drama than had been afforded by earlier operatic conventions;29 and through his personal direction of mise-­en-­scène he sought to produce performances that were (by the standards of his day) more natural than stylised. 30 But the space inhabited by his operas was still an imagined plane. One of his most often­cited comments of his later years says it all: rather than copying truth, he argued, ‘to invent truth is better, much better … To copy truth is a beautiful thing, but it is photography, not painting.’31 To see – and hear – Verdi’s operas as sound-­pictures, as a play on light and colour, in which some details might be finely, realistically drawn, while others have a broader, more impressionistic treatment is perhaps the closest apprehension of the composer’s artistic concept and strategy. T he au dien c e sin g s  V erdi

Only in the act of performance does opera find its full embodiment and create ‘meaning’, dependent on the specifics of the theatrical site: the venue, the singers, the audience, the period. The ‘meanings’ created by a Verdian opera at its première in an élite opera house with well-­known virtuoso singers such as Erminia Frezzolini or Marianna Barbieri-­Nini might be signally different from, say, a performance at a smaller provincial theatre with a singer of lesser rank. On 5 May 1854, for example, Piave recorded the progress of the rehearsals under his direction for the new production of La traviata at the small Teatro San Benedetto in Venice: the first staging of the opera since its troubled première at the much grander Fenice with Fanny Salvini-­Donatelli in the title role a year earlier. This time, Violetta was to be sung by the young Maria Spezia, and Piave predicted that she would perform the role ‘as no one else in the world would be able to dream of doing it … in her, everything unites to make her the true incarnation of the thoughts of Dumas, Verdi and myself ’.32 The differences between the two singers were not only in age and physique – Salvini-­Donatelli was thirty-­eight and rather stout when she created the role, while Spezia was only twenty-­five, slender and with a pallor suggestive of consumption – but also in their performing styles. Verdi had argued before the première that a soprano who sang ‘con passione’ was necessary, and while Salvini-­Donatelli appears to have excelled in the florid singing of the first act, she had lacked the pathos necessary in the latter part of the opera. Given that the audience had to accept the oxymoron of a consumptive who lives (and dies) through song, the credibility of the character was crucial. Combining both physical fragility and emotional investment, Spezia’s poignant rendition of Violetta did indeed play a significant part in changing the fortunes of this opera (along with Verdi’s revisions to the score), as Piave had anticipated. Performance was thus vital in mediating the vision of a character’s original architects.

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

How can we analyse such encounters between stage and auditorium? Piave’s idea of a ‘true incarnation’ of a role, in which the actor embodies a full realisation of the character, and the way in which an audience might construct ‘meaning’ from this form of representation, has long been a vexed issue. Anne Ubersfeld articulates a perception of the relationship between spectator and player in illusionistic theatre that has been highly influential over the past century, one that positions the spectator as a ‘powerless voyeur’: Melodrama and bourgeois drama express a dream of passional liberation that takes place in the imaginary. So it is that thousands (millions if we include cinema) have seen and understood La dame aux camélias. How amazing! Passion will in no way change the world order. Spectators can identify with Marguerite or with Armand Duval with impunity. What they watch will never be changed by their actions.33

Ubersfeld’s assertion that certain kinds of theatre deny spectators agency stems, of course, from Brecht. He famously developed his Verfremdungseffekt (‘distancing effect’) in order to enable the audience to ‘think’ rather than ‘feel’, with the aim of promoting political consciousness and motivating action.34 There were inevitable difficulties with the separation of these terms. If a spectator was moved by Helene Weigl’s silent anguished scream at the end of the première of Brecht’s Mother Courage, did that mean that reason was absent? Similarly, does thought necessarily preclude emotion? Yet later theories in semiotics, social drama and postructuralism have all (in sometimes conflicting ways and to varying degrees) continued to maintain this assumption of separation and difference between player and spectator, between what is acted and what is received.35 Only forms of theatre that demand direct participation in the event or that are performed with a specific politically nuanced aesthetic that both represents and critiques a character’s choices are presumed to splice open the audience’s capacity to evaluate rather than accept the fictional reality before them. In an important series of recent interventions, Bruce McConachie offers a rather different method of analysing audience engagement. Drawing on cognitive science, he demonstrates that the spectator, far from being a passive witness before the spectacle, is a ‘co-­maker’, and that empathy and emotion are vital components in the act of spectating all kinds of theatrical and quasi-­theatrical events. McConachie begins with a crucial question: ‘Can historians know and explain the experiences of people from the distant past?’36 It is, of course, a two-­part question that throws up ideas about both historiographical method and its stated target. To take the latter first, language-­centred and poststructuralist theories perceive ‘experience’ merely as a product of discourse, rather than as a producer of discourse.37 In theatre history, McConachie argues, the subsequent discounting of the spectator’s material experience as a valid site for analysis has led to a lacuna of understanding about the nature of the relationship between audiences and the theatrical event. Further, the reading of experience as individual rather

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than collective obscures the commonalities that exist at a cognitive level and which allow the historian to interpret spectatorship across periods. Focusing on how the spectator ‘attends’ to the stage, McConachie’s approach combines both a scientific strand (new findings about the function of the brain) and a philo­ sophical strand (how we construct ways of thinking about the world). Both strands refute Cartesian mind–body dualism and argue that all thought is embodied: our perceptions and cognitions are formed primarily by our bodily experience. For example, recent researches in neuroscience have revealed that our internal mechanisms for processing the act of seeing vary according to whether we are looking at inanimate objects or human subjects. When we look at fixed objects – a landscape, a stage cyclorama – we use ‘visual perceptions’; when we watch people and animals, however, we use ‘visuomotor representations’. The latter term describes a process of simulation, whereby ‘mirror neurons’ within the brain enact the very action that is witnessed. In other words, by reproducing the perceived action within our brains, we learn to recognise and interpret it accurately. This simulation, McConachie remarks, is commonly regarded by scientists as ‘synonymous with empathy’: it provides the theatre spectator ‘with the ability to “read the minds” of actor/characters, to intuit their beliefs, intentions and emotions by watching their motor actions’.38 The degree to which this takes place depends on the attention the spectator gives to the stage. Spectators often oscillate between placing themselves ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the performance. To be ‘inside’ the performance is to be absorbed with the fictional reality, narrative content and the actor as ‘character’; to be ‘outside’ the performance is to recognise the performance event itself as reality, to be overtly conscious of the transactions between auditorium and stage, technology and effect, performance techniques and the identity of the actor as opposed to the character. Nor are the two realms entirely distinct. Using theories of ‘conceptual blending’, McConachie shows that spectators are in a continual process of blending information about a complex array of categories and relationships (‘change, identity, space, time, cause–effect, part–whole, representation, role, analogy, dis-­analogy, property, similarity, category, intentionality, and uniqueness’).39 McConachie pursues his interest in the ‘hard-­wiring’ of the brain into the sphere of emotions. As we saw, simulation is considered to be a catalyst for empathy. Empathy is not itself an ‘emotion’, but a state of openness to the experiences of another, from which either sympathy or antipathy may ensue.40 Empathy thus precedes and facilitates evaluation of a character’s actions. The term ‘emotional contagion’ (developed in psychology in the 1990s) describes this transmission from player/character to ­spectator; it also refers to the manner in which audiences transmit emotions to one another. This process of emotional contagion is further intensified when spectators can see one another clearly (as in a fully lit auditorium), and where sound and movement are involved.41

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

Analysing the role of emotion in the theatre also draws on new scientific research that has opened up our understanding of the interface between cognitive and emotional processes. Jaak Panksepp identified six basic affective states in humans and other mammals, three of which have positive connotations (seeking, care, play), and three with negative connotations (fear, panic, rage).42 A later collaboration with Luc Ciompi explored the relationships between ‘affective-­cognitive interactions’, each dimension of which controls the other: ‘Emotions establish global, non-­linear dynamic control over perceptual processes, memory and learning, and cognitions can trigger and regulate emotional processes.’ For example, positive affective states ‘tend to broaden decision making processes, allowing one to recruit new ideas into an ever widening network of associations’ as well as enabling ‘increasingly productive social interactions’; while negative states can actively hinder cognitive functioning.43 The results of their investigations led Ciompi and Panksepp to propose a new term that encompassed this fuller meaning of emotional states: ‘thymic phenomena’, drawn from the Greek word thymos meaning ‘both “feeling” and “the forces of life”’.44 McConachie argues that this research also enables us to identify the key emotional transactions evident in the act of theatre. Far from prohibiting spectatorial agency, emotions change the way we think: ‘Emotion logics wear grooves in the brain’, thus shaping human behaviour and belief systems.45 This understanding can further be combined with Lakoff and Johnson’s demonstration that bodily experience underpins the key metaphors that thread through human understanding and philosophy, in order to construct new analyses of the relationships between audiences, performers, texts and spectacle. McConachie’s spectator is therefore an engaged co-­maker in the theatrical event, who is actively ‘experiencing’ (even re-­enacting) the performance at a deep unconscious level while selecting at a more conscious level a complex array of images, zooming in and out of focus. The Aristotelian notion of ‘mimesis’ has thus been transferred from the performer to the spectator. The strict divide between emotion and reason in the Brechtian sense is a misapprehension; emotion and reason function in tandem. And feeling can indeed lead to new thinking. This theoretical refiguring of the spectator obviously has implications for the discussion of women and opera, particularly with regard to the structuring of emotion in both music and drama. Whatever meanings Verdi’s female portrayals held rested in the theatrical moment when the twin opposing gazes of performers and audience met. What role then did the opera house play in the lives of Italian women? ­S pe c tators

The theatres – with their casinos and cafés, their private boxes, their long evenings of both an opera and a ballet and sometimes yet more besides, their masked balls and benefit evenings – were the public face of Italian society at leisure. Or at least, a certain

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part of Italian urban society: primarily the aristocrazia, the borghesia and (to a lesser degree) the artigiani. The physical construction of the interior of the theatres with their tiered boxes emphasised the social hierarchies of privilege and power. Rules set by each theatre governing the behaviour of the spectators included if and when applause was permitted (generally not in the presence of a monarch), and whether encores were allowed: all served to contain a crowd that might turn into a mob. 46 One opera house hardly constitutes a representative sample of the hundreds active in the peninsula during the period; none the less, the Teatro Regio in Parma, the closest city to Verdi’s home in Busseto, provides various examples of female spectatorship. On 28 October 1819, the English author Lady Morgan described a recent and not altogether satisfactory visit to Parma, ‘where the late empress of Europe reigns over a dreary, desolate, and gloomy country town. Her only amusement is the opera, and such an opera! a narrow lozenge box, lighted with five tallow candles. We staid to see the churches and Correggio’s paintings, and would have staid longer, but we were entirely hunted out by the bugs.’47 The ‘late empress’ was Napoléon Bonaparte’s second wife and the daughter of Franz II of Austria, Maria Luigia (1791–1847); her installation as Duchess of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla following Napoléon’s exile was part of the treaty of the Congress of  Vienna. Maria Luigia proved a surprisingly effective ruler, initiating a programme of civic reform, and rewarding herself and her subjects in 1829 with the construction of a brand-­new opera house, the Teatro Ducale (later known as the Teatro Regio). In place of the meagre candles, a magnificent chandelier now illuminated an expansive, elegant auditorium. The duchess not only attended regularly, but was actively involved in the choice of operas and singers – sanctioning some, dismissing others – and on occasion, even rearranging the order of the acts, as it suited her personal taste.48 The theatre was thus an extension of her drawing-­room (indeed, it was physically connected by a series of corridors to her palazzo), where she entertained guests, amused herself and presented herself publicly before her subjects. What of the rest of the audience that shared her nightly attendance at the theatre? In 1842, Alessandro Stocchi, the portiere (door-­keeper) of the Teatro Ducale, published the latest in his series of books detailing each season’s events. His purpose, he claimed disingenuously, was not to judge the merits of each production, but simply to record their outcomes, from success to failure.49 On this occasion he also included a witty account of the composition of the audience, dividing them into various classes, all with their own ‘habits and opinions’ and ‘their manner of seeing, hearing and understanding’. 50 He began with the male spectators thronging the benches of the platea. First were the Condomini, whose regular attendance and ownership of their seats made them ‘the terror of the actors’ owing to their perfect recall of ‘every production that has taken place from the beginning of the century, the points that were applauded or whistled, and even the words over which the actors stumbled’.51 Next came the Apprendisti, the

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

apprentices studying aspects of performance and dramatic art, with their eager attention to the stage, while the Languidi merely spent their time gazing at the inhabitants of a particular box and sighing. The Sonnacchiosi arrived only to sleep, while the Indigesti perpetually fidgeted. The Eloquenti talked continually ‘without taking breath, without changing tone, without closing their mouths once during the entire performance’. 52 The Punti ammirativi, who found ‘everything beautiful, magnificent, sublime, incomparable’, were offset by the Punti interrogativi with their unceasing questions: ‘What time is it? Are we in the first act? Is this play new or old? Who is the author? What colour is that dress? Why use that sword? Do you think that the calves of that actress are hers? Etc. etc.’53 The Soffiatori were those who ‘do not know how, cannot, nor want to do anything other than hiss or boo. Their mouths are shaped like a whistle, and they cannot breathe unless they are hissing or booing. That’s how life goes. Either hiss, boo, or die.’ 54 The Battitori were of different ilk: ‘Their hands meet without wanting to. An invincible force makes them beat one against the other.’55 Stocchi then turned to the female spectators sitting in the five rows of boxes. In the first row were Le Indifferenti, women who either ‘must or seem to be indifferent’. The constant object of attention from the male spectators in the platea, these women knew ‘the art of defending themselves with their fans, and of speaking without moving their lips. Necessity little by little becomes habit. One sees in these boxes neither a gesture nor a glance that gives any sign of life. These boxes are the tomb of every feeling. They should be closed by a gravestone.’56 In the second row were Le Diplomatiche, the ‘queens of fashion and taste’ who ruled the theatre: Every one of their movements has a motive, every look a reason, every coiffure a purpose. All is deliberate, reasoned, contemplated. The movement of their fans has a rhythm, their words are pure, their voices are silvery. The colours of their dresses, the flowers in their hair, the cut of their sleeves are often in relation to the drama.57

On the third row were Le Simpatiche, women with ‘faces of every kind, hair of every colour, mouths of every size; blue eyes and brown eyes, pale or rosy complexions, severe matrons or extravagant young women; tall or small, thin or rounded, modest or audacious – and in this capricious variety without art, without design, without pretension, lies the attraction’.58 The fourth row held Le Platoniche: Their sighs are lofty. From the height of their boxes, the women can contemplate the heavens and lower a look of compassion on the follies of the world below. Up there, everything is serious. When there is a passionate scene, the first handkerchiefs to be bathed in tears are those of the fourth row. Every ten years, one marriage emerges from these boxes, and two cases of consumption.59

As for the fifth row of boxes, Stocchi describes their inhabitants as Le Plebee: ‘We don’t concern ourselves with them but look and pass. And yet there are certain faces so

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appealing sometimes, that whoever has the spirit and herculean strength to risk the arduous journey [to these boxes] would not repent of their climb. We only know this by report, because our telescope does not reach that far.’60 Stocchi’s summary stresses the social organisation of the opera house: the men grouped below in the platea, the women at the front of the boxes – as much a part of the spectacle as the stage itself. The first two rows of boxes were the most important in terms of social status. For their owners, these boxes, with their inner rooms beyond the corridor where one could eat and entertain in private, were a reflection in miniature of Maria Luigia’s relationship to the opera house as a whole. The women of the borghesia might be found in the third and fourth rows; those from the artisan classes in the gallery on the fifth and final row. Attendance at the opera for women in this topmost row provided a temporary, circumscribed glimpse of the ruling classes. There was no opportunity for social mingling; the gallery had its own staircase and entrance. The layout of the theatre suggests one of Lakoff and Johnson’s primary metaphors: ‘relationships are enclosures’.61 The separation of the boxes provided areas of security for families and their guests, as well as enacting divisions between society: places that provided safety for the domestic unit but which also marked it off from others – a guarded engagement in community. Clearly, the audience would have experienced opera in different ways, not least from the geographical perspective.62 Maria Luigia’s box, sumptuous and spacious, afforded the best view of the stage – and, indeed, of the auditorium. The duchess could survey both entertainment and subjects at one and the same time. In contrast, the women in the gallery were much further away, forced to crane to see a whole picture. Such differences had further significance. Unlike the rest of the audience, for example, Maria Luigia saw something that she could directly control and order: she possessed, in effect, an ‘on–off ’ switch for her entertainment. To a lesser extent, the audience en masse could also at times determine certain changes in the programme or the cast, according to how forcefully they expressed their opinion. Stocchi also emphasised the diversity among the audience in terms of the focus of attention, the range of different knowledges about opera or different agendas for spectating. The way he presented male and female behaviours reflects the epoch’s assumptions about gender. His description of male spectators includes some intellectual engagement with the business of opera (although not uniformly so); the supposed responses of the women in comparison are either unreadable, emotional or limited to ideas of fashion. This was a common enough trope at the time, appearing in various articles in the press;63 but as we will see, there is evidence from various sources that women’s reactions to opera were much broader. Moreover, Stocchi’s comments about female spectators’ emotional reactions or their dressing in the fashion of the opera correspond with McConachie’s ideas of empathy, suggesting a particular type of engagement with the opera’s narrative and characters.

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

Stocchi used words to depict the theatre audience; other popular means were the many engravings, illustrations and cartoons of the period. The arrival of photography introduced another kind of historical record. At the opposite end of the epoch in 1909, a rare photograph (by Ettore Pesci) of the audience of the Teatro Regio provides a counterbalance to Stocchi’s memoir, and demonstrates the changes that had occurred in the life of the theatre (see Figures 0.2 and 0.3). This audience was attending a charity gala event, in aid of the thousands of victims of the earthquake that had occurred at Messina on 28 December 1908. We might note first the dark, empty royal box: Maria Luigia had died in December 1847, on the eve of revolution; her heirs, the Borbone family, had long since been exiled (indeed, one was assassinated in 1854 shortly after leaving the opera house); and the box was now the property of the civic authorities, the Comune di Parma. However, many of the palchi in the first and second rows had been handed down through the generations and were still occupied by those families first described by Stocchi – the women again displaying their modish clothes, in contrast to the more soberly dressed female spectators in other parts of the theatre. The platea now provided comfortable fixed seating for a mixed audience; Stocchi’s male army of soffiatori and battitori has been transferred to the upper gallery (where even today the opera zealots gather). No woman, it seems, is there alone; all are accompanied by a man, or, in the case of one demure young woman dressed all in white in a box near to Maria Luigia’s sumptuous, deserted palco, by an elderly female companion. That single figure recalls another young woman dressed in white, whose record of her opera-­going many decades earlier allows us to explore the idea of the female spectator in more individual terms. Alexandrine d’Alopeus (1808–48) was the daughter of a Swedish count who served as the Russian Minister at Berlin and his German wife, Jeanne de Wenkstern.64 After her father’s death, Alexandrine and her mother moved to Italy, where a year later she met Albert de la Ferronnays, the brother of an old friend and the son of a exiled French aristocrat. Music played its part in their courtship. They sang together: he admired her rendering of ‘Moëris’ (Sophie Gail); she delighted in his ‘deep, sweet full-­toned bass voice, which somehow or other went to my heart’.65 On 6 July 1832, both attended a performance of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Alexandrine wore a white gown – it was her first outing to the theatre in two years, following the period of mourning for her father: Ivanhoff ’s [sic] charming voice in the part of Percy, that magnificent theatre brilliantly lit, the joy of loving and being loved, all combined to make that evening one of perfect enchantment. Count Sebzeltern came to fetch me to his box, which he had lent to Madame de la Ferronnays. I thought myself in good looks, and was glad that Albert should see me, and Pauline too, that she might compliment me on my dress.66

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Figure 0.2  Teatro Regio, Parma, 1909; Ettore Pesci (Casa della Musica)

Alexandrine was thus both a spectator and herself part of the spectacle. Reaching home in the early hours, she wrote in her journal: ‘This day has seemed to me like a long dream.’ However, the sense of a flawless event was missing some weeks later at a performance of Rossini’s La gazza ladra. The day before, Alexandrine had given Albert the first volume of her private journal, as a means of testing his love by revealing herself more fully to him. By the time the couple met at the opera house, Alexandrine was in a tumult of nerves about Albert’s reaction: I felt like a guilty person when he came into the box. He looked gloomy and out of spirits. He asked me to allow him to give me a note, because he said he was going the next day to Castellamare. He put it in the case of my opera-­glass. A thousand fears disturbed me. I scarcely knew what I was about, and I must have derived less pleasure from the opera than any of the audience. Madame Malibran was drawing tears from everyone, and certainly the music was in harmony with our feelings; but though I was very sorry to part with Albert for several days, I was longing to get home to read his note.67

On this occasion, Alexandrine’s enjoyment of the opera was wholly consumed by her anxiety and desire to know the contents of Albert’s note. When she did finally read it, it was an ardent declaration of his love for her. (In his own journal earlier that morning,

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

Figure 0.3  Teatro Regio, Parma, 1909; Ettore Pesci (Casa della Musica)

he had written that her diary ‘has driven me almost wild’, filling him with a ‘passionate love! A love which kills me’).68 Their own music-­making continued in this feverish atmosphere: one day Alexandrine sang an aria from La Muette de Portici, ‘Ô moment enchanté!’, which spurred Albert to admit that he had read the concealed part of her journal where she revealed her love for him.69 Finally, despite Albert’s relative poverty, their families agreed that marriage might be possible – but only after a long period of separation in order to test their resolve. On 3 November, the day preceding Albert’s departure, Alexandrine again attended the Teatro di San Carlo. This time, however, her ‘sorrow completely transformed the whole aspect of the house, the stage, the lights, and everything. Instead of the festive look I used to think it had when I was quietly enjoying Albert’s society, it seemed to me now like an illuminated sepulchre.’ This sensation vanished only when Albert unexpectedly arrived to inform her of a day’s delay to his parting.70 Only one other opera visit is given prominence in Alexandrine’s recollections: three years later in Vienna, long after their marriage, she again donned evening dress to see a performance of Bellini’s Norma.71 It was, she wrote, the last time she did so: Albert, who only ten days after their wedding had revealed the clear signs of tuberculosis, died a few months later. Alexandrine clothed herself in black, and withdrew for ever from society.

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It is important to note that this account is mediated by more than one party. Although she refers to and often quotes from her journal, Alexandrine was reliving the experience after her widowhood; her account was then further distilled and edited by her sister­in-­law, Pauline de la Ferronnays Craven, after Alexandrine’s own death. In that sense, it constitutes an interpretation-­of-­an-­interpretation rather than a necessarily factual account of what took place. There are indications, for example, that there were various other opera visits that were not written about in detail (or that Craven chose not to reproduce in her volume). The ones that are included, however, demonstrate how much Alexandrine’s response to the operas on the occasions she cites was determined by what she herself brought into the theatre. In all instances, she did not go to the opera precisely in order to see a particular work, but rather to participate in a social event at which she could engage with the primary protagonists in the drama of her own life. As we’ve seen, Alexandrine’s opera-­going was combined with her own music­making.72 The important role music played in female education (otherwise desultory, at least until the last two decades of the nineteenth century) meant that women spectators were often themselves practitioners – mainly either pianists and/or singers. Publishers such as Giovanni Ricordi and Francesco Lucca hastened to bring out vocal scores and transcriptions for piano and other instruments before or shortly after an opera’s première, as a crucial part of commercial strategies. Many women in Italy and beyond did not therefore access the operatic experience merely as spectators: they engaged actively in the music as domestic performers, singing arias and duets, or playing piano transcriptions of operas. Standards of performance could be very high; if Alexandrine really was able to sing her way through Elvira’s taxing aria from La Muette, ‘O moment enchanté’, she must have possessed a two-­octave range, a strong upper register with excellent stamina and considerable agility. This kind of music-­making often led to semi-­formal performances for invited guests. (Such engagements could be unorthodox: Maria Luigia of Parma once sang Mozart’s duet ‘Là ci darem’ with herself as Zerlina and the notorious Caroline of Brunswick playing the role of Don Giovanni.)73 Women’s apprehension of music thus came in part through their own participation in its structures and modalities of expressivity. And music-­making provided the opportunity to sample other, fictional lives. To ‘be’ Elvira (or later, Violetta or Azucena), albeit for a few brief moments in a drawing-­room or concert hall, was a means of inhabiting other dimensions of the ‘feminine’ and of recognising – consciously or unconsciously – that femininity could be constructed in different ways. To return to the opera house, it is intriguing that at that first magical evening it was the voice of a male singer (the Russian tenor Nikolay Ivanov) that registered most with Alexandrine, suggesting perhaps that at an early point in her relationship with Albert she was more drawn towards registering pleasing aspects of masculinity than identifying with female characters. And it was a very particular example of masculinity: the English critic Henry Fothergill Chorley (who heard him in London in 1834) described

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

Ivanov as possessing ‘the sweetest voice, as a gentle tenor, that ever sang in Italian or Muscovite throat. Nothing could be more delicious as to tone.’ Yet on stage he was little more than an unwound ‘automaton’, remarkable only for his ‘insignificance of aspect’ and ‘nullity of demeanour’.74 There is an odd parallel here with Alexandrine’s own responses to Albert, whom she did not find at first physically attractive (apart from his eyes) but vocally appealing. Did Ivanov’s physically gauche but tender invocation of a young hero somehow underscore Albert’s suitability as a romantic partner? Or should we distrust Alexandrine’s allusion to the tenor completely? After all, this was the evening on which Ivanov made his professional operatic debut in Naples, to considerable acclaim. Is his name given emphasis here because of his later celebrity? Alexandrine’s account also illustrates that sense of seeing and being seen (note the contrast between her enjoyment of the brilliant lighting in the theatre when her mood was high, and her sense of an ‘illuminated sepulchre’ when depressed) often ascribed to the vanity of the élite opera audience: its need for the display of wealth and power. Without detracting from that view, McConachie’s theories of spectatorial engagement offer a further interpretation of the function of a fully lit auditorium, in that the aspect of emotional contagion is facilitated when an audience can clearly see each other. An example of this is provided by a rare letter from a female correspondent to the September edition of the Giornale di scienze, letteratura ed arti per la Sicilia in 1832, regarding that same Neapolitan performance of La gazza ladra with Malibran that Alexandrine had also attended. Alexandrine, we should recall, had barely paid heed to the performance, gripped as she was by her anxiety about the contents of Albert’s secret note – although she did acknowledge that ‘Malibran was drawing tears from everyone’. That ‘everyone’ included the Giornale’s anonymous correspondent, identified only as ‘una gentilissima signorina siciliana’: Yesterday evening I witnessed the most moving theatrical spectacle possible, including that of I Capuleti e i Montecchi [Bellini]. I am talking about the Gazza ladra performed by Malibran in a way to surpass, if possible, imagination. What truth! What sublime naturalness! To hear her truly merits a journey. I would have been desperate if I had not wept at her weeping. Yesterday evening she sang for the last time, but the enthusiasm she aroused is impossible to describe. One cannot convey the proper idea of it, because such was the emotion, and so strongly and powerfully felt, that it is difficult to find the right words. A single man does not express [such feeling]. It requires hundreds and thousands of people together invaded and possessed at the same time by the same sentiment. It was my last thought yesterday evening, my first this morning: it has gripped me almost distracted in a convulsion felt over and over again: neither can I yet free myself of it, although a whole night and a great part of the day has already passed.75

The very few interventions by women writers on opera in the Italian journals of that period make this an exceptional account. Note the emphasis on the feeling that is

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aroused in this spectator, and how her tears stem from those of Malibran – presumably in the Act ii prayer scene, ‘Deh, tu reggi in tal momento’, when Ninetta pauses before a church to pray as she is led to her execution. And the writer’s emotion was clearly enhanced by the unity apparent in the audience: the ‘hundreds and thousands’ who are ‘possessed by the same sentiment’. Nor was her emotional experience a fleeting occurrence, but rather absorbed her over a period of hours and well into the next day. The mood that the performance had created was thus particularly intense. From these various accounts, we can see that information about the female opera spectator is tantalising but also fragmented, circumscribed and simply rather thin on the ground. In the absence of consistent material about substantial numbers of female spectators, we have to rely heavily on just a few  – who may or may not be representative. We can, however, consider possible parallels with scholarship on modern female audiences. When research began on genres commonly associated with women spectators such as romantic films and televised soap opera, it produced some surprising results. Of particular interest were studies that drew on surveys of the audiences, such as Jackie Stacey’s work on cinematic spectators76 and Ien Ang’s investigation on ­television audiences and the 1980s soap opera Dallas. This last study produced the curious finding that most of its women viewers (drawn from the Netherlands) claimed to find the programme (set in Texas among super-­rich oil ranchers) to be ‘realistic’ and ‘congruent with their own lives and experiences’. 77 Ang accounted for this perception with a theory of ‘emotional realism’: ‘the pleasures of affect for audiences were derived from a shared sense of personal tragedy, allowing them to empathize at an emotional level with the pain associated with familiar renditions of domestic dysfunction.’78 Nor do viewers accept unquestioningly the values offered to them by the narratives. Carolyn Byerly and Karen Ross demonstrate that although soap opera and film narratives may posit unconventional behaviour as deviant, female spectators none the less may adopt a strategy of resistance to such hegemonic reinforcing, choosing instead to develop their own evaluations of the characters’ life choices. 79 Such findings offer some intriguing avenues to account for the responses of female opera audiences in the nineteenth century. The ‘women’ of my title thus refer not only to Verdi’s female characters but to the singers who realised them on stage and the spectators who watched and listened in the auditorium. The following pages have been driven by my curiosity about this mediated relationship between Verdi’s operas and the life-­world of the female audience: the places where ideas on-­ and offstage coincide or contradict, reflect or refract.80 What might the Italian female spectator have seen in these operas that connected to her own lived experience? What was missing? Where did her life and that of the female characters mesh, and where did it diverge? In considering this juxtaposition of fictional and lived experience across the central themes that recur through Verdi’s operas (war, prayer, romance, sexuality, marriage, death, laughter), I hope to illuminate aspects of

Prologue: Verdi and his ­audience

the operas previously neglected or even misinterpreted in the otherwise extensive field of Verdian scholarship. As will be already apparent, the conjunction of the fictional world of the opera, the actual world of performance (the realisation of the opera), and the life-­world of the spectator none the less poses inevitable difficulties with regard to evidence. The fictional world of the opera is the most substantiated element, given that it exists in documented form. Even here there are obstacles, given the inherently ‘evasive’ nature of the written musical score,81 which gestures towards but does not ‘fix’ a finite perform­ance, and the multiple different versions of both music and text that were performed during the period. The ephemeral realm of performance itself brings further problems. Critical reception (especially in Italy) often paid little heed to the semiotics of opera staging. Some information can be gleaned from reviews, the disposizioni sceniche or staging manuals (where available) and correspondence from Verdi and others. Yet a live witness to the event nevertheless gives us access to only one perspective, while the audience might have comprised hundreds, if not thousands, all potentially with separate responses. And the event itself constitutes but a single occurrence: the raising of the curtain each time constructs a ‘new’ theatrical event, even when it involves a repetition of a previous performance.82 Perhaps the most opaque area concerns the life-­world of the female spectator. Ottocento music and theatre criticism was a field dominated by men, with only a few exceptions at the end of the period. Private correspondence provides occasional indications of women’s response to opera, but these are sparse and again limited to particular individuals. Female authors sometimes engaged with opera performance in their novels – but their operatic events were usually imaginary, with an indeterminate relationship to real occasions. What such fictional accounts nonetheless provide are examples of how opera was perceived and used in other cultural contexts, which can inform our own understanding of the significance of the event in broader terms. We can also draw substantial inferences from the social history of women, itself shaped by other histor­ies: of mentalities, of cultures, of political events. However, the writing of women’s history – or indeed, the inclusion of women as a subject within other histories – is still an emerging field in Italian scholarship, and moreover has so far been substantially devoted to the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As late as 2000, Silvia Mantini could claim that ‘gender history of the nineteenth century is virtually nonexistent’. 83 Much valuable work has been done in the past decade, but there are still important gaps and elisions, particularly regarding the pre-­Unification period. Above all, relations between these worlds  – the fictional, the representational and the real – are murky, particularly with regard to defining the effect of discourse. What, ultimately, was the significance of Verdi’s female characters in their contribution to ideas of gender and feeling? New Historicism attempted to debunk the notion of art’s ‘transcendent’ quality by asserting that opposition is suppressed, contained

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women

and ultimately recycled by the dominant power. There are certainly examples of this process with regard to some of Verdi’s heroines in the following chapters. But it is too reductive a summary. More pertinent is Carolyn Porter’s discussion, drawing on Bakhtin, of ‘multivoiced discourses’: although oppositional discourses may not achieve their full objectives, she argues, ‘they cannot be denied agency’. 84 As will be seen, discourses containing both dominant and oppositional ideologies are frequently apparent in and around Verdi’s operas. And in an odd way, they also seem aptly evocative of Verdi himself, whose complex, contradictory and at times plain contrary nature has so often been noted. Women and their various, often conflicted ‘histories’ do not emerge out of Verdi’s operas as easy ciphers of a new world – nor, again, do they seem fully reflective of  the old. In that enigma lies my excuse for adding one more volume to the book-­lined walls of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani.

­1

­War

When Abigaille strode on to the stage with sword in Odabella, Attila, Prologue hand and vengeance in her voice in Nabucodonosor (1842), her thrusting energy invested Verdi’s writing with a new dynamism. Propelled by its aggressive ­heroine, Nabucco became Verdi’s first international success; he would later describe the opera as the true beginning of his career.1 The sword Abigaille brandished was seized by other Verdian heroines during the 1840s and (less often) beyond. For some, its blade was real and explicit (Giovanna d’Arco, Odabella); for others, it contracted to the more economical dagger (Elvira, Lady Macbeth, Gulnara, Amalia); for yet others, it was a metaphorical weapon (Lucrezia, Hélène). There was nothing particularly new about such warlike female protagonists: rather, a revisiting of older Italian traditions. The intrepid guerriera, whose skill in battle equalled and sometimes superseded that of her male counterparts, first stalked Renaissance popular poems (cantari) and epic works such as Orlando furioso (Ariosto, 1516–32) and La Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso, 1575),2 and then found fresh territory to conquer in early opera.3 As either militant amazon or reigning queen, she soon became a stock character, acquiring renewed vigour in the 1760s and 1770s.4 From then on, her appearances dwin­ dled. Perhaps the last true guerriere to capture public imagination were the title roles of Rossini’s Semiramide (1823) and Mercadante’s Caritea, regina di Spagna (1826) – both operas written for La Fenice in Venice. While the heroine of Bellini’s Norma (1831) bears some resemblance (not least in her arousal of the populace against the Romans with her fiery cry of ‘Guerra, guerra!’), the emphasis on her religious duties and mother­ hood suggests a certain softening in the image of the guerriera. Changes in both operatic conventions and ideas beyond the theatres had contrib­ uted to the decline of the warrior heroine. The arrival of tragedy on the operatic stage in the late 1820s positioned women more often as victims rather than protagonists of violence. Only a handful of women in Donizetti’s completed operas (around sixty-­five in total) seriously contemplate spilling blood, for example; even fewer follow through their intentions.5 This situation was not entirely of Donizetti’s choosing. In a letter of 1842 about the soprano Rosine Stoltz’s rejection of his opera Le Duc d’Albe (finally performed posthumously in 1882), he emphasised the ‘innovative’ nature of his central female character, who attempts to assassinate the Spanish governor of Flanders and thus avenge her father’s death: ‘I had above all cherished the rôle of the heroine: perhaps a new role in the theatre, a role of action, where almost always the heroine is passive. ‘Fammi ridar la spada!’

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women

Here she is young, enthusiastic, loving, a Joan of Arc.’6 Such ideas clearly did not chime either with Stoltz or with emerging ideas of gender. Seven years earlier, the Italian music periodical Figaro had claimed that woman’s delicate physique and affective con­ stitution unfitted her for the rigours of combat, arguing that while some women ‘in all ages and almost all countries’ were naturally endowed with ‘courage and extraordinary strength’, such instances were rare.7 This insistence on feminine fragility ignored the reality that many women from the artisan classes laboured in the fields, on the roads and in the mines in jobs that were as physically demanding as other occupations per­ ceived as ‘masculine’.8 Opera, too, deployed something of a double standard in this respect. Women con­ tinued to wield swords on the stage during the 1820s and 1830s – but they usually did so dressed as men. Donna Caritea’s warrior skills were paired with those of her lover Diego, written for a female musico. While her character languished in later years, his flourished. This use of the contralto in the first four decades of the nineteenth century was due mostly to the hiatus in the male representation of the hero between the disap­ pearance of the castrato and the emergence of the tenore di forza.9 Thus women could don virile guise as Malcolm in La donna del lago (Rossini), Arsace in Semiramide (Rossini), the title role of Tancredi (Rossini) or Maffio Orsini in Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti) – or even, on occasion, assume roles written for male singers, such as Otello (Rossini). 10 As late as 1829, Bellini and Felice Romani considered writing the title role of Hugo’s Hernani for Giuditta Pasta; Verdi himself had to resist strong pressure to do likewise in his Ernani for Carolina Vietti at La Fenice in 1843.11 In this context, Verdi’s choice of armoured heroines who flaunt swords and daggers, sometimes inflicting fatal wounds on their male victims, suggests a reclaiming of this active territory for female singers, dressed once again as women rather than men. His rationale, however, was as much to do with his strong distaste for travesti roles, as with any proto-­feminist leanings: during the negotiations with the La Fenice management over Ernani, Antonio De Val reported that Verdi was ‘a sworn foe to the idea of making a woman sing dressed as a man’. 12 (It was a stance he relaxed only later in his career with two exceptions, both pages: Oscar in Un ballo in maschera,1859, and Thibault in Don Carlos, 1867.) Every Verdian heroine was effectively in a state of ‘war’, driven by conflicts with family or society or within herself. Such is the stuff of drama. Yet there was also a press­ ing external discord that provided the backcloth to their ordeals. All but two of Verdi’s operas were written during the most tempestuous decades of the Italian Risorgimento. Many themes of that political turmoil and its four main conflicts – the failed upris­ ings in 1848–9, the more successful war in 1859–60 that led to the partial unification of Italy, the campaign undertaken in 1866 that drove out the Austrians from most of their strongholds in the Veneto region and finally the token but significant assault on the Vatican state in 1870 that produced the shape of modern Italy – were woven con­ sciously or unconsciously into the fabric of Verdi’s operas. In broad terms, in the 1840s

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his operas captured the increasing bellicosity of certain parts of Italian society; in the 1850s, they shared in the mourning of the defeated and oppressed; in the 1860s and early 1870s, they articulated the anti-­clerical stance that swept much of the country in the wake of Rome’s intransigence. To what extent did they also engage with female experi­ ence in these years? In an anonymous pamphlet published in besieged Venice in 1848, the author declared that history would recall the role of women in the struggle for liberty, because ‘sons will be proud to relate the virtues of their mothers’.13 And yet, quite the opposite happened. Derek Beales describes women’s contribution to the Risorgimento as perhaps ‘the sin­ gle most neglected aspect of nineteenth-­century Italian history’.14 One hindrance, per­ haps, was the conflation of Italy and ‘Woman’ that marked that epoch. Alberto Banti rightly notes that ‘woman’ as a symbol was an essential component of Risorgimental pictorial discourse: ‘Italy is a woman, often sat, often wearing a turreted [turrita] crown, sometimes modestly covered by a shawl; at other times with an exposed breast, to underline the nurturing function performed toward her children; often portrayed in chains, to recall her state of oppression; or even girded with arms, in the moment of her longed-­for liberation.’15 Yet the emphasis on the use of woman as a symbol of something else obscures or even negates the actual experiences of women themselves during the period. While the absence of scholarship has been partially addressed more recently, 16 there is still the lack of an overarching study of women’s involvement in almost every facet of the wars for independence: as supporters, antagonists, victims, observers, com­ batants, nurses, fund-­raisers, journalists and propagandists. Before considering how Verdi’s operas engaged (or not) with some of these roles, the political context of opera and the opera house deserves some elaboration. O pera a n d politics

In a review of the first La Scala production of Verdi’s I due Foscari in 1845, Francesco Regli commented that the theatre was a ‘synonym for uncertainty, contradiction, changeability’.17 Regli was referring to the changing fortunes of the opera since its prima in Rome the previous year; but his statement aptly describes the role opera played in the Risorgimento. The theatre was a shifting, contested site, in which broader political realities found subtle and sometimes more profound articula­ tion. On the one hand, republican activists in the 1830s such as the actor Gustavo Modena sought to create ‘il teatro educatore’, 18 a notion that had its first roots in 1797 in a manifesto for the institution of a ‘Teatro Civico’ designed to ‘educate the People’ by way of drama and music, and thus counter the ‘prejudices of ignorance’. 19 Given both widespread illiteracy (extending even in 1860 to almost four-­fifths of the population)20 and, even for the minority who could read, the proscription of many texts deemed subversive,21 theatre could usefully disseminate knowledge of all kinds.

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women

Drama’s capacity to depict history ‘in animated pictures’, for example, was regarded by Modena as especially beneficial as a tool to develop society’s understanding of its own culture and composition.22 There were also at least some efforts to turn opera to similar account. In 1836, the republican activist Giuseppe Mazzini maintained that the relationship between the individual and society was mirrored in the alignment between melody and harmony in musical structure.23 Such attributes, he urged a year later, brought responsibility in the political climate: ‘[W]e cannot at the present day merely amuse ourselves with being artists, playing with sounds or forms, tickling only our senses, instead of pondering some germ of thought which may save us.’24 One avenue for perceived change lay in the use of the opera chorus, which in its conventional representation as a single mass appeared to Mazzini as emblematic of the state’s disregard for the people; instead, he argued for the possibilities of the chorus as ‘collective individuality’, ‘capable of individual, independent and spontaneous life, like the people of whom it is the born interpreter’.25 Did Verdi and his librettists share the same kind of educative aims as Modena and Mazzini? It is easy to perceive in many of their operas of the 1840s the zeitgeist (or, in Banti’s words, ‘the morphology of national discourse’26) of the Risorgimento. The emphasis on ‘patria’, the exhortations to war, the portrayal of a suffering people, the prominence of the chorus, the engagement with questions of state, nationhood and governance all seem to gesture towards the issues concerning the foreign rule of geo­ graphical Italy. The idea of Verdi politico is further supported by a number of letters declaring his unequivocal allegiance to the cause of liberation; 27 one opera, La battaglia di Legnano (1849), was deliberate propaganda; at least four of his librettists in those years (Temistocle Solera, Salvadore Cammarano, Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei) as well as his pupil and assistant Emanuele Muzio were declared supporters of the Risorgimento;28 his circle of close friends included activists such as Clara Maffei and Carlo Tenca, while his wider acquaintanceship encompassed Mazzini, Giusti and other figureheads of the movement; he expressed warm admiration for politicians and sol­ diers such as Cavour and Garibaldi;29 he signed a public petition asking for French aid in the 1848 uprising; he provided the money for guns in his home town during the second revolution in 1859, and he himself later served (albeit with considerable reluctance) as a senate member for Parma in the first Italian government following Unification in 1860. Yet while Verdi’s correspondence with his librettists and associates sometimes expressed a desire to deal with political and moral issues more explicitly, his operas were hardly political theatre in the same sense, for example, as Modena’s satirical sketches or a ‘highly political and nationalist’ (so described by the periodical Il trovatore) musico­theatrical piece presented in Turin in 1857 by Stefani and Botto. 30 Verdi’s operas were politicised rather than political theatre, primarily engaged in the display of the passions aroused by ideas of liberty, independence and nationhood.31

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Even so, their value was clearly regarded as ambiguous or even negative by some supporters of the Risorgimento. In the memoirs of the artist and politician Massimo d’Azeglio, for example, there is not a single mention of Verdi – nor does his name fig­ ure in the writings of many other politicians. One might expect that Modena, a fellow theatre practitioner, would have regarded Verdi sympathetically, but in an article pub­ lished in 1856 he condemned opera’s frivolous materiality and strongly disparaged the ‘divinazzione’ of Verdi.32 The more right-­wing historian Cesare Cantù deplored Verdi’s ‘continually violent style, which leads to exaggeration and monotony’, and argued that opera was all very well, but when the subsidy of a theatre was greater than that accorded to public education, when statues were erected to singers and the country acquired a reputation for frivolous amusements, one could only bemoan ‘those distrac­ tions [that] incapacitate the mind to serious truths, and turn it aside from feeling the virile pains from which regeneration emerges’.33 Another staunch patriot of the period, Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, shared such sentiments. Not mentioning Verdi directly by name but undoubtedly referring to his operas, she criticised the frenzy in a town at the arrival of new opera singers, dismissed the music as a cacophony that ‘little by little corrupts the sense of beauty’ and lamented that energies that should have been devoted to the patriotic cause were instead expended uselessly at the opera house. 34 Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi was typically abrasive, describing opera in 1857 as a prostitute who had ‘infected souls in Italy with consumption’ (one wonders if his choice of phrase made reference to the recent pervading success of La traviata) and collaborated with Austrian rule: ‘What infamy have you not sung, O Music?’35 It seems odd, if Verdi’s main role in this period was indeed one of the political awakening of his audience (as Massimo Mila suggests, describing his operas as ‘a voice of national consciousness and a decisive authentic force of our liberation’),36 that its effects were all but inaudible to some of his most committed brothers-­and sisters-­in-­arms.37 But there was good cause for suspicion. The most prestigious opera houses were either built or directly sponsored by the various absolutist governments, and were used as a means to display power, to bring together ruler and ruled in convivial entertain­ ment and apparent unity, to provide amusement for the garrisoned troops (military per­ sonnel invariably benefited from reduced ticket prices) and to impress foreign guests. They also furnished a method of control and surveillance, enabling the authorities to take note of subversive behaviour: police reports listed suspicious occurrences ranging from excessive applause at the expression of politically sensitive sentiments to visits to and from the boxes of the ‘usual suspects’.38 Most contentiously, perhaps, the theatres were deployed as a means of distracting the populace from the more serious effects of occupation  – d’Azeglio’s much-­cited claim that the Austrian regime had ‘governed Lombardia for so many years through the means of La Scala’ had some real foundation.39 Baron Karl von Czoernig-­Czernhausen, a Bohemian statistician and sometime police official in Lombardo-­Veneto, described

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the attitude of the Italian nobility in 1833: having deliberately detached itself from the bureaucratic and military systems of the Austrians, it was now ‘morally corrupt’, car­ ing only for ‘il dolce far niente and pleasure’, and behaved ‘as a spectator in political and public life’.40 This view of the Italians as no more than an audience at the spectacle of their own fate played well into the use of opera as a diversion. The Austrian adminis­ tration had close connections with the operatic marketplace. Milan’s venal and notori­ ous police commissioner, Luigi Bolza, was an opera enthusiast; one daughter studied at Milan’s conservatorio from 1835 to 1842 and became a soprano under the name of Luigia Ponti (later, after marriage, Ponti Dell’Armi);41 another married a young com­ poser who would become a major critic, the editor of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano from 1856–8, and the first designated conductor of La Scala: Alberto Mazzucato. 42 Another key adviser to the Lombardo-­Veneto administration, Karl Pachta, began his career as a theatre impresario with links to Wagner, Weber and Meyerbeer: 43 the com­ poser Angelo Catelani described him as ‘omnipotent within and beyond the theatres’ and indeed met La Scala’s impresario, Bartolomeo Merelli, through Pachta’s services in 1842.44 From 1836 to 1848, Merelli ran both La Scala and Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater, as well as managing seasons at a number of other theatres, and was accused, rightly or wrongly, of being an Austrian spy.45 Political surveillance of the opera house and its employees could even extend beyond the theatre itself. The soprano Lucy Escott, who sang Leonora in an early production of Il trovatore at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples dur­ ing the 1850s, claimed that each morning she could go to the police station and read her private conversations in her lodgings from the previous night.46 As for the content of the operas themselves, censorship on political, religious and moral grounds ensured that offending passages were excised or altered, sometimes requiring changes to titles or entire settings of operas. Several of Verdi’s operas – most importantly, Ernani, Giovanna d’Arco, Stiffelio, Rigoletto, La traviata and Les Vêpres siciliennes – were given at different theatres in a bewildering range of guises. Manipulation of operatic content and performance was facilitated by the economic mechanism of the theatres. Singers, composers, instrumentalists, librettists, conductors and stage designers were all intent on at least making a living, if not actively pursuing individual goals of financial reward, celebrity and artistic achievement. A vociferous, often parti­ san musical press (in which some elements were Austrian sympathisers, such as Luigi Mazzoldi and Pietro Perego in the 1850s) ensured that their efforts were under constant scrutiny; and success mostly depended – especially in the early stages of a career – on attracting the right kind of support. Verdi himself dedicated the vocal scores of two of his early operas to members of the regime or their associates: I Lombardi alla prima crociata to Maria Luigia, Duchess of Parma,47 and Giovanna d’Arco to Giulia Samoyloff, a Russian countess in Milanese society and a pro-­Austrian sympathiser. And then there was the audience – or rather, audiences. While the Risorgimento’s efforts to promote a cultural and economic regeneration of Italy had wider appeal, its

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political aim – unifying the eight separate states of the peninsula into a single entity – was by no means universally popular.48 In 1859, Giovanni Frassi summarised the situa­ tion that had existed over a decade earlier: one group of activists sought gradual change through means of education and politicisation; the other engaged in fund-­raising for acts of insurrection and violence. Yet both groups combined were but a distinct minor­ ity of the population: ‘[M]ost people were either unaware of, indifferent or hostile to political matters: that is, either they knew nothing, or they did not want to know anything.’49 The liberal movement itself was riven by multiple fissures between repub­ licans and monarchists, devout Catholics and anti-­clerics, pacifists and supporters of armed struggle, federalists and unionists, democrats and liberals, rich and poor, north and south, city and countryside.50 Around them circled the foreign powers – France, Prussia, Britain, Russia, Spain and the USA – with their own agendas and interventions, supporting or opposing one group here, and another there. Underlying all was perhaps the most divisive factor: that the concept of ‘patria’ referred first and foremost to individual territories – often no larger than a small town, complete with its own language and culture – rather than a national homeland. And the mass uprising of the peasant class so longed for by Mazzini and Giovine Italia never took place.51 For most people, it mattered comparatively little if they were ruled by for­ eigners or Italians – they were equally distanced from both, by reasons of class, money, education and even language. The quality of government was perhaps a more press­ ing factor in the eyes of many. A foreign ruler such as Maria Luigia of Parma could be appreciated for her charitable works and civic reforms by Parmigiani otherwise fully supportive of the Risorgimento;52 while d’Azeglio commented that the years of the Austrian regime in Milan between 1840 and 1845 were ‘of a government so mild, so lit­ tle terrorizing [terrorista], that among all the little governments of Italy there was not one that, in comparison to the Austrians, was not infinitely more horrendous’. 53 Many Italians thus remained loyal to the governing regimes. A third of Radetzky’s army in the north comprised Italian soldiers,54 while in the south the eventual triumph of Vittorio Emanuele II in 1860 (primarily courtesy of Garibaldi’s troops) was regarded by many as the victory of a foreign power and led to long-­standing civil unrest that caused more deaths between warring Italians than the sum of the preceding conflicts with the Austrians.55 Schisms were evident not just within communities, but even within fami­ lies: in Naples, for example, Irene Ricciardi and her brother Giuseppe followed their parents’ liberal persuasions, while their siblings were declared monarchists. 56 In such a climate, ideas that spoke to one constituency clearly might fail to address another with equal authority. Gustavo Modena was disillusioned by the audience’s reluctance to engage with political issues in the theatre. In a letter to Filippo De Boni in 1850, he counselled the writer to publish his play rather than stage it, because a ­‘political drama’, albeit with the excellent aim of education, would be ‘a soporific for the masses’ as such plays lacked ‘dramatic interest’: ‘Theatre audiences want sensations,

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emotions – and they do not forgive those who want to make them think.’57 Anticipating Brecht some seventy years later, Modena found that satire and humour were vital ingre­ dients in making political theatre more palatable. Indeed, the lack of any audience at all had become a pressing problem for theatres. Attendance was mostly sparse in the months leading up to both the earlier main con­ flicts, particularly in the state-­sponsored theatres. Italian newspapers could only refer vaguely to ‘deserted’ auditoriums; the foreign press was more explicit. The Times cor­ respondent reported that on 5 March 1848 during Eugenia Tadolini’s performance of L’elisir d’amore (a popular prima donna in a popular opera) he had counted 236 empty boxes out of a total of 240, while the pit was moderately filled with Austrian offic­ ers and ‘300 spies’.58 Most theatres closed during the actual hostilities; the few that remained open played to meagre audiences. A plaintive plea from actors and musicians in besieged Venice described the hardship the profession was now experiencing, and argued for their political credentials on the grounds that the theatre had always been ‘the true founder of the people’.59 Nor did things improve greatly when open fighting had ceased. In the restoration of 1849, liberals across the peninsula enacted a deliberate policy of non-­attendance at the theatres as a sign of mourning – leading in some cases to intervention by the authorities to enforce the opening of theatres and the presence of an audience.60 In Padua, for example, Austrian officials employed various strategies, ranging from the carrot of the programming of popular works, free tickets and a casino to the stick of the arrest and imprisonment of known liberals, in their efforts to once again revert Italians from activists to spectators.61 Attendance none the less remained stubbornly patchy until the mid 1850s. In Milan during the same period, the Austrian­sponsored La Scala was shunned in favour of the Teatro Carcano, despite its distance from the centre of the city.62 Even when audiences were politically aroused, the impetus often stemmed from extra-­theatrical factors rather than operatic content. One such instance occurred at the Teatro Comunale in Modena in February 1849 during a performance of Verdi’s I masnadieri. The prima donna was Augusta Albertini (Italian-­born, but of English parentage), a cantante di bravura with an excellent technique and a strong, attractive voice who initially was popular with the Modenese public and Austrian garrison alike.63 Yet Albertini’s uni­ fying effect was ultimately compromised. Contractually, she was required to share the proceeds of her benefit evening with the impresario, Pietro Camuri. Some Austrians decided to circumvent this clause by making her a private gift of 1,000 lire two days after her benefit. Having learnt of the gift, Camuri made formal complaint – but to no avail. Angered, he apparently then spread rumours that Albertini’s popularity with the Austrians rested on the availability of her sexual favours. The result of his insinuation was that members of the local partito liberale not only refused to applaud Albertini on later evenings, but humiliated her with their obvious disapproval – reserving instead their applause for the prima ballerina, who took to wearing a tricolour rosetta as a sign

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of political solidarity. The Austrians waited until the last evening of the season for their revenge. Throughout the performance, the more they applauded Albertini, the more the Modenese activists (wearing red cravats and hats alla Calabrese) whistled. During the final terzetto (‘Caduto è il reprobo!’), the civil and military authorities quietly left their seats. In their absence, open violence ensued when the curtain fell, as the soldiers laid into the spectators with the flat of their sabres: ‘The whole auditorium became a battle-­field, where all that was heard was the sound of the blows laid onto the shoulders of the victims, curses, and the screams of frightened women.’ Those who attempted to flee through the foyer found themselves forced to run the gauntlet between two rows of Croatian soldiers. Only the spectators in the first row of boxes (containing the aris­ tocracy) escaped assault. The theatre subsequently remained closed until the following December.64 In short, the opera house had too many components with opposing needs and power-­bases to function effectively as a coherent, dependable device for political sub­ version. (Nor was this a feature purely of opera – Lucy Riall argues that it is equally difficult to trace substantial links between popular culture and the Risorgimento.) 65 But neither, as we can see, could it be controlled entirely by the authorities. Regli’s comment about the essential mutability of the theatre was an expansion of a line from Felice Romani’s libretto for Luigi Ricci’s Un’avventura di Scaramuccia (1834): ‘La scena è un mare ­instabile, / Che muta ad ogni vento’ (‘The stage is an unstable sea / That changes with every wind’). Those winds would soon become a storm. L e ispiratrici

This, then, was the environment in which Verdi’s armoured heroines brandished their weapons. All were drawn from historical and, with one exception, foreign sources. Their travails, temporally, geographically and culturally distant from their female spec­ tators, at first must have seemed to have little in common with contemporary reality. As the years passed and the conflict deepened, however, aspects of these fictional lives acquired other meanings and even, perhaps, obliquely anticipated some of the experi­ ences women endured outside the theatres. War challenged the gender definitions that had been gaining ground in the early dec­ ades of the century. Indeed, it was in this epoch that the foundations of the later Italian feminist movement were laid.66 One accepted role for women that fitted within both old and new notions of gender, however, was that of inspiring men to action. ‘It lies to men to do great deeds: it belongs to women to inspire them’, the Rivista teatrale had declared in 182467 – a sentiment now echoed by Isabella Rossi’s description of ‘woman’s mission’ in 1848 as that of making use ‘of our influence, of our dominion over men in order to encourage them, incite them, inflame them’.68 The words women produced, how­ ever, had an important function not only in relation to encouraging male participation

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but also in recording their own experience of the Risorgimento. Writers seized on this opportunity in different ways. Poets such as Luisa Amalia Paladini, Isabella Rossi, Giannina Milli and Giulia Molino-­Colombini (to name but a few) contributed to the formation and dissemination of Risorgimento discourse in the 1830s and 1840s; Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso established the liberal periodical Gazzetta italiana in exile in Paris;69 later, when fighting had begun, Caterina Percoto documented at first hand the atrocities of the Austrian army in Friuli in 1848,70 Margaret Fuller depicted the rise and fall of the Republic of Rome for the readers of the American newspaper, the Tribune, while during the second conflict in 1859 Jessie White Mario became the first female war correspondent. Public statements sometimes also translated into private exhortations. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci paid direct homage to the noted poet Giovanni Berchet, using his title of ‘All’armi, all’armi!’ as the opening and closing words of her own verses ‘Agl’italiani’ urging men into battle;71 her blood-­lust did not waver in the letter later written to her husband and sons in June 1848 following the battle of Curtatone: ‘If you return, I beg you, be the last of all.’72 (We can only guess at the pressure such statements might have caused to men perhaps fearful of combat.) For many other women, their words were spoken, not written. The muttered conversations in salons of women such as Clara Maffei in Milan and Teresa Mosconi Papadopoli in Venice provided import­ ant exchanges for liberal activists.73 And as Banti records, the descriptions left by male participants in the wars of independence rarely failed to make use of the cliché of the admiring female crowd who threw kisses and flowers, and dispensed ‘smiles or cock­ ades or tricoloured flags’ as they surrounded departing or arriving soldiers. 74 The act of inspiring men to arms was also a task that sometimes fell to female char­ acters in Verdi’s operas. In a highly censored theatre, however, subversive meanings had to be conveyed surreptitiously – in similar fashion to the semiotics of resistance operative through the gestures and symbols that enacted the Risorgimento: the anti­tobacco campaign, the wearing of mourning or alternatively the colours of red, white and green or certain kinds of hats, or the staging of masses for the fallen. 75 Accent and allusion thus became key instruments for political activists on both the stage and in the audience. It was a skill in which Gustavo Modena excelled, as Leoni recalled: Gustavo Modena prided himself on anticipating the [audience’s] capacity to understand him. With an inflection, a gesture, a cry, he aroused the most lethargic audience, and seemed to be the accent and the cry of Italy, which was beginning to pulsate with the convulsive throb of the future Vespers. And everything served his great intent. A single word, although far from bearing a political sense, was coloured by him with such vibration that the public applauded wildly, a presage of revolt … The police were bewildered; they did not understand how an inflection, a figure of speech, which was innocuous in the copy presented for the censor’s approval, could incite that fanaticism! And Modena enjoyed himself hugely, and pretended to commiserate with the confused Commissari, who were begging him not to load certain expressions. He,

­Wa wanting to ridicule them, would promise to do so; then on stage he redoubled the dose. The words liberty, emancipation, patria were like litanies, which later especially in Tuscany Modena threw impetuously into the crowds; they welcomed them fervently and, extemporising a new kind of plebiscite, saluted the tribune, although dressed as king and tyrant.76

Even when playing a despot, Modena thus conveyed a double meaning at least to the politically conscious spectator, if not to the wider audience. Antonio Ghislanzoni (bari­ tone, journalist and eventual librettist of Aida) described in detail Modena’s interpreta­ tion of Alfieri’s Saul – a play Stendhal had seen in Naples in 1817, and which he recorded in his diary as exerting ‘some power over the secret nationalism of the Italians’ and arousing them to ‘transports’.77 So too, according to Ghislanzoni, did the audience respond to Modena in the 1840s: The spectators, following on stage the movements of the biblical King and hearing the ferocious words of that hypocritical tyrant, understood that the artist, by reproducing with so much emphasis the truth of the character, wanted to shame all the despots of the earth and offer them up for public execration. The republican actor, dragging on the stage the regal mantle reddened with blood, roared his anathema to the monarchy and sought to shake thrones. For anyone who heard Modena’s Saul, the terrible pauses with which he interrupted Alfieri’s verse will remain eternally memorable: Traggasi a morte … a cruda morte … e lunga. He was the tiger who wants to savour agony and douse himself with living blood.78

Modena’s performance was thus less an embodiment of the role (in the later sense of theatrical naturalism), but rather a form of pre-­Brechtian commentary that through inflection ‘demonstrated’ the character to the audience. Audience responses to certain passages in opera confirm this capacity of some spec­ tators to intuit a broader political understanding. Works such as Caritea, regina di Spagna (Mercadante), Guillaume Tell (Rossini), Norma (Bellini), I puritani (Bellini) and Gemma di Vergy (Donizetti), among others, all provided moments for their audiences when the veil of the fictional landscape was suddenly illuminated from within by the light of contemporary analogies with quite different protagonists.79 At times, Verdi’s operas provided similar scope. The American feminist and journal­ ist Margaret Fuller was in Rome just prior to the revolution, during December 1847. The opera season had begun, she wrote, and there was ‘little hope of hearing any other music than that of Verdi’ (indeed, the Teatro Argentina was staging Attila, Nabucco, I masnadieri and I Lombardi). In particular, Ezio’s words in Attila provoked enthusiastic applause: È gettata la mia sorte, Pronto sono ad ogni guerra; S’io cadrò, cadrò da forte, E il mio nome resterà.

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women Non vedrò l’amata terra Svenir lenta e farsi a brano Sopra l’ultimo Romano Tutta Italia piangerà.80

(My fate is cast, / I am ready for any warfare; / If I fall, I will fall as a strong man, / And my name will remain. / I will not see the beloved land / Slowly fade and be torn to pieces. / Over the last Roman / All Italy will weep.)

Ezio, otherwise cynical and double-­dealing, was hardly a natural Risorgimento role model, but it seems that the audience – or at least, part of the audience – experienced the opera in segmented form. It mattered little that the whole did not add up to a coher­ ent depiction of heroism (and would almost certainly have been refused permission by the censors if it had done so); more important were these single explicit revelations of certain words and phrases. They could be found similarly prominently in another aria that often provoked applause – Odabella’s defiant cavatina, ‘Allor che i forti corrono’, where she proclaimed the determination of the Italian women to resist Attila’s oppres­ sion. A month later, as the political climate grew ever more tense, vehement reactions to Attila took place at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples: In the first two performances the merit of the music could not be judged at all, since numerous spectators were stirred by an emotion wholly other than that which could be caused by the appearance of a new opera. There was much applause, and enthusiastic applause; however, it was never directed at the score or the performances. In spite of that, several attractions in this score by the maestro of the day were noted, and the weak performance and the very poor mise-­en-­scène were unanimously condemned.81

Given that performance values were what generally motivated enthusiasm in an Italian audience, this positive response to a supposedly poor production signals that the fer­ vour in the auditorium was sparked by extraneous factors. Such incidents were rarely spontaneous, but rather carefully orchestrated – in the case of the Teatro di San Carlo, almost certainly by the activists (led by Rosolino Pilo and Francesco Crispi) co-­ordinating civil disturbances on the Palermo–Naples axis.82 Without such intervention, even contentious operas were often performed in more subdued fashion. In Modena, for example, plans to stage Attila in early January 1848 were disbanded by the arrival of an Austrian garrison in response to the rising threat of revolution;83 yet the opera was produced on 22 June 1850, shortly after the cessation of hostilities, without incident but also with little success. 84 We might assume that any dangerous elements within the work had been suppressed by censorship (as occurred at La Scala in the 1851–2 season, where Odabella’s cavatina was stripped of its allusions to ‘patria’ and armed female revolt);85 but the liberals’ policy of refusing to attend the élite opera houses in the wake of the defeat also ensured that the receptors of political meaning were no longer among the audience.

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Intriguingly, Verdi gave deliberate operatic shape to this interplay of allusion and double meaning between performer and spectator in Les Vêpres siciliennes, written to a text by Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier and first staged at the Paris Opéra on 13 June 1855. Set around a famous and bloody uprising in medieval Palermo, the opera addressed a subject that featured heavily in Risorgimento literature and art, and indeed Les Vêpres siciliennes would not be given an Italian performance in its original form until after Unification.86 Scribe’s libretto was actually a refashioning of his earlier text for Donizetti’s ill-­fated Le Duc d’Albe, concerning the occupation of Flanders. The shoe­ horning of the plot into a quite different background meant that the mesh between historical fact and fictionalised action in Verdi’s opera is tenuous at best. The legendary flashpoint for the real events in Palermo, after years of oppression by Charles d’Anjou (brother of Louis IX of France), occurred on 30 March 1282. The account by the Sicilian historian and liberal activist Michele Amari, first published in 1842 and revised on later occasions, constituted the most authoritative and influential version then available (and one which Stephen Runciman argues still has value).87 According to Amari, a French soldier named Drouet, on the pretext of a search for weapons, handled the breasts of a young woman accompanied by her husband outside the Chiesa dello Spirito Santo, where they were about to attend vespers. She fainted; her outraged husband swore death to the enemy; a youth sprang from the crowd and knifed Drouet; and a massacre lasting two days began, killing over 2,000 Frenchmen – and even their unborn babies lying in the wombs of their Sicilian wives and mistresses (or so Amari claimed). 88 This, at least, was the version of events familiar to the Italian audience. Scribe and Verdi’s opera begins rather differently. In the first act, Hélène crosses through the piazza on her way to church to pray for her brother on the anniversary of his death (at the hands of the French commander Montfort), and swears to avenge him. A French officer, Robert, stops her and insists she sing for them. She begins a seemingly innocu­ ous ballad, about sailors at sea in a storm: ‘Au sein des mers et battu par l’orage’. But the pleas of the terrified sailors for heavenly intervention are met by a suggestive reply: ‘N’avez vous donc d’espoir qu’en des secours divins? / Vos jours dépendent de vous mêmes; / Votre salut est dans vos mains’(‘Does your hope therefore rest only in divine aid? / Your future depends on yourselves; / Your lives are in your hands’). Hélène’s ensuing cabaletta, ‘Courage! … du courage!’, arouses the gathering crowd; drawing their weapons, they prepare to launch a furious assault on the French soldiers. The effectiveness of this diegetic rabble-­rouser relies on both words and music. First, that telling phrase ‘Vos jours dépendent de vous mêmes; / Votre salut est dans vos mains.’ To its French audience, it may not have seemed very significant; but it carried much more weight in Italy. Its sentiment was the underlying rationale of Risorgimento discourse. Similar words, for example, appeared in the Turin journal Museo scientifico, letterario ed artistico in 1848, courtesy of the journal’s editor, Pietro Corelli: ‘the destiny of the people is in the hands of the people themselves’ (original emphasis).89 The political

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sensitivity of this phrase in the libretto of Les Vêpres siciliennes is confirmed by the fact that when the opera was subsequently performed in Italy in the 1850s as Giovanna de Guzman (now set in Portugal), censors in cities such as Milan, Venice, Trieste, Florence and Rome insisted on rather different words: ‘Iddio risponde in sua giustizia immensa: / “A chi lotta col turbo il cielo arride, / E un giusto e santo ardir sempre compensa!”’ (‘God replies in his immense wisdom: / “On whoever struggles with adversity heaven smiles, / And always rewards a just and devout daring!”’ (Even thus, the opera was described as a ‘wholly subversive’ work by one police chief in Sicily.) 90 In liberal Turin, however, although the opera was performed in its Portuguese setting, the original text of the cavatina was retained. Curiously, this was also the case at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, where the opera was produced in 1858 under the title of Batilde di Turena. Only after 1860 could Les Vêpres siciliennes be finally given in Italy in translated form as I vespri siciliani. In the musical setting of the inflammatory words of Hélène’s cavatina, the phrases are repeated mostly on c´, set against an anapaestic rhythm; the final three words, ‘dans vos mains’, are then repeated five times more, with the last instance marked ‘parlé’ and with semiquavers on the first two notes (see example 1.1). Hélène thus conveys her dou­ ble meaning to her co-­patriots via ritualised repetition, the use of pauses (as Gustavo Modena did), a change from singing to declamation and strong contrasts in volume. 91 From the play of these inflections, Hélène launches into her more explicit urging: ‘Courage! … du courage!’ In writing a cabaletta whose dramatic purpose is to rouse the onstage listeners to violent action, Verdi resorted once again to the wide leaps, arpeg­ gios and rhythmic patterns that had marked Odabella’s fiery cavatina in Attila, ‘Allor che i forti corrono’ (and to which we will return later in the chapter).92 Verdi’s choice of a similar musical vocabulary for Hélène suggests that he thought that Odabella’s cavatina had captured this intense patriotism effectively – and that it provided a model that could be reused. He was surely also conscious that words that could be sung on the Parisian stage would face considerable editing by the Italian censors. Using music evoc­ ative of Odabella’s earlier cavatina might therefore have ensured that Italian audiences would grasp the true meaning underlying any changes to the text, and understand (or even share) the sentiments of their onstage Sicilian counterparts: ‘Quels accents! quel langage! / À sa voix, mon courage / Se ranime déjà!’ (‘What accents! What language! / At her voice, my courage / Revives again!’).93 This brief episode in Les Vêpres siciliennes – a woman in mourning forced to sing for the boorish perpretators of her grief, and turning this situation to more positive account through allusion and double meaning  – also suggested an allegory of Italy after the failed uprising, when the enforced openings of the theatres compelled Italian singers and musicians to entertain Austrian troops and officials. Hélène, of course, achieves something that we have no evidence ever happened in Italy with a Verdian performance, or indeed that of any other composer: she stirs the crowd to the point

­Wa Example 1.1  Les Vêpres siciliennes, Act i

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of engaging in physical revolt (although their attempt is quickly stifled by the arrival of Montfort). None the less, some anecdotal evidence suggests that Italian exiles in the audience at Paris might have appreciated the gesture. Tina Whitaker claimed that her parents – the Sicilian patriot Alfonso Scalia and his wife – told her of the ‘frantic enthusiasm’ of the cry ‘Viva Verdi!’ at the opera’s première in Paris, ‘when the Italian exiles and patriots made it the occasion for a great demonstration’. 94 So much might be exaggeration; however, it is useful to note that a group of young Milanese radi­ cals – including the Venosta brothers, Carlo Mancini and Saule Mantegazza – were in Paris that summer for the Exposition Universelle. Venosta visited the opera house on a number of occasions, as the guest of another patriot, Teresa Berra Kramer, 95 including one night attended by Queen Victoria and Napoléon III and his wife Eugenia.96 Given that the Venosta brothers specialised in a particular type of patriotic response in the theatres (the Teatro Carcano in Milan was their preferred venue, where they suppos­ edly confused the police by wildly applauding the very worst singers), 97 Whitaker’s claim that Les Vêpres occasioned notable ardour from this group of exiles and visitors seems credible. The critic Pierre Scudo, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes after the première, commented on the large number of Italians in the audience, for whom the occasion had ‘the importance of a political event’. Art, he wrote, was no longer a mat­ ter of taste in Italy, but rather something that engaged ‘the passions and the real inter­ ests of life’, in which each Italian success (regardless of the nature of the work) was viewed as ‘a success of nationality’.98 And intriguingly it was also during this period that the seeds of the acrostic ‘Viva V.E.R.D.I.’ were sown. Since 1854, two other Italian exiles in Paris, Daniele Manin (once the leader of the short-­lived Venetian republic) and Giorgio Pallavicino, had been engrossed in their efforts to remodel the liberal movement, this time around the figure­ head of Vittorio Emanuele II of Piedmont and Sardinia. Their ensuing Società nazionale would be highly influential in developing a middle-­class adherence to the cause.99 Its motto was outlined in a letter by Manin written from Paris on 29 May 1856: Unanimous agreement in the national formula: Independence and Unification and in its present practical application: Vittorio Emanuele, Re d’Italia should be manifested from one end of the Peninsula to the other in some of the thousand ways the fertile initiative of an agitated people knows how to invent. 100

It surely was only a matter of time before some enterprising liberal intent on discover­ ing how to advertise this formula hit upon ‘Viva V.E.R.D.I.’, which by 1858 was daubed upon the walls of Italian cities.101 Certainly, if Verdi’s operas had their detractors among the liberal activists, they also had their supporters. Their approbation was furthermore framed in the allusive

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qualities of music. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci might have heard only noisy confu­ sion in Verdi’s operas; others perceived something rather different. Indeed, ‘the sense of beauty’ Ferrucci admired in the operas of the past (she particularly approved of Rossini)102 was exactly what Carlo Tenca, in his mission statement for the new and pro­ vocatively titled L’Italia musicale on 7 July 1847, regarded as the reason that Italy had long been described as ‘the land of the dead’ (‘la terra dei morti’): ‘Too often has it been said that the arts enfeeble the will; and music especially has too often been condemned as the emasculator of souls and intellects.’103 But change had already begun, Tenca claimed, and music was now playing its part in developing a glorious, emancipated future: Along that path music walks with great steps, as the most liberal of the arts, as that which experiences least the influence of tradition, and which is most immediately subject to contact with the multitude. Music has already long repudiated the indolent warbling that solicits only the ear; it has made itself lyric and dramatic, and restored the accent of passion and sentiment to the human voice. The scholastic traditions and proverbial stability of the conservatories have not managed to contain its impetus [slancio]; by now the cry of the spirit [grido dell’anima] infuses simple cantilenas, as in the harmony of the great choral masses.104

Tenca was a personal friend of Verdi, and this description assuredly belongs to Verdi’s music. It was a view increasingly shared by others, especially with the success of Verdi’s trilogy (Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata) of the early 1850s. Marco Marcelliano Marcello (a political exile in Turin since 1848) argued in the pages of his new journal Il trovatore in 1854 that Verdi was an innovative genius equivalent to Manzoni and Hayez, the fig­ ureheads of the cultural Risorgimento. Describing the triumphal sweep of his operas throughout Italy (‘now inflaming, now moving every manner of people’), he asserted that Verdi ‘responds to the needs of the time more than any other composer … For us, Verdi is the most advanced expression of musical progress.’ 105 ‘Progress’, we should note, was a key word in Mazzinian discourse.106 What marked out Verdi’s operas especially from others of earlier stamp was ‘slancio’, or, loosely translated, an ‘accent of emotional abandon’. This quality was associated with Verdi through both performance and the music itself, and was perhaps identified first by Mazzucato in an article for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano on 18 April 1847. Mazzucato argued that beyond conventional vocal technique, the Verdian singer required ‘instinct’, because the foundation of Verdi’s music was itself an ‘erupting, fervent, incisive instinct’. Singers therefore needed not just considerable security in breath, agility and ensem­ ble work, but above all ‘an ardent, brilliant, vigorous feeling’: in short,Verdi’s operas demanded what might be termed a ‘cantante di slancio’.107 This aspect of ‘slancio’ was also considered a decade later by another critic and composer, Abramo Basevi. 108 In a series of articles for the Florentine periodical L’armonia from 1857 to 1858, Basevi offered the first sustained critical investigation of Verdi’s works, and showed little hesitation in claiming that politics and music had always had the ‘closest relationship’:

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women [W]here spontaneous movements of nations are considered, we will see them born from their ways of feeling [modo di sentire] … Now, if music is the most liberal manifestation of the way of feeling, or of the inclinations and dispositions of the soul toward this or that passion and emotion, it will be obvious to anyone that music, from such an aspect, can be regarded as the sign and representation of the political vicissitudes of a people, and also of society.109

In pursuing his idea of music as a ‘modo di sentire’, Basevi compared Verdi with Rossini. The latter’s compositions were penned mostly in the years following the Congress of Vienna, when the population was desirous of peace. In contrast, Verdi emerged ‘when the people, tired of the quiet life, were disposed to venture into the stormy sea of civil commotion’; his genius, in respect to that of Rossini, ‘is equally frank, casual, vehe­ ment like a soldier; but differs in that he is brusque, scornful, irritable, melancholy, or convulsively cheerful like a hypochondriac’.110 However, Basevi made no claims for Verdi’s music as a spur to the barricades. On the contrary, praising the final terzetto of Verdi’s most explicitly political work, La battaglia di Legnano, he wrote that the com­ poser showed himself ‘better suited to express with notes the nobility of one who dies for the fatherland … rather than the enthusiasm of those who run to liberate it’. 111 In other words, Basevi focused on how the music might have internally inhabited (rather than externally affected) political reality. How might this be manifested in musical terms? Beyond citing the rhythmic pat­ terns, orchestration and the writing for modern brass instruments in Verdi’s composi­ tions, Basevi echoed Mazzucato in making special mention of slancio as an element in Verdi’s new musical vocabulary. In his discussion of Verdi’s early style or prima maniera, Basevi argued that it rested on a notion of ‘il grandioso’ that ‘destroys, so to speak, every individuality or personality, and transforms them into universality’, because although ‘expressed by a single character, it penetrates into the soul of the spectator as if it was expressed by a people, by a caste, by a social class’. And in order to convey this sense of ‘not one but many’, passion is ‘exaggerated beyond measure’, as demonstrated prima­ rily by those phrases Verdi ‘denominates as slancio’.112 This suggestion that audiences found certain moments in Verdi’s operas ‘exaggerated’ – that is, bearing a particular meaning and significance in their own historical context – again takes us back to Tenca’s mission statement for L’Italia musicale in 1847, where he connects ‘slancio’ to accents of passion and feeling that have a broader political meaning.113 Basevi reads things in similar terms. If Donizetti ‘almost always wants to please’, the more passionate Verdi ‘strains himself most often to agitate and arouse the listener’. 114 Tenca’s description of the desired ‘new’ direction of music had been precisely thus: what was required was ‘the translation of great affects that agitate and transport our soul’. 115 It was in this qual­ ity of ‘agitation’, of music that disturbed, confounded and provoked the audience, that Verdi’s modo di sentire had the greatest impact.

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Verdi’s own description of his imperatives in operatic production many years later confirm his recognition of the effect of accent and interpretation  – those elements beyond musical notes – on the listener’s apprehension of meaning. Writing to Léon Escudier in 1872, he outlined his recipe for success: ‘I am ever more convinced that for musical works you must first of all have a musical performance: fire, spirit, muscle and enthusiasm.’116 The scores of his operas of the 1840s and 1850s bear the traces of his attempts to prescribe that kind of performance. The allusive quality of slancio, and its associated markings, con forza, con passione or grandioso are deliberately employed by Verdi’s inspiring heroines as a means of ‘performing’ their political ideals. Giovanna d’Arco urges the hesitant Carlo VII, king of France, to accept the sword she offers him in ‘Son guerriera che a gloria t’invito’ (‘I am a warrior who invites you to glory’). The opening bars of the aria are in atto profetico, but the following 24-­bar section begin­ ning ‘Sui Britanni cadaveri vola / già l’insegna del franco guerriero!’ (‘Over the British corpses flies / already the flag of the French warrior!’) are marked con slancio, as her fiery exhortation takes a more bloody turn. Rhythmically, this plays into the strong accents both on and off the beat, but slancio also required a particular vocal delivery. The baritone Leone Giraldoni (who created two Verdian roles: the title role of Simon Boccanegra and Renato in Un ballo in maschera) described the effect: ‘the slancio, properly speaking, is none other than the successive and almost instantaneous passage of the voice from forte to piano on the same note’.117 In other words, it was an acceleration of that cornerstone of bel canto technique, messa di voce. Giovanna’s combination of rhythmic and dynamic vocal impetus sweeps Carlo into a corresponding enthusiasm for war – and also for the Maid herself.118 The successful use of allusion in accent or mise-­en-­scène obviously depended on the complicity of the performer, and his or her known political allegiances. Modena’s radical sympathies are well documented. Did opera field the same kind of politically engaged performer? Francesco Guerrazzi clearly did not believe so, stating that only one singer had ever challenged authority (the castrato Luigi Marchesi to Bonaparte when he entered Milan in 1796).119 As we have seen, some singers did indeed have links with pro-­government figures. Others, however, participated actively in the liberal cause. In April 1848, Ignazio Marini and Achille De Bassini led a torchlit parade in Florence to celebrate the Cinque Giornate of the Milanese uprising;120 Ghislanzoni, as he tells us in his autobiography, fought at Rome in 1849 and was imprisoned for four months. 121 But what of the female singers? In a period when few such women wrote their memoirs, and where censorship restricted press reports of any politically nuanced behaviour either on stage or in the auditorium, information about the relationships between prima don­ nas and politics is meagre at best. For example, in 1860 Olimpia Savio Rossi recounted the events at a theatre in Padua on the night of Vittorio Emanuele II’s triumphant visit to Milan (15 February) and his attendance at a gala that evening at La Scala. Padua,

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still under Austrian rule, had been warned to avoid demonstrations. At the theatre, however, tricolour garlands of flowers were thrown to a prima donna ‘of liberal per­ suasion’, who apparently kissed them fervently. Later, she was severely rebuked by the police, and warned that a repetition of such behaviour would lead to imprisonment. The next evening, more flowers were flung on to the stage – and this time the prima donna did precisely as required, trampling on them furiously and hurling them into the wings. The flowers, after all, were in the Austrian colours of yellow and black. 122 This tale was recorded also in the correspondence of Costanza d’Azeglio, in a let­ ter written by her husband Roberto to their son on 20 February 1860.123 He named the prima donna as ‘Madame Bedini’; Savio Rossi did not identify her singer, but her editor claims it was ‘Benini’. Neither singer has so far been traced. Yet did the event even take place? D’Azeglio implies that the story came from a newspaper; Savio Rossi gives no source. In 1898 Cesare Cimegotto repeated the anecdote, but this time the protagonist was the ballerina Carolina Pochini at the Fenice in Venice in 1859. 124 Brunelli’s later his­ tory of Padua’s theatres provided yet another version, placing the event at the Teatro dei Concordi in the late 1840s, and ascribing the actions to an actress rather than a singer – but again offering no supporting evidence.125 In short, it is difficult to know if this account was merely apocryphal, or confused reporting of a real instance. More solid clues of links between female singers and political activities are provided by a concert given in Genoa at the Teatro Carlo Felice on 16 September 1848 in support of besieged Venice. The music journals had been closed down by this stage in the conflict, and news of this concert comes from one of the patriotic presses.126 Many such fund­raising events were held in theatres across the peninsula, although their aims were often disguised in states ruled or heavily influenced by the Austrians – for example, three per­ formances of Il barbiere di Siviglia (featuring Antonio Superchi, Livia Ghidini and Angelo Calderini) were staged at the Teatro Regio in Parma in December 1848, ostensibly in aid of the city’s orphans.127 Genoa, situated in liberal Piedmont, could afford to be more explicit. Not only were the political objectives of the concert advertised, so too were the names of the singers, including five women: Luigia Abbadia, Marietta Gazzaniga, Teresa De Giuli Borsi, Teresa Parodi and Carolina Sannazzaro.128 All were relatively local to Genoa. The first three also had a particular connection to Verdian roles. Luigia Abbadia sang the first Giulietta in Verdi’s only real flop to date, Un giorno di regno, at La Scala in 1840. Later, however, she sustained an active career in various provincial thea­ tres, specialising with some success in the new Verdian repertory. Teresa De Giuli was known as the second – and arguably the more convincing – Abigaille in Nabucco, when the opera was repeated at La Scala in 1842. Her interpretation was compared favourably by critics to that of the original singer, Giuseppina Strepponi (then in poor health and unable to do full justice to the score).129 A few months after the Genoa concert, De Giuli Borsi (now married) would create the role of Lida in Verdi’s La battaglia di Legnano in the new Roman Republic, suggesting that her political colours were firmly tied to the

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mast – confirmed by her later appearances in patriotic musico-­theatrical events for a theatre company at Viterbo in May 1849.130 Marietta Gazzaniga was already well known to Genoese audiences, having performed Odabella, Lucrezia in I due Foscari and the title role of Peri’s Tancreda during the 1847 season there to much acclaim. Verdi would shortly compose two roles for her: the eponymous heroine of Luisa Miller (Naples, 1849) and Lina in Stiffelio (Trieste, 1850). Gazzaniga’s political sympathies were substantiated by her marriage in 1849 to the marchese Oberto Malaspina, wounded and decorated for valour at the Porto Santa Lucia during the siege of Vicenza in 1848.131 Teresa Parodi was another notable Lucrezia in I due Foscari,132 although her reper­ toire (as befitted a pupil of Giuditta Pasta) tended to focus more on roles by Rossini and Donizetti. A year before the concert she had been singing at the Teatro Carolino in Palermo, when the theatre erupted in demonstrations at performances of Donizetti’s Gemma di Vergy in September 1847. The crowd was first aroused by the references of Tamas, the Arabian slave, to subversive sentiments such as ‘mi togliesti e core, e mente, / Patria, nome e libertà’ (‘you have taken from me heart, mind, / Fatherland, name and liberty’). Their ecstasy reached new heights when Parodi brought a tricolour on stage; she was showered with political pamphlets and flyers (demonstrating clearly that this was a prepared event).133 A biography published later in 1851 (an attempt by the impres­ ario Max Maretzek to rival the puffery that his competitor Phineas T. Barnum was then expending on Jenny Lind) emphasised Parodi’s patriotic credentials, claiming that she had been even more actively engaged in politics, carrying ‘at the risk of her liberty and life, military despatches in favor of the republican cause’, and was now an exile. 134 No other corroboration of Parodi’s supposed activities has so far emerged. It is also difficult to know whether her ‘exile’ was enforced or elected – or indeed whether the other singers in the Genoa concert paid in some way for their open participation in the liberal cause. There was a slight hiatus in De Giuli Borsi’s career (L’Italia musicale notes a four-­month absence for ‘known reasons’ – possibly implying pregnancy),135 although she was again singing at Rome in 1850. When Verdi wanted her for Gilda in Rigoletto at La Fenice in 1851, however, the theatre management dragged its feet until she was con­ tracted elsewhere and no longer available.136 Advertisements in the musical press sug­ gest that Abbadia struggled to find work in Italy in 1850, taking engagements instead in Constantinople and Portugal.137 Gazzaniga fared rather better in the same period, given Verdi’s support; although he flatly refused her for La traviata in 1853, claiming that he had written two important roles for her but had not been satisfied with her efforts on either occasion.138 (Her disastrous performance as Gilda in Rigoletto at Bergamo a few months earlier seems also to have been a factor.)139 However, Gazzaniga also sang at La Scala from 1851, initially in Gerusalemme, which suggests that she had little compunction about appearing at the Austrian-­sponsored opera house. What might these singers have brought to their roles in terms of political emphasis or nuance? Was the concert at Genoa a political awakening, a confirmation of

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existing tendencies or something in between? In November 1847 (as the political tem­ perature began to noticeably rise), Abbadia shared a stage with Antonio Ghislanzoni in Codogno in a production of Attila in which she was generously praised and the audi­­ ences were wildly enthusiastic.140 She then repeated the role at Como, where the pro­ duction was noted by The Times on 18 February (in an article on political activity in Italy) as having provoked a dispute between the police and the mayor over the audi­ ence’s requests for encores.141 L’Italia musicale had to be rather more discreet, com­ menting only that her aria ‘Allor che i forti corrono’ had been especially applauded, and was ‘magisterially ­performed’.142 In the Rivista contemporanea in 1856, Marcello recalled Carolina Sannazzaro’s participation as Fanny in Angelo Villanis’ La spia, ovvero il merciaiuolo americano (libretto by Felice Romani) at the Sutera in Turin in 1850, in which there was ‘a patriotic song, sung with much feeling by Sannazzaro’. 143 When De Giuli Borsi and Gazzaniga later sang the Italian versions of Les Vêpres siciliennes (De Giuli Borsi in Giovanna de Guzman at Rome, Gazzaniga at Turin, both in 1856), did the pages of Hélène/Giovanna’s cavatina recall to them echoes of their own perform­ ances in those tumultuous months of 1848? Were they, in fact, acting – at least for a few moments – themselves? L e salvatrici

If inspiring men to action was an accepted dimension of womanhood, so too was the act of intercession when things went awry. Rescue scenarios had been part of French and German operatic repertoire since the French revolution, best exemplified by Beethoven’s Fidelio, in which Leonore disguises herself as a man in order to gain work in the prison where her husband is incarcerated. Italian composers also set libretti on similar themes, such as Mercadante’s Doralice (1824), or Donizetti’s Otto mesi in due ore (1827), where a daughter struggles across Siberia to plead for her father’s release. During the late 1840s and 1850s, such scenarios gained particular inflection. Women who engaged directly with the authorities in order to effect the release of their loved ones from captivity or punishment figured in a number of Verdi’s operas. Abigaille’s opening military escapade is mounted to rescue her sister (Nabucco); Giselda facilitates the survival of the crusaders (I Lombardi alla prima crociata); Lucrezia attempts (but ulti­ mately fails) to ensure her husband’s removal from the austere bitterness of his father’s grasp (I due Foscari); Gulnara saves Corrado’s life (Il corsaro); Luisa (Luisa Miller) obedi­ ently refutes her love for Rodolfo in order to secure her father’s liberty; Azucena nurses her foster-­son Manrico back to health, and later goes directly to the soldiers’ camp to look for him, regardless of her own safety (Il trovatore). Of all Verdi’s depictions of female rescuers, I due Foscari (1844) stood to gain the most resonance in the years directly spanning the 1848 uprising. The source material, Byron’s The Two Foscari, anticipates Tosca with its heroine, Marina, listening aghast as

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her husband is tortured by the Venetian guards in the prison cells of the Doge’s palace. At Verdi’s request, this scene was omitted in the opera – he regarded the character of Jacopo as ‘weak and of little dramatic effect’ in Piave’s first draft. 144 In contrast, the energetic and determined Lucrezia, intent on ensuring the release of Jacopo from the political machinations of the Council of Ten (led by Jacopo’s father, the Doge) who rule Venice, emerges in more powerful guise. Jacopo’s ‘crime’ was his illicit return from exile, after having been accused of treach­ ery. In fact, he is the pawn by which Loredano, a member of the Council of Ten, hopes to oust the Doge of Venice from his ruling position. Lucrezia must therefore first deal with her father-­in-­law. In her interview with the Doge, the content of Lucrezia’s words is softened in comparison with those of Marina in the equivalent scene in Byron’s play, but the music arguably creates as strong an effect. Lucrezia arrives like a storm, her entrance accompanied by tempestuous triplets, and from the beginning she dictates the tone of the debate through her questions and her curt responses. When the Doge reminds her that the law must be respected, her answer is brutally concise: ‘Son leggi ai Dieci or sol odio e vendetta!’ (‘To the Council of Ten, law is now only hate and venge­ ance!’). The Andante in C minor that follows is marked ‘declamato con espressione’, and ends with a phrase that becomes a repeated motif: ‘barbaro genitor!’ (‘barbaric par­ ent!’). The Doge pleads for sympathy, moving into the parallel major, but Lucrezia remains deaf to his entreaties and obdurate in her demand for the freedom of her hus­ band. Even the conventional cadenza that combines their voices at the end of the sec­ tion is structured so that the voices are almost always moving in opposite directions – a deliberate contrast to the unison writing that marks the duet between Lucrezia and Jacopo (‘Ah! speranza dolce!’), demonstrating their shared intimacy. Having refused to countenance the Doge’s self-­pity, Lucrezia now moves again into the attack at the beginning of the Allegro: does the Doge really doubt the innocence of his son? Does he not realise that his son’s crime was no more than a desire to see his homeland again? And is there no pity for his actions? Eventually, she forces the Doge to the tears he had patronisingly counselled for her at the beginning of the scene as, unmanned, he confesses he simply does not have the power to save his son. This reversal of their positions is met by Lucrezia with joy, as a sign of  hope. Although in her earlier cavatina Lucrezia had confided her fears and anxieties at her husband’s situation to her surrounding women, from then on she demonstrates herself as emotionally much stronger than either her father-­in-­law or her husband. Like Leonore in Fidelio, Lucrezia finds her imprisoned husband already delirious; it is she who brings him back to sanity. And where Lucrezia imperiously demands Jacopo’s liberty, he himself pleads on his knees for his life in the ensuing scene with his father. Even her grief in the final scenes, having learnt of Jacopo’s death on his way to exile, has an edge of challenge; Basevi noted that her energetic aria contains ‘one of the usual phrases of slancio on the words “Sorga in Foscari”’.145 Mazzucato’s review of the

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La Scala production in 1845 complained that in her interview with the Doge, Lucrezia was ‘furious’: ‘she almost does not know what she says: some expressions escape from her mouth that would not badly suit an assassin’.146 This trait was repeated throughout the opera; the role of Lucrezia consists of ‘a continual curse, a continual railing’, and ‘shrieks upon shrieks’.147 Similar comments were made by other critics.148 Verdi himself would later say that I due Foscari was too dark, with ‘one tint, one excessively uniform colour from beginning to end’.149 Post-­1848, however, the opera’s doleful tone and themes of prison and exile sounded like a tolling bell for many in Italy. Staged regularly throughout the peninsula over the next decade, I due Foscari was argua­ bly the most performed opera of those years, even outstripping Verdi’s previously more popular operas such as Ernani and Nabucco.150 In an odd reversal of Mazzucato’s com­ ments, the Omnibus claimed the opera’s endurance was because it was more ‘lyrical’ than Verdi’s other works (the rest were responsible for the ‘great corruption of taste’ that was afflicting Italian opera and the quality of singing). 151 Yet I due Foscari was also peculiarly fitted to the times. At its outset in 1844, it might only have distantly recalled women such as Teresa Casati Confalonieri and her well-­publicised endeavours in the 1820s to save her husband from the death penalty, and then to engineer his supposed escape from life imprisonment in the Spielberg fortress – only to learn that he would not leave prison without his comrades.152 Later political events, however, introduced many more women to similar situations. Teresa Manin’s letters to the Austrian officials in Venice in January and February 1848 regarding the arrest of her husband Daniele (subsequent leader of the Venetian uprising) provide an insight into the wearisome legalistic workings of such appeals.153 At other times, securing freedom or a reduced sentence relied not on points of law but emotional appeal. Luigia Codemo’s account of her experiences in Treviso following the return of the Austrians in 1849 describes the conviction of one of Manin’s associates, Giacomo Gaggio: The desperation of his daughter saved him. To such contingencies we were exposed! … Young women, whose most serious task had been to learn the waltz, had to rouse themselves from the golden dream of heedless youth and find themselves before a scaffold or yet more shameful punishment. They had to throw themselves at the feet of a brute, and bathe them in tears … in those days neither the lyricism of poets nor the sentimentalism of newspapers were enough. Either a firing-­squad in a few days, or be laid across a bench in the public piazza and suffer a flogging … be they men, women, rich or poor.154

Such efforts to save relatives from punishment inevitably provoked the politicisation of a number of women who might otherwise have led rather different lives. Giuseppina Perlasca made desperate efforts in 1851 to rescue her lover Luigi Dottesio from prison in first the Comasco and then Venice; his eventual execution was the impetus for her full involvement with political action and her own later imprisonment. 155 And there were the numerous smaller and private incidents that formed family histories, such as when

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Tina Whitaker’s grandmother refused to allow soldiers past her into a room where her two sons (Alfonso Scalia and his brother Luigi) were destroying papers – the soldiers ‘had no orders to fire upon a woman’ and as she stalled them, her sons escaped through the window.156 Female daring was evident on both sides of the conflict, however. One of the most famous and publicised rescues of the period was Teresa Giraud Spaur’s whisking away of Pius IX in disguise from the Vatican at the height of danger, posing as his wife. Spaur was the wife of the Bavarian ambassador to Rome and an Austrian gov­ ernment agent, Count Karl von Spaur. Her own account of the event, published shortly afterwards, reads like an adventure novel – perhaps owing to her heritage as the niece of the dramatist Giovanni Giraud.157 While Lucrezia’s torment and determination in I due Foscari might have found cer­ tain parallels with the emotions pervading the spectators in such dark times, the role differed sharply from real experience in at least one respect. Although Lucrezia finds some comfort in her women, for the most part she acts alone. Offstage, the new circum­ stances required greater solidarity. Antonietta De Pace, already an experienced activist, established the Circolo femminile in Naples in 1849: a close band of middle-­and upper­class women whose relatives were political prisoners.158 The Circolo (soon renamed as the Comitato politico femminile) played a vital role in gaining access to the prisoners, supplying food, linen and medical aid, and also in obtaining and passing on ­important political information. Giovanni Nicotera would later claim that similar help from Odile Poggi saved his life and those of other survivors of Carlo Pisacane’s ill-­fated Sapri expedition in 1857 incarcerated in the Salerno dungeons.159 Such activity brought its own risks. The Comitato politico femminile survived until De Pace’s arrest on 24 August 1855, when she demonstrated her quickwittedness by swallowing two highly sensitive mis­ sives from Mazzini in front of the Bourbon officers. Her own ensuing period in prison was a brutal experience. For fifteen days she was not permitted to lie down or wash; and over the next eighteen months she was interrogated forty-­six times. Her subse­ quent trial attracted international coverage. She escaped the death penalty by a split vote of  3–3.160 Saving men sometimes required even more drastic measures – the sale of oneself. In Alzira (1845), Attila (1846), Luisa Miller (1849) and Il trovatore (1853), women are persuaded to promise themselves (or pretend to) to the enemy in exchange for the lives of their lovers or fathers. But this is a topic to which we will return in later chapters. L e guerriere

Where Verdi’s heroines strayed into more contentious territory, however, was in their readiness to engage in physical combat. Almost all, in the years up to 1849, availed them­ selves directly or indirectly of a weapon. Giselda (I Lombardi alla prima crociata), initially opposed to war, ultimately leads the Lombardi crusaders into battle; Abigaille (Nabucco),

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Giovanna (Giovanna d’Arco) and Odabella (Attila) explicitly adopt the full trappings of soldiery; Lady Macbeth urges her husband on to murder; Gulnara (Il corsaro) tires of male vacillation and herself applies, in Byron’s words, the ‘firmness of a female hand’ to deadly effect. Even more conventionally feminine heroines such as Elvira (Ernani) and Amalia (I masnadieri) defend their honour with knives or swords filched from their importuners. Only Alzira and Lucrezia (I due Foscari) are exempt from this list; but as we have seen, Lucrezia is in the mould of the Roman matron and makes her argument with words, while Alzira’s weapon indirectly consists of the hands of her lover, Zamoro. The opera that most celebrated female violence was Attila (Venice, 1846). Widely performed in the eighteen months leading to the 1848 uprising, it introduced its war­ rior heroine, Odabella (created by Sofia Loewe), via a powerful cavatina in which she contrasts the timidity of the German women with the determination and valour of the Italians: Allor che i forti corrono Come leoni al brando Stan le tue donne, o barbaro, Sui carri lagrimando. Ma noi, donne italiche, Cinte di ferro il seno, Sul fumido terreno Sempre vedrai pugnar. (When the strong run / like lions to the sword / Your women, O barbarian, / weep in their chariots. / But we, Italian women, / our breasts girded in steel, / you will always see fight / on the smouldering battlefield.)

Attila is so impressed – and sexually aroused? – by this show of female courage that he presents her with his own sword: a gesture of self-confidence in his rampant mascu­ linity that leads ultimately to his death. Odabella’s verbal ferocity extends to physical action. While the warlike deeds of Abigaille and Giovanna d’Arco against their enemies take place discreetly out of sight of the audience, Odabella plunges her sword into Attila centre stage at the end of the opera. How was this act viewed? It is intriguing that despite its unusual nature – a male death in this fashion at the hands of a woman does not seem to have occurred previ­ ously in extant Italian nineteenth-­century opera – the early reviews of the Venetian première avoided all mention of it. The critic of La fama was more taken (like Attila himself ) with Odabella’s seductive costume (‘in quel costume così seducente’), with its short skirt.161 The only sustained discussion of the role comes from a retrospective review by Alberto Mazzucato of the opera’s arrival at La Scala during the carnevale sea­ son of 1846–7, with Eugenia Tadolini as Odabella. Mazzucato acknowledged openly the bloodthirsty disposition of this ‘Amazon’, but accounted for the audience’s enthusiastic

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response by arguing that it was aroused by Tadolini’s vocal virtuosity rather than any appreciation of the character of Odabella. For a start, he claimed, there was consider­ able distance between Tadolini herself and Odabella. Could a singer who excelled as the eponymous heroine of Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix,162 he asked, really transform herself into ‘the bloody murderer of the leader of the Huns?’. 163 Nor (or so he believed) would Tadolini choose to adopt Odabella’s dress and actions on her own account. After all, she lacked the requisite vocal means: Did Tadolini’s voice possess the true warrior accent, warm with patriotic feeling, the accent that is due, for example, to that imperious and inspired phrase – Ma noi, noi donne italiche, etc.? No, no; neither is the nature of the singer’s albeit sonorous vocal organ suited in any way to the interpretation of that phrase, nor to others in the opera bearing the same imprint of slancio, of vigour. Observe that the adagio of the cavatina is one of Verdi’s most masculine, most characteristic inspirations: it is worth a hundred times the cabaletta that follows it. And yet, I recall how great was the effect of the cabaletta here: since the adagio drew only applause I would term as ‘polite’, while in the allegro by far the majority of the audience were clapping and shouting with true enthusiasm, profoundly convinced of a wonderful performance. The performance of this cabaletta can present itself to the listeners under a double aspect, that of the dramatic sentiment, and that of difficulty overcome. Needless to say, the audience were elated for this second reason, because some audacious passages, performed by Tadolini with that theatrical magic [polvere teatrale] that she knows so well, led her numerous admirers with good reason to general applause.

But the reasons for this applause, Mazzucato emphasised, were simply Tadolini’s skill in florid passages and her ‘seductive organ’: Was there ever in that voice the expression of a blood-­oath? Did those accents sound a single instant of revenge? Never: there were only those trills, rendered in truth with a certain aplomb, with dazzling ostentation, but which did not at all indicate Odabella’s curses. The applauding listener thought only about Tadolini – Odabella was forgotten; one saw and thought only about the performer.164

Tadolini’s art thus obliterates Odabella’s sword, the threat is defused, and all that remains are the harmless ovations accorded to the prima donna. Mazzucato’s purpose in this review is unclear, clouded further by his own connec­ tions as the son-­in-­law of Milan’s loathed police chief, Luigi Bolza. Was he attempting to diminish the political inflections of (and possible spectatorial response to) the role of Odabella by dismissing the audience’s applause as essentially innocuous? Or was his emphasis on the bloody nature of Odabella’s urgings and action a coded way of drawing even greater attention to her deeds? Or was he simply providing an accurate account of Tadolini’s performance? Certainly, an illustration of Tadolini in the Cosmorama pittorico as Odabella in 1847 depicts a softly feminine stance, head slightly inclined, with some tendrils of curls escaping from her plumed helmet (see Figure 1.1];165 while the following

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­ Figure 1.1  Eugenia Tadolini as Odabella, Il cosmorama pittorico, 13 March 1847 (CIRPeM, Parma)

year Verdi argued that Tadolini’s beauty of voice and feature made her unsuitable for the combative role of Lady Macbeth.166 In the increasingly glacial atmosphere of the Austrian-­sponsored La Scala, it is prob­ able that that more loyalist audience did indeed respond to Tadolini the prima donna rather than Odabella the guerriera. In smaller theatres with other singers during the same period, a different kind of stirring seems apparent. Abbadia sang the same role in Codogno in November 1847, just a few weeks before Tadolini’s appearance at La Scala: her interpretation provoked this sonnet entitled ‘Odabella nell’Attila’, with its heavy hinting in the penultimate strofe: Vate, il tuo ardito immaginar fecondo Alle Italiche vergini novella Aggiunse gloria a farle chiare al mondo Nell’ ideal magnanima Odabella.

­Wa Fremè la Storia, che già disse al fondo Dei guai caduta quell’ Età rubella, E disdegnosa dell’ ingrato pondo Si diede all’ arte dei tuoi carmi ancella. Da chi l’alto portento, onde le genti Del secol nostro in sua ragion severo Del core ai moti sommetton le menti? Da Te, o LUIGIA, che il sovrano impero Sull’ alme tempri coi divin concenti Del dittator del gemino emisfero.167

(Bard, your passionate, fertile imagination / adds new glory to Italian maidens / by revealing them to the world / In the ideal magnanimous Odabella. / History, which had already spoken at length / of the woes befallen that stolen age, pulsated, / And uncar­ ing of the thankless burden / gave herself as handmaiden to the art of your poems. / To whom [is owed] the lofty miracle, whereby the people / of our severely rational ­century / Subdue their minds to the movements of the heart? / To you, O Luigia, because your sovereign empire / over souls tempers with divine harmonies [that] / of the dictator of the double hemisphere.)

Signed only ‘Un ammiratore’, one likely candidate for the sonnet’s authorship is Antonio Ghislanzoni, then playing Ezio alongside Abbadia, and who published another ode to the soprano (written at Codogno on 30 November 1847) in Strenna teatrale.168 Why did the censors allow works such as Giovanna d’Arco and Attila at all? One reason was that these aggressive warrior heroines of earlier historical periods appeared out­ landish in ‘modern’ society, with its corsetted, crinolined women genteelly tending the domestic hearth. Both Giovanna and Odabella were considered stronger personalities than the heroes they partnered – for example, while Basevi thought Giovanna’s hero­ ism ‘uncertain’ owing to her distance from historical actuality, he described Carlo as ‘an almost idiotic King, without a decided character’ and Giovanna’s father as ‘unnatural’. 169 As Mary Ann Smart describes, the daring of the female characters was a trait that fitted well with their symbolisation of nationhood.170 These allegorical heroines were none the less presumed to be remote from real women. As we have seen, Mazzucato thought that Tadolini, so adept in the representation of alluring femininity, would never grasp Odabella’s sword for herself. Yet when hostilities finally began, some women did precisely that. In Palermo, women participated in the mass demonstrations of 12 January 1848; when a troop was deployed to disperse the crowd of 30,000, it was forced to withdraw by the efforts of the women, who from the windows and roofs of the houses poured down a rain of stones, vases, boiling water, furniture and whatever came to hand.171 At Milan two months later, many women of all classes were seen ‘armed with pistol or musket’ at the windows of the streets under Austrian attack, firing at the soldiers.172 A popular illustration of the notorious ‘Dieci Giornate’ at Brescia in March 1849 depicts one woman waving a flag

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while another grimly aims her rifle at the oncoming soldiers. 173 There are numerous descriptions of women joining the fight on the barricades in various cities, supplying shells to artillery or loading weapons,174 such as Luisa Battistotti Sassi (Milan, 1848) or, a decade later, Marianna de Crescenzo, known as La Sangiovannara (Naples, 1860). Both women took leadership roles in rousing their communities to action and direct­ ing their efforts. Battistotti Sassi, according to one report dated 25 June 1848, donned male garb and ‘placed herself at the head of many inhabitants around the bridge of the Pioppette; she was always the first at the assault, killed many, pursued without rest, and only laid down her arms in order to bring flour into the city’.175 Angiola Martelli led fifteen women into Milan on horseback;176 another woman killed three Croatian soldiers. Almost a hundred women were wounded or died during the Cinque Giornate in Milan.177 A year later, as the bombs began falling on Rome in 1849, Margaret Fuller watched a woman deal smartly with the threat: this ‘noble descendent of Roman antiq­ uity showed herself worthy of that heritage, by seizing a bomb and putting out its fuse’. Her example was followed by one soldier, and then by others: soon the bombs were being extinguished as they fell, while the women collected the enemy shells and took them to their own artillery.178 A few months earlier in Messina, Rosa Donato had set fire to the ammunition wagon of a battery that was bombarding the hospital; in the explosion a number of enemy soldiers died; Donato was subsequently bayonetted and her body tossed over the city walls.179 And what of Tadolini herself ? Michael Burke Honan, the Times correspondent who reported on the uprising, later published a fuller account of his Italian experiences. He claimed that a key figure in his gathering of information about the barricades in Milan was a prima donna he dubbed ‘Angela Borgononi’: a singer of international renown (‘the sweetest of syrens, and the admired of the Scala, the Pergola, and San Carlo’) with whom he had long been acquainted from her appearances abroad in Paris and Vienna.180 His description of this singer in terms of age and appearance in his book curiously coincides with that of the only singer he referred to in his newspaper col­ umns: Eugenia Tadolini. A further clue might be found in the singer’s pseudonym: ‘Borgononi’ is an anglicised version of ‘Borgognoni’, meaning ‘Flemish’; the last role Tadolini created at La Scala before the outbreak of hostilities was that of Giovanna di Fiandre (Boniforti), or ‘Giovanna of Flanders’. When Burke-­Honan visited Borgononi in her apartment that lay in the thick of the fighting near the Duomo, he asked her why the piano had been positioned so close to the window, next to two heavy baskets filled with stones. She replied that ‘the piano was to be launched on the heads of the first body of Croats that passed, and the paving-­stones were to be flung after them, as they retired’.181 If this singer was indeed Tadolini, she perhaps was rather more akin to Odabella than Mazzucato had supposed. Banti describes such violent activities as spontaneous attempts to protect women’s own lives and that of their families and friends.182 For some women, however, physical

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engagement in the conflict was a more calculated act. One of the female spectators who attended the first performances of Attila (with Sofia Loewe as Odabella) in Venice in January 1846 was Teresa Mosconi Papadopoli, a close friend of Clara Maffei and well acquainted with Verdi himself  – in fact, he paid her a visit during the rehearsals for the opera in late 1845.183 Although Mosconi Papadopoli was already part of the liberal movement via her salon, Odabella’s antics must have seemed a world away from the daily routine of this rich merchant’s wife. But just over two years later, Papadopoli was one of three signatories (along with Elisabetta Michiel Giustinian and Antonietta Benvenuti) of an appeal that the newly formed militia in Venice should add a women’s battalion. As reported in the Milanese journal, Corriere delle donne, in 15 April 1848, their statement bore some echoes of Odabella’s cavatina: While all Italians take up arms in order to free our generous nation from the foreign yoke, we Italian women do not know how to resist the need to also serve such a holy cause ourselves. With our fathers, with our husbands, with our brothers, we want to share the dangers; we want to share with them the honour of saving this common fatherland. The assistance of our arms is certainly weak, but if it is true that the greatest defence is courage, we have faith that we can be useful to the fatherland in these dark times. Citizen commander! Add to your civic Guard a battalion of women. Assigned by you when danger urges either to care for wounded soldiers, or to make shells, or to carry arms, the Venetian women will not disdain any office that has for its goal the independence of all Italy.184

Journalists – particularly cartoonists – entertained themselves with this new ­concept of female soldiers;185 and yet the women were serious and committed. After much debate, the newly formed battalion was ultimately reserved for non-­combatants but, as Filippini states, this did not mean that the women did not fight alongside the men – only that their efforts remained undocumented by officialdom. 186 That veil of obscurity was already ensured by the ruling that the battalion was to carry out its duties (accord­ ing to the Corriere delle dame on 20 April 1848) by ‘avoiding any appearance in public’.187 The fate of Colomba Antonietti Porzi (1826–49), who cut her hair, donned a soldier’s uniform and fought alongside her husband in Rome, was more openly recorded. ‘She fought as a man, better to say as a hero’, wrote Margaret Fuller in a letter. 188 Il monitor romano of 14 June 1849 noted her death outside the walls of San Pancrazio on the previ­ ous day. Helping to repair a breach under incessant fire from a French cannon, she was struck by a shell: ‘She joined her hands, turned her eyes to heaven, and died crying out: “viva l’Italia”, new Gildippe of our sublime epic!’189 These noble words were almost cer­ tainly journalistic flourish. Her husband later said simply that she died in his arms.190 Other women  – including most famously Anita Garibaldi, Rosa Strozzi, Giulia Modena, Rosalie Montmasson and Tonina Marinelli, to name but a few – followed their husbands, lovers and brothers to war; yet others went on their own account. 191 What role did cultural images of armoured heroines in operas and literature play in licensing

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or even encouraging such acts? Perhaps little. In their poems, books, diaries and let­ ters, women turned mainly to historical or biblical figures for inspiration; the acts of ‘real’ women, albeit altered or mythologised, seemed to have had more concrete value as role models than purely fictional characters. Both Judith (who seduced and then decapitated the Assyrian general Holofernes, thus freeing the Israelites) and Joan of Arc were commonly used reference points.192 Women also turned to one another for inspiration, seeking echoes of previous figures among their own acquaintances, per­ haps as a way of rooting their current ‘aberrant’ action more within an acceptable historical framework.193 Cristina di Belgioioso’s action of hiring a ship in Naples and gathering together a group of 200 volunteers to join the conflict in Milan in spring 1848 had obvious resonances,194 even if her attempts to rouse a crowd by impassioned oratory appears to have been only partially successful.195 In 1856, the fourteen-­year-­old Grazia Mancini hungered to emulate the events of past heroines: At certain times I exalt myself to the point of believing myself changed into Joan of Arc or Caterina Segurana or Cinzica de’ Sismondi … This morning, for example, I awoke, my mind full of strange ideas of sacrifice and abnegation for the fatherland … Who knows, if I have the opportunity, what I will do?196

Another young woman, Concettina Ramondetta Fileti, had followed just such impulses in Sicily seven years earlier. She had already inscribed her patriotism in her verses, including a hymn to Garibaldi. But on the night of 16 March 1849, she stole out of her aristocratic family’s palazzo in Palermo to join the resistance to the Bourbon troops’ effort to retake Sicily: While I was going to the battlefield, I thought to myself: now I do not say only words, now also I serve the fatherland: finally my inexpressible affection for it will no longer be hidden in my heart like the love of the girl of Schakspeare [sic] … […] the most difficult obstacle, which was that of escaping from the house, I have already overcome; and as for the hoe [‘se tratto la zappa’], by making use of it for my fatherland, it seems to me more honourable than the pen with which Dante wrote his divine poem … One of my friends presented me to the Fifth Battalion of the National Guard, to whom I recited a passage from my hymn. My dear, I truly believed myself to be Joan of Arc. But was I not armed? And is a heart that beats for the fatherland and for liberty not worth very much more than a cannon? 197

Her own experience seems to have led her to seek out other historical examples of war­ rior women. A year later, she recalled in separate poems Stamura’s courageous defence of Ancona in 1174 (‘Stamura’), and the more recent behaviour of the Souliotes women in Albanian Greece at the battle of Kiafa in 1792 (‘Le donne suliotte ai suliotti’). In this last work, she described the women’s response when their besieged menfolk, on the point of defeat, decide to kill them rather than allow them to fall into the hands of Ali Pasha’s troops. Moscho Tzavellas (the wife of the Souliotes leader, Lambros Tzavellas) demanded that instead the women be armed, and then led 400 into battle and eventual

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victory: ‘We, with sword in hand, / Faces lit by warrior-­like fury, / We seemed not women but heroes.’198 That reference to a transmutation of gender perhaps owed something to Fileti’s own words some months earlier: ‘Io non sono io’ (‘I am not myself ’), she had suppos­ edly said to a neighbour who saw her on her clandestine way to join the soldiers. Not all women could lay aside their feminised selves in such a fashion – nor did all wish to do so. Luigia Codemo might have thrilled to Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco in 1847 in Venice, but, she recalled, many more in the audience were more concerned with the quality of Anna Lagrange’s performance in the title role rather than the ‘patriotic subject matter’ of the opera.199 Male response to female valour was similarly mixed. Garibaldi, presumably mindful of the soldierly prowess of his wife Anita, threatened in 1848 that if men had doubts about engaging in the conflict, he would gather together the Italian women, ‘who will be enough to chase away the Austrians!’;200 his much later novelistic account of the Mille (1873) foregrounded the resolute military engagement of his heroines, Lina and Marzia.201 The opposing loyalists, however, had their own warrior women. During the defence of Gaeta in 1861, Giuseppe Buttà was inspired by the young Bourbon queen, Maria Sofia, who in masculine dress ‘appeared in the midst of the fire of our cannons and the explosions of the enemy bombs like the spirit of Good, like the consoling Angel’.202 Men on the receiving end of female violence in either camp, however, were disconcerted, even embittered. The painter Ippolito Caffi, captured by Croatian soldiers at Ialmicco in northern Friuli in April 1848, described the crowds who attacked him on his forced march to Gorizia: crowds that included women from all classes, who spat at him and beat him: ‘Eternal infamy to the Goriziani, and especially to the women, who instead of being the angels of peace were the furies of hell.’ 203 Caffi ’s sense of griev­ ance was clearly heightened by this distortion of his expectations of perceived gender roles. In the mentality of the period, men were beautified – even beatified – in combat; women were demonised or, at best, ‘stained’. Giuseppe Cesare Abba, in campaign with Garibaldi’s Mille in 1860, was shocked as much by the behaviour of the women on his own side of the conflict as he was by those in the opposite camp. On one occasion he came across a group of women dancing and singing around a pile of dead soldiers; on another, the pitiful figure of a Bourbon soldier who had tried to escape: We ran toward the shouting of women – To the mouse! To the mouse! – They were shrieking, – he’s a mouse! – We did not arrive in time. Ten or twelve furies had already cut the poor soldier [birro] into pieces … He had finally risked leaving dressed as a woman; but they had recognised him, cut him, reduced him in a manner one cannot describe. 204

‘Le furie’ was Abba’s usual nomenclature for these women on the field of battle. Even his first sight of the nurse and journalist Jessie White Mario (known for her auburn hair) was disturbing: ‘[A] face of fire, hair of fire, gestures of fire – is she an

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angel, is she a Fury, what is she?’205 That indeed was a question that pervaded both art and society. Whether by design or coincidence, both real and fictional worlds often exhibited parallel attitudes in their perceptions of the dual identity (or so it seemed) of violent female protagonists. When Colomba Antonietti died at Rome, she was buried with a dress over her soldier’s uniform – an attempt to reclothe her aberrant self with the trappings of femininity.206 In the Verdian panorama too, the mantle of womanhood was commonly drawn over deviant behaviour. Guilt is the predominant outcome for those heroines who use force. When Abigaille’s thrust for power is finally defeated, she poisons herself. Her broken entrance in the last number of the opera offers a strik­ ing contrast to her earlier dynamism. The plaintive lament of a cor anglais prefigures her arrival; no longer even able to stand alone, she is supported by two soldiers. The anguish of her confession of guilt and pleas for forgiveness is underlined by a mournful rocking motif played by a solo cello. But as she asks who might relieve her of the heavy weight of her crime, the flute’s rising arpeggios indicate that the answer lies in heaven – and Abigaille gratefully embraces the Jehovah of the people she had sought to destroy. Abigaille’s manner of death differed noticeably from that in the opera’s origin­al source (Anicet-­Bourgeois and Cornu’s Nabuchodonosor performed at the Parisian Théâtre Ambigu-­Comique in 1836, and later adapted for Antonio Cortesi’s ballet at La Scala in 1838). There, she is killed on stage by the king himself.207 Given that her death scene in the opera was supposedly the first number Verdi composed, he pre­ sumably merely followed the version in Solera’s libretto handed to him by Bartolomeo Merelli.208 Allowing Abigaille to determine her own punishment as well as an oppor­ tunity for repentance and conversion gave a Catholic nuance to this tale of ancient Babylon. Surprisingly, her act of contrition found less favour with the Italian audience; the number was often cut after the first performances, with the opera ending with the report of Abigaille’s impending death and the chorus ‘Immenso Jeovah’. And yet the scene is noteworthy for Verdi’s imaginative setting, conjuring up effect with sparse but aptly chosen motifs and instrumentation. Lady Macbeth’s somnambulistic trance of obsessive guilt also drew an unusual music from the composer. Verdi and his librettists had accentuated the extremes of the character, particularly in their revised version in 1865. Lady Macbeth is more force­ ful in urging her husband to murder than in the play (in the later version, note the added duet ‘Ora di morte e di vendetta’ at the end of Act iii, with the couple at last in accord with their cries for blood). Yet while in Act i Lady Macbeth had belittled her husband’s propensity to externalise visually the internal sources of his terror, finally she too is prey to the scratchings of corpses on the edges of her reason. Although the sleep-­walking scene is relatively brief in Shakespeare’s play, its musical treatment extends its length and impact – indeed, Verdi considered it one of the two most import­ ant numbers of the opera, and its originality has been much noted.209 Just as Abigaille’s

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guilt was underpinned by rhythmic repetition, Lady Macbeth’s act of attempting to cleanse her bloodied hands finds musical form in the haunting demisemiquaver and semiquaver pattern in the strings, while the discordant sighs of the cor anglais both act as a reminder of the owl that presaged Duncano’s death and gesture towards her own impending demise. Reviews sometimes demonstrate how this scene countered or alleviated the more ‘unwomanly’ aspects of Lady Macbeth. That this might have been Verdi’s conscious intention is suggested by his comments on an opera written a year later, Il corsaro. The role of Gulnara was composed for Marianna Barbieri-­Nini, who had already created both Lucrezia Contarini in I due Foscari and Lady Macbeth. Gulnara combined reso­ nances of both characters. In her duet with the tyrant Seid, she tries to save a man’s life; in her duet with Corrado, she tries to engineer a man’s death. When Corrado refuses to kill Seid as he sleeps, she does the deed herself.210 Verdi declined – or was unable – to oversee the first production in Trieste, but his letter to Barbieri-­Nini written from Paris on 6 October 1848 provides an invaluable glimpse of his stage direction in action. Some of his detailed instructions usefully con­ cern tempi and musical effect, but it is his comments about the dramatic interpretation of the role that offer most food for thought. First, the duet with Seid: In the duet with the bass, the primo tempo should be sung sostenuto and declaimed; think more about the words than the notes: the cabaletta in cut time, but not too fast. The bass has the first phrase, and he will perform it in full voice; you will sing a mezza voce throughout the section (remember your mezza voces in Macbeth). You know better than I that anger is not always expressed by shouting, but sometimes with a stifled voice – and so it is here. So, sing the entire final movement sotto voce, except for the last four notes; wait until the bass has almost left the stage before exploding with a shout, which should be accompanied by a terrifying gesture, almost as a premonition of the crime you are about to commit.211

Verdi’s insistence on ‘a terrifying gesture’ implies that Gulnara is already envisaging the act of murder, long before her discussion with Corrado. It thus introduces an element of calculation into her later scene with the corsair not immediately apparent from the libretto alone. Here, too, Verdi provided guidance. Describing the duet as ‘certainly the least worst piece in the opera’, he advised Barbieri-­Nini to walk slowly and sing sotto voce in the recitative, while in the primo tempo she should ‘try to express the words with all the power of your soul’. Only in the latter part of the adagio, beginning from ‘ah! fuggiamo!’, should she release her voice with passion, and then leave the stage swiftly.212 The early part of the duet, where Verdi urged Barbieri-­Nini to ‘express the words with all your soul’, contains another example of slancio: ‘E può la schiava un palpito sentir per l’oppressor? / nel core sol dei liberi sa germogliar l’amore’ (‘And can the slave feel a palpitation for the oppressor? / only in the heart of the free does love know how

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to germinate’). Initially marked grandioso, a steady crescendo begins on ‘core’, rising to con forza on the a˝ of ‘germogliar’. This is the only extended musical phrase in this section of the duet, and Verdi’s markings are significant. Gulnara’s ostensible reasons for the murder are that Seid has impugned her honour by accusing her of infidelity and she is now therefore herself under threat of death – but the musical emphasis on this reference to slavery gives her actions a potent undercurrent of political revolt. If this seems a little stretched, it is worth noting that at the Teatro Carcano in 1852, the cen­ sors insisted on removing both the words ‘slave’ and ‘oppressor’. 213 Yet Corrado, though sympathetic to her plight, still cannot be moved beyond his ideas of honour in combat. Gulnara loses patience: ‘Terror d’un pugnale provi tu, masnadiero, corsale? Un imbelle a vibrarlo t’insegni!’ (‘Are you afraid of a knife, brigand, pirate? A woman will teach you how to use it!’), she spits at him, with the words ‘masnadiero, corsale’ marked ‘ironico’. She then exits, to the stage direction: ‘flees rapidly through the gate brandishing the knife with supreme exaltation’. Male response to female violence is at the crux of Byron’s poem. His Gulnare, equally determined if less eager in her use of the knife than Verdi’s heroine, provokes a horror in the corsair when she returns after her murderous assault, unmarked save for one careless spot of blood on her brow: He had seen battle – he had brooded lone O’er promised pangs to sentenced guilt foreshown; He had been tempted, chasten’d, and the chain Yet on his arms might ever there remain: But ne’er from strife, captivity, remorse – From all his feelings in their inmost force – So thrill’d, so shudder’d every creeping vein As now they froze before that purple stain. That spot of blood, that light but guilty streak, Had banish’d all the beauty from her cheek! Blood he had view’d, could view unmoved – but then It flow’d in combat, or was shed by men!

Verdi’s mise-­en-­scène for Gulnara is an operatic response to the problem Byron sets. Although striking as a poetic conceit, Conrad’s interior repulsion – especially when directed at a single, barely perceivable mark – is less easy to address in music or in a gas-­lit theatre with a large auditorium. Gulnara must therefore herself ‘perform’ the bloodstain. Verdi writes to Barbieri-­Nini: Then, when you make your exit do so hastily, and when you return pale and unsettled, take each step virtually as the music indicates, until the moment when you can no longer stand on your feet. You should utter the following words lying on the ground: ‘già … l’opra è finita, per destarsi egli stava’. Say them without following the tempo, without paying

­Wa attention to the notes, but with a stifled voice that is scarcely audible. The cabaletta should be delivered slowly and sung with great passion. The dramatic situation of this entire duet is, as you see, stupendous.214

The stage directions at this point state: ‘Gulnara returns, looking behind her with hor­ rified gaze … she staggers as she walks, and falls.’ As we can see, Verdi directed Barbieri to walk precisely in time with the music (something he repeats for Otello’s murderous entrance into Desdemona’s bed-­chamber much later). Two grace notes introduce a pat­ tern of two staccato quavers, followed by a heavily accented semiquaver leading into another semiquaver and then ending on a staccato quaver, suggesting a dragging, hal­ tering step; death sounds in the ominous anapaestic rhythm of the final three notes. 215 The sudden intrusion (twice) of the tremolo bar marked fortissimo is surely meant to represent Gulnara’s ‘horrified look behind her’; on the third and final instance she collapses to the ground. Her next words (‘già … l’opra è finita, per destarsi egli stava … e morì!’) (‘so… the deed is done, he was about to wake…and died!’) are delivered from her prone position ‘con voce soffocato’. Corrado’s revulsion is encapsulated in the single phrase: ‘Tu! … Gulnara, omicida!’ (‘You! … Gulnara, murderess!’). At the end of Verdi’s letter comes a crucial instruction: ‘In the final trio, do not forget you have killed a man, and let your remorse be evident throughout in all your words, even when you are comforting Medora.’216 Verdi’s insistence on Gulnara’s exhibition of remorse is a means of rehabilitating her within the frame of femininity, as in the poem, when Conrad is slowly reconciled to his rescuer: ‘Though worse than frenzy could that bosom fill, / Extreme in love or hate, in good or ill, / The worst of crimes had left her woman still!’ But Gulnara’s efforts to rescue Corrado have been largely in vain: she must witness first Medora’s death, and then Corrado’s own suicidal leap into the ocean. Ultimately, her murderous act has saved only herself. Left alone on stage, she falls (‘cade’). Not all acts of female violence in Verdi’s operas are portrayed as provoking guilt. As we shall see in a later chapter, Giovanna d’Arco – in defiance of Catholic condemnation of her as a heretic – goes to heaven, deeply satisfied with her battle prowess. Verdi’s Attila also differed from the source material of Werner’s drama, Attila, König der Hunnen (1808). There, the captured Burgundian princess Hildegunde is an odd composite of Judith and Joan of Arc. Having saved Attila from a fatal poisoning solely in order to kill him herself (in revenge for the deaths of her lover, Walther, and her father), Hildegunde marries him. That night, she murders his fourteen-­year-­old son, Irnak, and then plunges Walther’s axe deep in Attila’s chest. She is immediately condemned to burn at the stake, but falls on her sword instead, expressing in her last words her undying love for Walther. Then, ‘Das Scheusal stirbt!’ (‘The monster dies!’), exult Attila’s soldiers, and the throne passes to Odoacer.217 Madame de Staël, whom Verdi regarded as an indispensable guide when composing his opera, described the character of Hildegunde:

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women Example 1.2  Il corsaro, Act III, scene ii 316

321

326 Gulnara

332 Gulnara

Corrado

­

­Wa This woman is depicted as the goddess of war; her blond hair and scarlet tunic seem to unite in her the image of weakness and fury. She is a mysterious character, who at first has a great hold on the imagination; but when this mystery continually increases, when the poet allows us to suppose that she is seized by an infernal power, and that not only, at the end of the piece, does she slaughter Attila during their wedding night, but stabs his fourteen-­year-­old son by his side, there is no longer any trait of woman in that creature, and the aversion that she inspires prevails over the dread that she can cause. Nevertheless, the whole role of Hildegonde [sic] is an original invention; and, in an epic poem, where allegorical characters are allowed, this fury beneath her sweet features, attached to the footsteps of a tyrant, like perfidious flattery, will doubtless produce a great effect. 218

Modern scholars find Odabella’s split personality (in both musical and dramatic terms) unconvincing,219 but it is plain that Verdi’s delineation of her character reflected de Staël’s appreciation of Hildegunde’s blend of ‘weakness’ and ‘fury’  – a contrast of binary opposites much in line with Romanticism’s fascination with chiaroscuro. The adjustments made to the character for the opera softened some of Hildegunde’s more extreme traits. Odabella’s lover, Foresto, is discovered alive, giving her the oppor­ tunity to express more affectionate sentiments as well as explain her acceptance of Attila’s attentions as inspired by the strategy of the biblical Judith. Her propensity for violence is also somewhat curtailed. An episode in the play, when Hildegunde help­ fully offers to slaughter some refugees – mainly women, old people and children – on Attila’s behalf (he declines) was cut;220 so too was the murder of Irnak. At one point, it seems that there was even a suggestion that Odabella should not kill Attila. On 12 April 1845, Verdi (having parted company with Solera, who was disturbed by the composer’s ideas to inject more individuality in the final scenes) wrote to Piave about the end of the opera: ‘It seems to me that Odabella cannot be grande if not (in one way or other) by killing Attila.’221 In the opera’s final version, Odabella flees her wedding celebra­ tions deep into the forest, and finds Foresto. When Attila arrives in pursuit, she flings the crown from her head and, as the Roman soldiers arrive, plunges her sword into his body with the cry ‘Padre! ah padre, il sagrifico a te!’ (‘Father! ah father, I sacrifice him to you!). Odabella embraces Foresto, Attila gasps one last phrase of sorrowing disbelief at her act of treachery, and the curtain falls. In this opera then, there is little sign of guilt; violence leads rather to liberation – ­crucially, not just for Odabella but the Roman community represented by Foresto, Ezio and the soldiers. How far-­fetched was this notion that some women might find release in violence? Concettina Ramondetta Fileti described her experience in the defence of Palermo as a day of ecstasy: ‘it is the most memorable day of my life, rather, only today can I count on having lived.’222 We have no way of knowing if her response was an iso­ lated occurrence or not – or if indeed it was even genuine.

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Verdi’s armoured heroines of the 1840s mostly remained, with greater or lesser success, on Italy’s stages throughout the following decade; some, such as Giovanna d’Arco, even found a perceptible reflourishing in the years directly before the next uprising in 1859. 223 But Verdi himself largely turned away from the guerriera. In his most explicitly politi­ cal opera, La battaglia di Legnano, written for the new Roman Republic in January 1849, he dispensed with the symbolic warrior heroine, and limited the female roles to more conventional depictions as supporters of the cause. Open war is man’s business. Lida’s main responsibility (sung by Teresa De Giuli Borsi) is to produce sons for the cause. Three years later, Verdi rejected a libretto by Scribe entitled Wlaska, ou Les Amazones de Bohème (or in a following draft, Wlaska ou La Guerre des Femmes) on the grounds that ‘The female soldiers strike me as odd.’224 Around the same time, Antonio Somma’s libretto for Verdi’s projected Il re Lear presented Delia (Cordelia) ‘in abito all’amazzone’ (‘Amazonian costume’) when she brings her army to rescue her father at the begin­ ning of Act iii.225 In a letter dated 16 December 1853, Verdi firmly dismissed the idea: ‘It seems to me also that the character of Delia, so sweet, so angelic, suffers by making her a warrior-­woman and dressed as an Amazon. Her figure thus acquires an outline that is a little too dry and hard, and in this drama we have too many strong and fiery characters.’226 When he returned two years later to the plans for the opera (which had lain fallow as he concentrated on fulfilling other commissions), Verdi wrote again: ‘In the third act, as I told you previously, you should not dress Delia as a warrior, but leave her as a woman and angel as she is throughout the drama.’ 227 His comments, of course, may simply reflect a desire to remain true to the play – where Cordelia is meant to be a foil to her more heinous sisters. Arguably, only Hélène in Les Vêpres siciliennes recalls the earlier heroines of the 1840s. Even here, the attempted assassination that marked the end of the former version of the libretto for Donizetti (Le Duc d’Albe) was excised; instead, the curtain falls on Hélène’s attempts to shield her lover (the son of the hated French enemy, Montfort) from the Sicilian rebels as the violence finally erupts. The completion of the first phase of unification in 1860 allowed Verdi to portray a somewhat different attitude to conflict in La forza del destino, written for St Petersburg in 1862. Preziosilla is no warrior-­woman, but a vivandière whose jaunty evocation of war (‘Viva la guerra!’) provides the first opportunity for Verdi’s characters to sing ‘Morte ai tedeschi!’ (‘Death to the Germans!’) with impunity. Five years later, there were plans for Eboli to appear in warrior form in Don Carlos: in the original draft, her fiery resolve to save Don Carlos (‘Je le sauverai!’) at the end of ‘Ô don fatal’ sees her return later armed and at the head of a mob. The scene was drastically reduced just before the première – and Eboli’s character loses some of its complexity and vigour as a result.228 What provoked Verdi’s move away from the guerriera? Perhaps nothing more than the reason why he often changed direction: a desire to do something different. Besides, other composers had begun producing similar heroines  – the title-­roles of Levi’s

­Wa

Giuditta, Peri’s Tancreda and Villanis’ La vergine di Kent are the most obvious examples, although none acquired the popularity of Verdi’s protagonists.229 Other factors may have also played their part. After seeing Macbeth in 1847, the liberal poet Giuseppe Giusti had urged Verdi to pursue a different path: You know that the chord of sorrow finds greatest resonance in our souls, but sorrow assumes a different character according to the period, or to the character and position of this or that nation. The kind of sorrow which now fills our Italian souls is the sorrow of a people who feel in need of a better fate; it is the sorrow of one who repents and waits, and wishes for regeneration. My dear Verdi, accompany with your noble harmony this elevated, solemn sorrow; nourish it, fortify it, direct it towards its goal. Music is a language understood by all, and there is no great emotion which music cannot produce. The fantastic is something which can give proof of genius, but the truth proves both genius and soul.230

This last sentence seems to have struck Verdi with particular force; he later inscribed it in Clara Maffei’s album.231 The repression that followed the restoration of Austrian con­ trol in the north of the peninsula and Ferdinando II’s iron grip in the south in 1849 gave yet deeper meaning to Giusti’s words. In November that year, Verdi wrote to Escudier: ‘Italy is nothing more than a large and beautiful prison! … A paradise for the eyes: an inferno for the heart!’232 What, after all, had been achieved? The fate of two young women opera singers, emboldened to the least of actions, demonstrates something of the atmosphere a year after the Austrians’ return to Milan. On 18 August 1849, Ernesta Galli (of Cremona) and Maria Conti (of Florence) aged twenty and nineteen respectively, saw a crowd gather­ ing outside the residence of a glove-­maker (described in Mazzini’s L’Italia del popolo as ‘an Austrian prostitute’),233 Annetta Olivari, who had hung out a flag to celebrate the birthday of the Austrian emperor. Galli and Conti were still in their own apart­ ment, watching from the windows, and laughed as the crowd jeered and daubed signs on Olivari’s house. They were then arrested, along with Galli’s sixteen-­year-­old sister Selene and eighteen others. The whole group, comprising artisans, students and gen­ try, were swiftly convicted of acts including ‘scandalous anti-­political demonstrations’, insults to the emperor and shouting revolutionary slogans and were sentenced to a public flogging. After a medical inspection, Selene Galli as well as two boys aged six­ teen and seventeen were released. But her sister Ernesta was sentenced to forty strokes (the most severe punishment permitted by law was fifty) and Maria Conti, to thirty. The sentence was carried out at the Castello Sforzesco on 23 August. The only concession made to the women was that their punishment took place within the castle, rather than (as for the men) in the piazza outside. This is how the event was later described by Aurelio Bianchi-­Giovini: One receives this barbarous punishment on a naked back, passing between two rows of soldiers, each furnished with a hazel-­rod, with which he forcibly strikes the kidneys of the

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women sufferer. With open insult to their modesty, those young women were forced to divest their blouses, and submit to the punishment with all the rigour of military code, in the presence of various officers who brutally sniggered at their weeping. That cruel operation having finished, the women, oppressed by pain and shame, asked permission to be taken home in a carriage at their own expense; but they were ordered to dress and go away.234

Moreover, the city of Milan was forced to pay for the costs of the punishment (even down to the vinegar used on the wounds to avoid gangrene), as well as compensate Olivari. News of the incident was published first in the official newspaper, the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano, on 23 August. Six weeks later, Alexandre Dumas père picked it up in his journal, Le Mois, printing the entire extract followed by the comment: ‘Have you read? Have you understood? ernesta galli, singer, born at Cremona, aged 20 years, forty strokes!’,235 and the story surfaced in a number of other Italian and foreign sources across the following years. Far worse things happened to women during the wars of independence, but this act encapsulates the change that occurred across the peninsula once the various conflicts had been – temporarily – stilled. Was the flogging of Galli and Conti a convenient opportunity for Austrian troops to take indirect vengeance on all those other women, those real Odabellas who had defended the barricades? Or was it simply to demonstrate that from now on women would suffer fates similar to – and sometimes worse than – those of their male comrades? Battistotti Sassi was con­ demned to death by the Austrians, who otherwise gave amnesties to men with more violent records; she was forced to flee to her home town of Stradella and shortly after­ wards emigrated to America. In the Veneto region, too, the police – for the first time, according to Filippini  – adopted a much harder approach towards women activists, pursuing them relentlessly and imposing harsh penalties even for participation in pub­ lic demonstrations.236 Of Galli and Conti themselves, we know very little.237 They may have been chorus singers working at one of the minor theatres in Milan. Whatever ambitions they might have held for a professional stage career were perhaps beaten out of them – certainly, both disappeared from view after this event. As for Verdi, in the bitter aftermath of the aborted uprising he did as Giusti pre­ scribed. From Luisa Miller onward, and particularly in his famous trilogy of the 1850s, his emphasis for his female characters was more towards the victims of oppression than the activists who opposed it.

­2

­Prayer

Warlike characteristics were demonstrated by some Giselda, I Lombardi alla prima of Verdi’s heroines; prayers, as either extended arias crociata, Act i or short injunctions, were voiced by almost all. The figure of a supplicating woman was a ­common trope throughout much nineteenth-­century European opera. Prayers, pleas and invocations might be addressed to humans (living or dead), pagan deities (‘Casta diva’, Norma sings to the moon; ‘Numi, pietà’, pleads Aida) or Christian divinities (‘Vous me donnerez du courage, Vous me protégerez, Seigneur!’ is Micaëla’s plea in Carmen, as she shivers with fear on the mountainside). Prayers were by no means exclusively reserved for women – both men and groups of people pray, sometimes kneeling or prostrate 1 – but in the gender context of the period, they raise certain questions about the depiction of womanhood.2 Such moments of gestural and musical communion might be read as simple signifiers of performative femininity, offsetting a heroine’s transgressions. In the light of broader historical discourses and material realities, however, these scenes often contain more elaborate and uncertain codings of female behaviour than is at first apparent. Opera itself was negotiating a new relationship with religion. As Italian opera moved away from the mythological and classical themes prevalent in previous centuries, aspects of Christianity became more prominent in operatic narratives. The Catholic Church, as religious, social and political institution, was a powerful force and the primary arbiter of morality. Opera’s engagement with religion was part manifestation of the analogies between the rituals of church and theatre, and part reflection of determining factors in external society and their impact on individual behaviour. It was also part of a broader gentrification process of the stage in the emerging bourgeois social framework. By combining religiosity with the secular and sometimes even the profane, theatre claimed (not always successfully) a new moral value. Prayers and hymns had specific musical relevance in early nineteenth-­century opera, both in terms of logic and structure. As pre-­existing musical perorations in ‘real’ life, they provided a kind of comprehensible, rational use of music in the otherwise deranged environment of a sung world; as self-­contained enclosures, they could be inserted comfortably into the structure of number opera.3 Yet the influx of prayers into nineteenth-­century opera owed much to the rising emphasis on affect and passion.4 One notable example was Romeo’s ‘Ombra adorata’ in the third act of Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo (1796), addressed to the seemingly dead Giulietta.5 Composed by ‘Te, Vergin santa, invoco!’

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the male soprano Girolamo Crescentini (who created the role in Milan) as an insert into Zingarelli’s work, it became one of the most celebrated arias of the period. Crescentini’s performance in Paris in 1809 moved not just the entire audience to tears but also Napoléon Bonaparte to award him the ‘Couronne de fer’.6 Similar emotional effect was sought by Rossini with concerted prayers, such as ‘O nume benefico’ for three voices in La gazza ladra (1817),7 and then on a even larger scale with ‘Dal tuo stellato soglio’ for Mosè and chorus in the revised version of Mosè in Egitto, for Naples in 1819. Much acclaimed, the latter prayer nonetheless also had its critics. On seeing Mosè in Egitto some years later in Weimar, Goethe described the opera as ‘absurd’, arguing (in line with the New Testament’s dictum on the required privacy of prayer) that there ‘ought to be no praying on the stage’.8 Goethe’s stance is surprising, given that his tragedy Faust (1808) had depicted Gretchen’s prayer to the Mater Dolorosa as well as her attendance at the cathedral.9 In Catholic Italy, the Church authorities shared Goethe’s unease about operatic presentation of worship. Considerable difficulties with censorship arose from attempts to portray religious practice on stage, particularly in Rome and the papal states prior to 1860.10 Donizetti’s religious opera Poliuto, written for Naples in 1838, was denied performance there until 30 November 1848 in the more liberal conditions following the recent uprising (a reworked version as Les Martyrs had been performed earlier in Paris in 1840). The Church’s primary concern in such cases was the depiction of religious material. Censorship forbade the use of religious symbols, liturgical chants or hymns, or direct reference to the Church. An example of what this entailed is provided by the impresario Vincenzo Jacovacci in November 1851, reporting to Cammarano on changes required for the forthcoming production of Verdi’s Il trovatore in Rome: Instead of the ‘stake’ [rogo], which might be attributed to the punishment of the Holy Inquisition during that epoch, the simple term ‘death penalty’ will be used. Leonora must not allow the audience to see her take poison, because suicides are not permitted … The music of the offstage singing can be as you wish, accompanied by a large fisarmonica, which has the same sound as the organ, as is used in Stiffelio, but there must be no sacred and immoral words in any part.11

And when Leonora is about to enter the cloister and take the veil, she had to do so ‘without naming Church, Convent, and vows’.12 Censorship thus determined even the kinds of musical instruments permitted, as well as text and mise-­en-­scène. If religion obtruded on to the stage, so too did theatre into the church. The use of popular music within churches, as a means of drawing in the congregation, was a convention dating back to medieval times.13 In the nineteenth century, operatic music was often used as settings for liturgy – works including Lucia di Lammermoor and Guglielmo Tell and, remarkably, even passages such as ‘Parigi, o cara’ (La traviata) – provoking a series of only partially effective blacklists from Church authorities. 14 More lasting

­Praye

reform arrived in 1903, with Pius X’s motu proprio on sacred music, Inter sollicitudines. Specifically designed to counter the ‘fatal influence exercised on sacred art by profane and theatrical art’, it criticised the use of ‘old theatrical works’ as a basis for psalms, insisting that henceforth Gregorian chant be the ‘supreme model for sacred music’. 15 Until then, however, this practice demonstrates the manner in which opera pervaded, in one form or another, many areas of Italian society. The representation of religious themes and practices on the operatic stage took place against a wider backcloth of issues surrounding Catholicism. These, as we will see, were troubled years for the Church. The portrayal and reception of religious aspects on the operatic stage were even more complex with regard to women – made so by a deep irony, as noted by various commentators, between the theatre’s celebration of the female voice and the Church’s condemnation of the same.16 Ecclesiastical distrust stemmed from St Paul’s injunction: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak.’17 If speaking in church was frowned upon, singing (with its liturgical implications) was even more discouraged. In ad 394, Jerome had described female singers as the ‘devil’s choir’18 – a reflection of the ban first imposed on women singers by the early Church in ad 318 (leading to the introduction of the castrati in late fifteenth-­century church choirs) and which remained in existence throughout the nineteenth century.19 The only exceptions to this rule were nuns, who were permitted to sing in convents, providing they could not be seen by the public congregation. 20 In some cases, such concealment merely piqued greater curiousity in the public. Mendelssohn, visiting Rome in 1830, developed the habit of going to hear the ‘Ave Maria’ sung by two French nuns at the church of Trinità de’ Monti (adjacent to the convent then belonging to the order of the Religieuses du Sacré-­Coeur de Jésus). Mendelssohn was captivated by the combination of the invisible nuns’ ‘tender and touching’ voices (so much more melodious than the ‘loud, harsh, monotonous tone’ of the priests) and the play of light from the setting sun on the congregation.21 Intrigued by writing for singers he would never see and who would never see him, he even composed a version of the prayer himself for them. The theatrical potential of such disembodied female voices in the religious context was something that Verdi would draw on in several operas that employ offstage nuns’ choruses, including Act i of I Lombardi alla prima crociata, the finale of Act ii in Il trovatore, the priestesses in Act i of Aida or even the lone heavenly voice that accompanies the hideous burning of the heretics in Don Carlos. Prohibition against female singers was not always imposed rigorously across Italy. Preparations for a requiem mass in 1869 at San Petronio in Bologna (initiated by Verdi in celebration of Rossini’s death a year previously and comprising the work of a number of composers) were accompanied by public assurances that women singers would be allowed by local Church authorities, in contrast to papal interdicts. In an article for the Monitore on 4 October, Franco Mistrali welcomed the news that Bologna’s municipal government had apparently conquered ‘clerical intolerance’: ‘will we have the sweet

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voices of women raising hymns of love and faith, prayer and faith under the majestic vaults of the magnificent church?’22 (In fact, arrangements for the mass foundered in acrimony, and Mistrali’s hope was never realised.) Ten years later, Arrivabene wrote to Verdi: ‘In Florence they have finally allowed women to sing in Church. It was not permitted, but tolerated. If they sing both litanies and other prayers with the people, why cannot they do so in the choir?’23 Toleration, however, accorded no rights. Article 13 of Pius X’s Motu proprio of 1903 specifically reinforced the ban: ‘[S]ingers in church have a real liturgical office, and … therefore women, being incapable of exercising such office, cannot be admitted to form part of the choir.’24 This ruling crucially left women outside the spiritual frame of music-­making, and deprived of the economic opportunities afforded to male church singers in the Catholic community (and to singers of both genders in Protestant communities elsewhere). An article in La scena illustrata on 15 April 1885 made exactly this point. It described the efforts of an impoverished upper-­class woman who, endowed with a beautiful voice and needing to support herself and her family, had decided to become a singer. But she lacked the proper training for exhibiting herself on the stage: The society woman has been educated ‘inside’ private life. The artist must be educated ‘on the outside’! … Ah! If at least one might be able to sing in church! But the Church does not want to know anything of women. The Church pushes them towards the theatre! 25

The sight and sound of an ordinary woman (rather than a nun) raising her voice in prayer was therefore an experience to be found only in the secular world of theatres and concert halls – not within the walls of churches. Opera thus provided an important space for the expression of female spirituality. V erdi and religion

What were Verdi’s own views on religion?26 Much-­cited letters from Giuseppina Strepponi (Verdi’s wife) to both Cesare Vigna and Clara Maffei written in 1872 appear to confirm his status as a non-­believer. To the former, Strepponi claimed: He is a pearl of an honest man, he understands and feels every delicate and elevated sentiment, and yet this brigand allows himself to be, I will not say ‘atheist’, but certainly not much of a believer, and with an obstinacy and a calm that makes you want to hit him. I drive myself frantic speaking to him of the marvels of the heavens, the earth, the sea, etc. Wasted breath! He laughs in my face and freezes me in the middle of my flights of oratory, at my wholly divine enthusiasm, by telling me: You are mad, and unfortunately he says it in good faith.27

It is hard not to regard this letter as an accurate depiction on Verdi’s beliefs: there seems little reason for Strepponi to lie, and the detail – his calm obstinacy, his laughter at her

­Praye

protestations – adds further credence. Moreover, it is supported by another letter a few months later to Clara Maffei, in which Strepponi writes that while there were some virtuous souls who believe in God, others (meaning Verdi) were ‘happy not believing in anything and rigorously observing alone every precept of severe morality’. 28 Verdi’s own complaints in the 1860s about the rhythm of life in Busseto (‘Confessions, communion, days of abstinence, mass, novenas, etc.’);29 his claim in 1866 as war began that he, rather than the Austrians, was likely to be the principal target of Italian priests; 30 and the requests he made in his last will and testament in 1900 for the minimum of religious observances at his funeral (‘I do not want my death to be accompanied by the usual forms of expression’)31 bear out Strepponi’s summary.32 Despite his anti-­clerical tendencies, Verdi was not entirely anti-­religious. His letter to Clara Maffei on the death of Pius IX in 1878 offered a pragmatic, compassionate view of the pope’s legacy to Italian history: ‘Poor Papa. Certainly I am not on the side of the pope of the Sillabo,33 but I am for the pope of the amnesty, and of the Benedite, Gran Dio, l’Italia.’ Even the pope’s failure to support the independence movement had had its eventual benefits, Verdi argued. After all, what would have been the consequences if Pius IX had indeed managed to dislodge the Austrians in 1848?: ‘A government of priests! probably anarchy and division!’ 34 And yet while he disliked theocracy, there are reports that in his latter years Verdi began participating more regularly in religious services. The tenor Francesco Tamagno claimed to have discovered in the 1890s that Verdi attended mass daily and had told him: ‘after so many griefs and upsets, the hours I pass close to God are the sweetest ones to me. I was a little astray, but Peppina led me to Him again.’ 35 In short, Verdi’s relationship with religion was ambiguous, or at the least his opinions were subject to change and reappraisal across the years. Whatever the composer’s personal beliefs, religion in Verdi’s operas fulfilled simi­lar functions to those it performed in daily Italian life: it could be the source of comfort and succour in moments of personal crisis; or the manifestation of an ideal virtue to which earthly society could only aspire, representing at times even a sense of the modern and progressive; or an oppressive, conservative force, wreaking havoc on individual life through rigid, blind power and traditions; or simply an unremarkable but constant part of the social fabric and daily life. A glimpse of Verdi’s approach to these interventions of devotion occurs in the preparations for an opera he never composed: Il re Lear. His librettist, Antonio Somma, wrote to the composer on 4 December 1853, describing his addition of a prayer when Cordelia (now Delia) learns of her father’s rescue: I have moreover put in Delia’s mouth in Act iii that prayer ‘È tuo dono o buon Signore’ [‘It is your gift, O good Lord’] without any preceding recitative: because it seems to me that Delia, having heard of her father’s rescue, must of course thank God as soon as

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women emotion allows her to open her mouth – and I was thinking about a prayer without even instrumental accompaniment, reserving it for the secondo tempo.36

Verdi, however, was unconvinced. A little more than a year later (his plans having been interrupted by work on other operas), he replied to Somma on this point: In re-­reading this scene, the prayer È tuo dono has little effect [riesce fredda], like all prayers in general. If you want Delia to thank Heaven after Kent’s speech, add two or three lines of recitative (because on the contrary it would be good if you completed the recitative), then find two heartfelt, passionate lines in order to make a beautiful Largo cantabile. 37

Verdi’s comment suggests he found such moments of devotion anti-­dramatic, unless ameliorated by passion. Certainly, prayers provided limited opportunity in terms of mise-­en-­scène; reviews of the period make no mention of histrionic innovations in ways of worship.38 One kneeling figure was perhaps much like any other. And rather than propel the dramatic action forward, as Verdi invariably sought to do, prayers were often moments of pause and interior reflection. The weight of creating an effect therefore lay primarily on the music, and on the positioning of the prayer at the most appropriate point of the dramatic narrative – usually where it provided a contrast with more hectic scenes. Yet prayers, as we shall see, could also offer vital moments of private revelation and heightened emotion; facilitate the audience’s comprehension of a character, establishing important links between onstage and offstage realities; and, in their visual and aural images of women at worship, shape notions of the religious feminine. I L ombardi alla prima crociata

What is intriguing  – and even somewhat radical in the 1840s  – about Verdi’s religious inserts for women is their framing of a female divine, through the figure of both the Virgin Mary and her closest earthly symbol, the deceased mother. The first instance occurred in I Lombardi alla prima crociata (La Scala, 1843), drawn by Temistocle Solera from Tommaso Grossi’s 1826 epic poem of the same name about the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. Religion is at the centre of both works, but the opera libretto differs noticeably from the poem in its treatment of its young heroine, Giselda. Giselda’s first extended singing emerges towards the end of Act i, in the company of her mother, Viclinda. The two women, concerned that the penitence of Pagano (Giselda’s uncle, who years previously had attacked his brother Arvino on his marriage to Viclinda) may be false, make a vow to walk with naked feet to Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem if Arvino is protected from harm. Kneeling, they pray to the Madonna in words that closely resemble the Latin prayer:

­Praye Latin prayer

I Lombardi alla prima crociata

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, Benedicta tu in mulieribus, Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, mater Dei, Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.

Salve, Maria! di grazia il petto T’empie il Signor che in te si posa; Tuo divin frutto sia benedetto, O fra le donne l’avventurosa! Vergine santa, madre di Dio, Per noi tapini leva preghiera, Ond’Ei ci guardi con occhio pio Quando ne aggravi l’ultima sera.

This prayer belongs wholly to Solera’s libretto. There is only a brief mention of the Virgin Mary in Grossi’s poem, at a very different moment in the narrative (following the death of Giselda’s lover, Saladino);39 although we do learn that before leaving Milan Giselda had spent several anxious hours closeted with Viclinda. The insertion of an ‘Ave Maria’ was a bold move, in part because it constituted an explicit reference to actual religious practices. In Italy, operatic prayers were most commonly addressed either to God, or in more generalised terms to heaven. French opera had set other precedents, as in the chorus of young Catholic girls who intone a prayer to the Virgin on their way to church in Act iii of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836), or the duet sung by Teresa and Ascanio against the sound of the monks’ litany in Act iii of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (1838). Verdi and Solera’s decision to do likewise and use a ‘real’ prayer in I Lombardi beginning unequivocally with the words ‘Ave Maria’ occasioned concern in Milan’s archbishop, the Austrian cardinal Karl Gaisruck, who complained to Baron Carlo Torresani di Lanzelfeld, the city’s director of police. After some heated discussion between Torresani, Merelli (the impresario of La Scala), Solera and later Verdi himself, it was finally agreed that the opening words of the prayer would be adjusted to ‘Salve, Maria’.40 Public disregard for this kind of evasive wording was immediately obvious: a review in the Corriere delle dame of a private concert shortly after the première records that its hostess sang the ‘Ave Maria’ from I Lombardi, accompanied by the composer himself.41 As Parker reveals, the composition of ‘Salve, Maria’ was influenced by the vocal and dramatic qualities of Erminia Frezzolini, the opera’s first Giselda.42 Important too was the musical depiction of a religious stance, and the careful restraint of overtly earthly qualities. Giselda’s prayer, for the most part canto sillabico, is rigorously simple; it is the only number she sings in the opera without vocal ornamentation, with the exception of a leisurely turn in the last word of ‘l’ultima sera’. While the rests in the first six lines of the prayer have a functional quality, providing the singer with sufficient time to breathe in order to ensure the smoothest legato, they also convey a marked sense of formality and ritual. Only in the final phrases does the vocal line acquire more continuity, giving

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greater emphasis to its acknowledgement of impending death. The stripping down of vocal excess to pure, extended tone produces the calm of transcendent piety, but this is offset by piquant harmonies in the final phrases. Critical responses to ‘Salve, Maria’ were mixed. Vitali, writing in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, praised the instrumentation, with its pleasing arpeggios of clarinets and flutes, but was less convinced by the melody in the Andante mosso, regarding it as overly sophisticated (‘the thread is too intricate and diffuse’) and claiming that ‘more than one listener at the first hearing did not understand it’. Moreover, Vitali contended, the notes toward the end of the aria did not ‘perfectly depict the character of the words’. 43 Those adventurous harmonies diverged from more conventional ideas of religious music. Basevi warned in 1859 that ‘too distant and frequent’ modulations ‘agitate the soul’ instead of producing suitable spiritual calm. Some variance could be permitted, he argued, when music was designed for the theatre rather than the church, provided that it retained ‘a certain solemnity’ in order to be convincing.44 Unlike Vitali, the critic of the liberal periodical Rivista europea (almost certainly Benedetto Bermani) was more than willing to be persuaded by ‘Salve, Maria’. Openly justifying the devotional aspect of the cavatina, he claimed that its ‘profoundly religious character’ was the product of ‘a musical thought so sweet, so tranquil, so rich in affecting modulations, that distances it from any idea of profane song’.45 He was similarly enthusiastic in his praise for the nuns’ chorus in the same act. Such emphasis on the religious authenticity of the music suggests a deliberate refutation of the complaints of Archbishop Gaisruck and other detractors. In the more open atmosphere of post-­Unification, explicit claims were made for the political relevance of ‘Salve, Maria’. In 1868 Francesco Flores D’Arcais described Verdi’s compositional innovations as having embodied broader ideas of progress in the 1840s. New times had required a new music, one that aimed beyond merely delighting the audience: music that spoke not just ‘to the senses, but to the mind and heart’. 46 In responding to this need, Verdi was ‘truly the maestro of the Italian revolution’. 47 D’Arcais saw I Lombardi as ‘a new step on the road of reform’: the ‘Ave Maria’, along with the terzetto of Oronte’s conversion and other numbers were ‘protests against the old traditions of Italian theatre. The liberty of the music almost seems to announce the forthcoming political freedom.’48 So much might be merely a case of ‘reading back’; nonetheless, it is worth noting that Verdi’s setting of the prayer aroused curiosity among at least some of the liberal community when it first appeared. In 1844, d’Azeglio (son-­in-­law of Alessandro Manzoni and a close friend of Tommaso Grossi) wrote from Turin and asked his wife to send him a copy of the ‘Avemaria’, as he wanted to show it to his brother Roberto and sister-­in-­law Costanza.49 The issue over ‘Salve, Maria’ was merely a skirmish in the long-­running struggle to overturn religious censorship. In 1845, the frequent Marian references in Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco (in which Frezzolini sang the title-­role) were almost all removed by the

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Milanese censors, probably on the grounds of their overt martial and revolutionary context.50 Two years later, Verdi substantially revised I Lombardi for Paris, in a new version entitled Jérusalem. There, the cavatina began unequivocally with the Latin phrase ‘Ave Maria’, even though the remainder of the piece is written in French and differed considerably from the text of I Lombardi: Ave Maria, ma voix te prie. Ô vierge des douleurs, taris mes pleurs. Fais sur nous descendre ton regard si tendre ­… Vois mes terreurs Ô vierge Marie. Fais que la haine, Ô vierge sainte, Tombe et s’efface avec ma crainte, Qu’elle s’abjure en cette enceinte Et d’être heureuse enfin viendra le jour. Vierge Marie, ma voix te prie. Jette sur nous un regard d’amour! (Ave Maria, hear my voice in prayer. / O Virgin of sorrows, dry my tears. / Let your tender gaze fall on us. / See my terrors, O Virgin Mary. / Dispel hatred, O sainted Virgin, / [Let it] be effaced with my fears, / [So] that it is abjured within these walls / and that at last the day of happiness will arrive. / Virgin Mary, hear my voice in prayer. / Cast on us a look of  love!)

When Jérusalem was performed in Italian (as Gerusalemme) at La Scala in 1851, however, the censors insisted on rewriting the prayer as a more generalised plea for the safety of the heroine’s lover Gaston on the forthcoming crusade: Cielo pietoso, le preci intendi, Accogli i voti d’un cor che geme. Deh! tu proteggi, salva e difendi Il solo oggetto della mia speme; Scorgilo e vigila che fatto segno Egli non venga dell’ altrui sdegno: Tu lo proteggi, tu lo difendi … Alle mie preci, o ciel, t’arrendi …51 (Merciful heaven, hear our prayers, / Receive the entreaties of a heart that suffers. / Oh! protect, save and defend / The only object of my hope; / Guide him and watch over him so that / he does not come to harm: / Protect him, defend him … / Surrender to my prayers, O heaven …)

Verdi could only write in irritation to Ricordi: ‘Why cut out the Avemaria?’52 The answer probably lay in the altered context of the prayer. Jérusalem opens with a scene between Hélène and Gaston, where we learn that their two families have long been in conflict – indeed, Hélène’s father, the Count of Toulouse, was responsible for the death of Gaston’s father. The count has already refused to allow Hélène to marry Gaston.

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Nonetheless, on the eve of his departure for the Crusade, he is prepared to put aside the old grievances, and begin afresh. Not so Gaston, who harbours a fierce resentment, despite Hélène’s urging for peace. The lovers part. Hélene then prays to the Virgin, asking her to extend ‘un regard d’amour’ on herself and Gaston. Miraculously, on the count’s entry in the next scene he does indeed make an act of reconciliation towards Gaston, and then unexpectedly bestows his daughter’s hand in marriage. Perhaps the problem for the censors with this prayer was the way in which it was posed and answered: obtaining the Virgin’s blessing for a union that lacked paternal approval might have been considered perilously akin to aligning Mary with a dispute against authority, particularly in the repressive atmosphere that followed the 1848/9 uprisings. 53 The inclusion of ‘Salve, Maria’ raises further questions with regard to the narrative of I Lombardi. Some modern scholars perceive Giselda’s peroration to the Madonna as emblematic of her own character: Francesco Izzo contends that Giselda ‘epitomizes the feminine humility, meekness and resignation often encountered in nineteenth-­century Italian culture’.54 Yet are these qualities really borne out within the opera? Verdi’s intri­ guing harmonies in the ‘Salve, Maria’ foreshadow the revelation that Giselda’s ties to her faith or indeed her family are by no means as conventional as she (or we) might think. Nor was embracing Marian beliefs in 1843 quite the same thing as later in the period. The Church’s long-­held misogynistic attitudes can be illustrated by the upbringing of the patriot priest Ugo Bassi during the early decades of the century. His religious teachers depicted God as an ‘avenger and punisher’ and woman ‘as Satan’s accomplice’. 55 Bassi’s more progressive ideas stemmed from his mother, who taught him to see God as love, and to honour woman ‘as the inspiration of pity and virtue, because woman was the mother of Christ’.56 Bassi’s later writings emphasised the importance of the Virgin Mary as the embodiment of ‘Amore’, giving birth not just to Jesus but to the entire Christian community.57 Re-­visioning the Madonna was thus part of a growing, more enlightened rebuttal of the notion of woman as the devil’s auxiliary, in contradiction to older teachings by the Church. In I Lombardi, the image of daughter and mother kneeling before the Virgin Mary explicitly demonstrates an ascending chain to the divine – and one that is juxtaposed with more patriarchal lines in the opera. The figure of the mother, in either her earthly guise or as the mother of God, exerts a telling influence throughout the narrative. Viclinda is Giselda’s lode-­star in all her travails; but the heroine’s Muslim lover, Oronte, is also guided by his mother, Sofia. A secret Christian convert, Sofia encourages Oronte in his affections for Giselda and in his own desire to convert. Giselda, taunted in the harem in Act ii, similarly turns to her mother (now deceased) for comfort and guidance on her illicit love for Oronte in the first movement of her rondò-finale, ‘O madre, dal ciel soccori al mio pianto’.58 Scored more conventionally than ‘Salve, Maria’, the slow movement displayed Frezzolini’s fioriture to the full. While Giselda’s supplication to her symbolic mother, the Virgin Mary, was respectfully devoid of ornament, her prayer

­Praye

to Viclinda permits spirals of notes that in the words ‘d’ascendere a te’ (rising up to d♭′′′) seem like aural steps to heaven itself. Dramatically, this cantabile sostenuto reveals Giselda’s desperation at her plight. It also performs a function evident in other Verdian moments of contemplation in his early operas: through prayer, the heroine is mysteriously able to create action and movement – wishing or imagining a different reality brings this possibility into being. And yet the contrast between the help desired and sought by Giselda and what in fact arrives could not be greater. In the tempo di mezzo and subsequent cabaletta, Giselda’s ­concepts of a quasi-­feminised spirituality are sharply contrasted with the robust beliefs of the crusaders. Her reverie is first interrupted by shouts and noise of battle; Sofia arrives to inform her that both her husband and Oronte have been killed by the crociati; then Arvino, Giselda’s father, appears to rescue his daughter. At the sight of his bloody sword, already used against her lover, Giselda recoils. ‘As if struck by madness’ (according to the stage directions), she launches into an impassioned tirade against the ‘turpe insania’ (‘repugnant insanity’) of this ‘vendetta orrenda’ (‘horrendous vendetta’) and its waste of human life. More dangerously, she frames her argument on religious grounds, speaking directly for God: L’empio olocausto d’umana salma il Dio degl’uomini sempre sdegnò. (God always disdains man’s impious sacrifice of the human body.)

This passage, with its vigorous, staccato triplets and syncopated rhythm, is marked ‘con slancio’, and thus given a particular impetus and accent. Arvino accuses Giselda of sacrilege, but she responds in the musical language Verdi often employed for visions and prophesy: a long, sustained semitone climb, delivered ‘sotto voce ed in tuono profetico’, where she foresees a Europe riven with slaughter.59 Returning both musically and thematically to the subject of God’s will, she makes her claims even more energetically explicit: ‘No, no, Dio nol vuole / Ei sol di pace / ei scese a parlar’ (‘No, no, this is not the will of God, / He descended to speak / only of peace’) (original emphasis). The words ‘Dio nol vuole’ were a direct contradiction of the cry of the medieval crusaders, ‘Dio lo vuole’ (‘God wills it’) – a phrase that had been appropriated by Risorgimento activists – which threaded through Grossi’s poem and which had been voiced earlier in the opera by the Eremita (a penitent Pagano in disguise).60 Arvino, enraged by his daughter’s ‘obscene’ words, raises his dagger and threatens to kill her; the Eremita, Sofia and the chorus intervene to protect her; the curtain falls. The rationalisation of Giselda’s outburst as simply a deranged display of grief in both the stage directions and the words of the entire cast and chorus on stage (with the exception of Arvino) might seem to undercut the effectiveness of her challenging

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stance. Yet the resolute, driving music does not present her in similar fashion. Although its rhythm of a polacca had also been used by Verdi for Nabucco’s mad scene in his previous opera (Nabucco, Act ii), Giselda’s music betrays none of the disjointed form of that other aria – nor, unlike Nabucco, does she herself ever acknowledge a sense of weakness or disorientation. The orchestral support (complete with gran cassa) at the beginning of each phrase of ‘No, no, Dio non vuole’ acts as a spur of paradoxically martial intensity to her animated rebellion against her father and his comrades. If the ‘Salve, Maria’ was indeed meant to convey the sense of a meek, obedient daughter, the cabaletta presents a very different image: indeed, none of Verdi’s heroines argues at quite such length and with such fervour against their familial or religious patriarchs. No such scene takes place in Grossi’s poem. There, Giselda is rescued from the horror of the slaughtering crusaders by the Eremita: in her later delirium, her affection for Saladino (Oronte in the opera) emerges, and it is this revelation that provokes her father’s rage. Solera’s refashioning of this event into Giselda’s open opposition to Arvino’s blood-­hunt was a means of crystallising Grossi’s more diffuse anti-­clerical commentary on the crusades in the poem: as Raffaele Sirri makes plain, Grossi both valorises and criticises the campaign.61 Such sentiments belonged to the 1820s revision of medieval history, but they also chimed well with a growing movement in geographical Italy – neoguelfismo, led by the priest Vincenzo Gioberti since the late 1830s.62 Verdi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata coincided with the publication of Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli italiani in 1843, a highly influential volume that sold an extraordinary 800,000 copies over the next five years. Gioberti and his supporters sought an essentially non-­violent solution to the question of Austrian occupancy, led by the pope and framed by the supposedly religious and moral superiority of Italian culture. 63 Encompassing political conservatives as well as extending to more radical pacifists, Gioberti’s alignment of religion and nationalism gathered substantial followers until the 1848 uprising; then, in the wake of Pius IX’s recanting, it abruptly collapsed. In the context created by the emergence of neoguelfismo, therefore, Giselda’s noisy pacifism might have found (at least in the years prior to 1848) an echoing response in some minds, even if dismissed as misguided by others.64 Arvino certainly would have belonged to the latter camp. In despair over his daughter’s behaviour, he wishes she had never been born; but God has not deserted her. Unable to bear the closeness of her father’s tent (for which we might read the claustrophobia of her own community), Giselda slips away in search of ‘free air’ (‘aura libera’): she unexpectedly finds instead her beloved Oronte alive. Giselda’s rejection of her own community now becomes absolute. She proposes (in surprisingly assertive fashion) to elope with Oronte: ‘Tu sei patria, ciel e vita per me!’ (‘You are fatherland, heaven and life for me!’). Their happiness is brief; two scenes later, Oronte lies mortally wounded. Giselda turns furiously on God, with the resumption of the ominous polacca rhythm of the orchestral accompaniment echoing her earlier anger against

­Praye

her father. Why, she wants to know, is the last remaining support in her life being taken away? The answer lies in the knowledge revealed later by Oronte himself in a vision from heaven, where he tells her how to lead the Lombardi, dying of thirst in the desert, to the waters of Silloe. Giselda, the instrument of Oronte’s conversion, now becomes the instrument of her people’s delivery. She arouses the crociati, and she and Arvino steer them to victory. We should note that Giselda’s anti-­war stance seems to have slipped somewhat: together with the ensemble, she sings ‘Guerra!’ as they drive forward to the last battle. Giselda’s agency in the opera far outweighs that in the source material. Not only is there no grand scene of confrontation with Arvino in the poem, she also dies of thirst in the desert at the end of Canto xii, following the death of her lover; Jerusalem is liberated without her. Some of Giselda’s acquired power was undoubtedly due to nineteenth-­century opera’s reliance on the prima donna (in this case, Frezzolini) as the central figure of the narrative. Yet while Frezzolini’s performance aroused general praise, the character of Giselda raised the eyebrows of some critics. Vitali, ever a conservative, poured scorn on Giselda’s supposed fickleness: she goes to make war on the Turks but then falls in love with one of them; she castigates her father for coming to rescue her; having dressed as a ‘penitent’ on believing that Oronte is dead, she promptly abandons that stance when she realises he is alive and elopes with him; and then on his actual death, she desires only to be united with him. By the end of the opera, Vitali wrote sarcastically, ‘The conquering of Jerusalem matters so much to her that she wants nothing more than to go to Paradise.’65 Given that Vitali’s polemic in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano was designed to demonstrate that the opera lacked role models, it seems that even the ‘Salve, Maria’ did little to position Giselda as a suitable heroine. Other critics had doubts about the religious emphasis of I Lombardi. A review in Figaro noted drily the flaw of ‘an abundance of prayers’: Nabucco had contained seven such numbers, I Lombardi had twelve.66 Nonetheless, religion continued to form an important dimension in Verdi’s output. A number of similarities are apparent between I Lombardi and an opera he wrote two years later, Giovanna d’Arco, not least the fact that both heroines were written for the same singer – Erminia Frezzolini. It is a truism that Verdi never repeated himself; however, he did return to certain themes and situations and rework them differently. Both Giselda and Giovanna d’Arco serve a mission of redemption on behalf of their communities; both characters are introduced to the audience through their communion with the Virgin Mary; both are regarded as ‘mad’; both are rejected by their fathers; both are serenaded by celestial choirs (in Giovanna d’Arco, we should note the use of only contralto voices, with their suggestion of maternal presence, to represent the blessed spirits); both lead the way to victory. Seen in this way, it is easy to understand why Verdi felt he had all the necessary ingredients for a success in Giovanna d’Arco. Even the modifications are in a sense merely inversions of aspects of the previous score. Giselda’s pacifism has become Giovanna’s dedication

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to war; Giselda embraces her forbidden love (Oronte), Giovanna rejects hers (Carlo); Giselda lives, Giovanna dies. Yet the association between religious devotion and political change that marked Verdi’s operas in the 1840s was about to alter: a development that was framed, if not directly influenced, by a growing rift between Catholicism and the state. The apparent liberalism of Pius IX on his election in June 1846 (marked by an amnesty for political prisoners) was a fundamental factor in the surge in public feeling that led to the 1848 revolution.67 This opportunity to lead a popular drive towards a modern, unified Italy nonetheless foundered in the Pope’s hesitation in allying the Church to revolutionary movements against the Austrians; his subsequent flight from Rome to Gaeta on 24 November 1848 and the establishment of the short-­lived Roman Republic brought about a significant lessening in his popularity.68 On his return in autumn 1849, his previously liberal tendencies had waned, and he remained resolutely outside the attempts led by Cavour and others to gain independence during the 1850s.69 The Pope’s intransigence provoked a public reappraisal of the Church’s role and authority in society. Many liberals blamed the influence of the Jesuit order (often depicted as fanatical and corrupt) for Pius IX’s timidity in confronting the Austrians. 70 On becoming prime minister of Piedmont in 1852, Cavour embarked on a campaign to separate Church and state, introducing civil marriage, emancipation for non-­Catholics, state education and limiting ecclesiatical powers and privileges.71 Such moves deepened the rift with the Church. Even after the military victories achieved in 1860, the Vatican (aided by French support) continued its resistance to the newly unified Italy. Garibaldi’s attempt to enforce its participation in 1867 was fruitless. Only the ousting of Napoléon III and the subsequent loss of the Vatican’s French allies (combined with another violent, if brief, assault) finally brought Rome to heel in 1870. To the end of his life in 1878, however, Pius IX claimed he was no more than a political ‘prisoner in the Vatican’: 72 a view that found more concrete expression in the papal ban he introduced in 1874 on Catholic participation in national elections as either voters or parliamentary representatives (which remained in force until 1919).73 His successor, Leo XIII, although initially more disposed to reconciliation, ultimately hardened the antagonism between Church and state with his demand in 1887 for the return of papal sovereignty over Rome. 74 On his death in 1903, Leo XIII left a written statement penned a couple of years earlier arguing that the papacy had been denied ‘independence and freedom’ and was ‘reduced to living under hostile domination’.75 The animosity between religious and parliamentary governance was unabated. As Catholicism lost temporal and geographical power within secular society, and with its face set against the forces of modernity, it sought new alliances within the community. Women, once considered in largely negative terms by ecclesiastical authorities, were now its main target for recruitment. A first step was the redefinition of the role of Mary, mother of Christ. From his exile in Gaeta in 1849, Pius IX issued an enciclica .

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on the notion of the ‘Immaculate Conception’ of Mary, a widespread if disputed belief that Mary herself was conceived free from original sin and thus was stainless from her first moment of animation. The encyclical set up a commission of cardinals and senior figures within the Church to debate the matter; its findings, published in ten volumes between 1851 and 1854, confirmed support for the proposal. How much was Pius IX’s proposal to elevate a more submissive, dutiful model of womanhood also related to women’s troubling participation as activists and warriors in the recent turmoil? Perhaps it was merely coincidence. Yet some of the respondents to the encyclical demonstrate a clear awareness of the political context of those turbulent times. One essay fulminated against the forces of ‘rationalism’ and ‘semi­rationalism’, associating the first with socialism and science, and designating the second as the product of moderate Catholics (described as ‘pseudo-­Catholics’) intent on dangerous reforms – of which, the author claimed, Gioberti was the prime instigator.76 Both strands of thought had led to the recent violence, and were driven by the goals of ‘the full emancipation of the flesh, the free woman, the destruction of ownership and of every domestic relationship’.77 To the misguided adherents of this new creed, man was ‘wholly independent’ and humanity sovereign; the will of the people was the only ‘legitimate power’; happiness was only to be found on earth; and Christ was no longer a ‘Redeemer’ but merely a ‘humanitarian philosopher’ whose history was ‘a complex of myths’.78 In order to reclaim ordinary people from such errors and restore their faith, it was necessary to offer through the figure of Mary a ‘truth that does not speak only to the intellect, but also to the imagination, to the senses, and to the heart’ and which is ‘perhaps less understood than felt’ (original emphasis).79 This framing of Mary’s usefulness to the religious narrative in terms of emotional profile bears a striking (if unintended) parallel with the theatre’s emphasis on woman as the centre of affect in drama. It also neatly removed Mary from her subversive associations with the liberal community and re-established her as a figurehead within religious orthodoxy. After all, the war cry of ‘Viva Maria!’ had formerly been used to good effect by conservative Catholics from Arezzo in battles against Napoléon Bonaparte’s invading troops and their pro­democracy ideas back in 1799.80 While designed to appeal to both genders, the subsequent enshrining of the dogma of the ‘Immaculate Conception’ in 1854 had particular consequences for women. As well as elevating Mary to new heights, it posited an explicit link between female sexual purity and divine grace. This event gave impetus to the culto mariano, which swept across Italy as well as Catholic communities in other countries.81 (It found its most desired outcome almost a century later in Pius XII’s dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in 1950, an act defined by Jung as ‘the most important religious event since the Reformation’, because it ‘deified’ a woman – although we should note that Pius XII was careful to point out that although Mary had long been seen as the ‘new Eve’ for the ‘new Adam’, she was not an equal partner.)82 While monasteries closed, convents

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thrived and grew; new female lay communities emerged; and the whole movement was fuelled by the canonisation and beatification of increasing numbers of female saints (previously somewhat neglected by the Vatican).83 Education of women, hitherto desultory, became an important means of indoctrination, particularly during the drive towards improving literacy in the post-­Unification period. A rapidly expanding network of religious schools and institutions succeeded in attracting the majority of female pupils, despite the provision of new state education.84 Although some recent feminist historians have emphasised the positive aspects of these events for women,85 there were also negative connotations. Convent schools mostly promulgated the conservative precepts of nineteenth-­century femininity: obedience to father, passivity and submission. Marian devotion, with its focus on chastity and denial of women’s sexuality, encouraged the withholding of sexual knowledge and information from young women, with undoubted complications for young brides, as we will see in a later chapter. Religious communities did indeed provide not only sanctuary but rare opportunities for education, fulfilment and intellectual stimulus for some women – but not all. Olimpia Savio Rossi recalled that one of her favourite quasi-­theatrical spectacles in her adolescence in Turin in the 1840s was the investiture of new nuns: watching the ‘bella giovinetta’ arrive at first beautifully dressed, then disrobed and her hair shorn, while around her the funeral rites were sung and her family sobbed, until finally she was borne into the cloister laid on a coffin.86 Now dead to the mundane world, the novice would be reborn in her religious life. The reality that lay beyond this ceremony of transfiguration could be harsh. One much-­publicised case of the period was that of Enrichetta Caracciolo (1821–1901), first confined to a convent in 1840 by her aristocratic mother, who wished to remarry, and then forcibly retained against her will. Although from 1849 Caracciolo was granted some periods outside the cloister for health reasons, she frequently outstayed her licence and had to be brought back by the police; from 1854 she lived clandestinely in Naples for six years, in constant fear of discovery. A committed patriot, she found freedom only with Unification in 1860; Garibaldi himself laid her nun’s headdress on the altar of the Duomo in Naples during the ‘Te Deum’ celebrating the ousting of Francesco II. Caracciolo’s account of her struggle to obtain her freedom (ranging from repeated, fruitless petitions to the Church authorities, the intervention of her own, now reconciled mother, and even hunger strikes and attempted suicide) was published in 1864. Of equal significance was her disturbing description of life within the cloister, with mentally unbalanced young women at the prey of priestly sexual predators, acts of violence and abuse and high levels of illiteracy and ignorance.87 Amid such revelations and scandals, it is not surprising that the Church lost ground even among the devout. Giuseppina Strepponi had a profound belief in a ‘Supreme Being’, and yet considered religions to be ‘the work of cunning and superior men,

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who, to dominate their fellows or to do them good, have profited by their weakness, by terror, by misfortunes’. Once ‘exalted’, the priesthood had since become ‘corrupt, cunning and venal’.88 It was a view of organised religion that Verdi shared, and which dominated his later operas. L a forza del ­destino

In Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, the prayer of the Jews on the banks of the Red Sea was met by the parting of the waves; Ninetta’s plea to God in La gazza ladra as she is led to her execution is similarly answered in the arrival of Pippo with the revelation that the real thief is a magpie. God also responds positively to the prayers of those early Verdian protagonists most explicitly connected with the Risorgimento: Giselda, Giovanna d’Arco, Odabella and Lida. Intriguingly, as we shall see in a later chapter, there is even a final divine response to the agony of Lina in Stiffelio (1851), where a Protestant pastor struggles with the apparent adultery of his wife. Yet as Verdi’s works enter their maturity, God seems powerless to intervene directly in earthly travails. He becomes rather the ultimate sanctuary – death – while the grim battle for justice is fought out below. Destiny, not divine will, is revealed as the grand arbiter of human action. The curses made by Rigoletto and the mother of Azucena (Il trovatore) exert a terrible fate on their children. Such a view directly conflicted the Church’s teaching. The Jesuit periodical Civiltà cattolica in 1854 warned that ‘almost always in modern works freedom of choice is denied to man, and providence to God; and fate, destiny and fortune are put forward as causes for persistent wickedness and the misadventures of men’.89 Once this notion enters into people’s heads, the author complained, concepts of ‘vice and virtue, of reward and punishment, of laws and obedience’ all but disappeared.90 Far from heeding such views, Verdi pursued the friction between the chaos of fate and the ordered world as dictated by Catholic orthodoxy to an even more explicit degree in La forza del destino, written for St Petersburg in 1862 (rev. 1869). Imbued with religiosity, La forza del destino recalls I Lombardi in the quantity of numbers that are either direct prayers, or related to matters of faith. The idealisation and hope of the Lombardian crusaders is nevertheless exchanged for a much bleaker and (despite its historical setting) more contemporary view of religion. Leonora, in the grip of a love that crosses the racial divide between Spanish aristocracy and Inca royalty, experiences a voyage of desperation ending in her own, much-­desired death. Anguished by the accidental death of her father at the hands of her lover, Don Alvaro, and pursued by her murderous brother, Don Carlo, Leonora seeks atonement and safety as a hermit. Yet the Church provides no lasting sanctuary from destiny’s workings; neither Leonora’s solitary, bitter life as an anchorite nor Don Alvaro’s taking of religious vows save these lovers from the consequences of their passionate attraction.

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Virtually all the music that Leonora sings either alone or in an ensemble following her father’s death (Act i) has a religious context, as she turns repeatedly to heaven for protection. Two of her three arias are prayers, and both represent a development in Verdi’s attempts to infuse prayer with human as well as spiritual qualities – a quest that would find further fulfilment in the Messa da requiem of 1874, which captured the troubled, conflicted earthly responses to death rather than constituting a vision of divine peace. Leonora’s first prayer in La forza del destino occurs in Act ii, when (in male clothing) she has escaped from the tavern on recognising her vengeful brother Carlo disguised as a student. Outside the church, she falls to her knees and launches into a piteous plea to the Virgin Mary (‘Madre, pietosa Vergine’). Yet her address begins with none of the serenity of ‘Salve, Maria’ in I Lombardi, sung by Giselda beside her mother. Leonora is hunted and alone. Her prayer is driven by the raw fear of mortal danger: it is a prayer of gasps and melancholy broken phrases, interspersed by her long, arching cries of ‘Deh! non m’abbandonar, pietà, pietà di me, Signore!’ (‘Ah! do not abandon me, have pity on me, Lord!). She is answered by the sound of the organ and the monks’ chanting from within the church. Only now does Leonora rise from her kneeling position, comforted by this sign of religious presence, and she decides to ask for asylum. Far from acting purely as a static moment of reflection, this prayer aids the progression of the drama: it subdues Leonora’s distress, clarifies her mind and determines her course of action. Her new-­found tranquillity is marked by her participation during the following scene in the monks’ rendition of ‘La Vergine degli angeli’, which finally has all the trusting composure of more conventional religious music. The sense of resolution is but temporary. Although the Father Superior agrees to her request for sanctuary, it proves to offer merely physical shelter. Leonora’s final aria, ‘Pace, pace, mio Dio’ (an addition to the source material of Ángel de Saavedra’s drama of 1835), is a prayer torn apart by human suffering.91 Her long years as a hermit, her dedication to religious life, have neither brought inner peace nor have they succeeded in dispelling her love for Don Alvaro. That much is apparent from the very start of the aria, with the strings’ repetition of the turbulent four-­note motif in rising semiquaver runs that had preceded the furious entrance of Leonora’s father in Act i, and which has hounded Leonora throughout the opera as an aural manifestation of his wrath. Her first ‘Pace’, heard offstage, is an attempt to still this inner disturbance. The strings fall obediently silent. Then she appears: ‘Pale, disfigured, and very agitated, she emerges from the grotto.’ Harp triplets and the slow pizzicato throb of the cello suggest the restless rhythmic rocking of a body, while she reveals the landscape of her pain: jagged shapes that veer across octave leaps. Religion, it seems, has not provided earthly reconciliation. At the thought that she will never again see Alvaro, the strings briefly resume their tempestuous reminder, and Leonora responds: ‘O Dio, Dio, fa ch’io muoia’ (‘O God, God, make me die’). This is the prayer of a suicide, whose only hope is death. The final extraordinary coda – ‘Maledizione! Maledizione!’ – is provoked by the approach

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of someone (in fact, Alvaro) to her hermitage, but works equally well as a terrible reference to Leonora’s own cursed state. That elusive ‘peace’ will only be found in her embrace of death; in her dying moments (‘Lieta poss’io precederti’), she finally discovers phrases that rise to another world, instead of plunging back to a tormented earth. If in La forza del destino, the Church is shown to be largely impotent against human failing, in Verdi’s next two operas – Don Carlos and Aida – organised religion is explicitly challenged as institution and authority. Significantly, both operas were written for theatres outside Italy – Paris and Cairo respectively. The first, set in Spain at the time of the Inquisition, reveals the rigidity and zealotry in religious governance. As we saw from the Roman censor’s response in 1853 to the mention of ‘il rogo’ (‘the stake’) in Il trovatore, anything that referred even obliquely to this period of the Church’s history was regarded as intrinsically anti-­clerical; certainly, Don Carlos does little to protect the Inquisition from its reputation. The spectacle that was so much a part of French grand opera here finds a gruesome twist, in that the most visually grandiose scene is a lavish display of the very aspect that the Roman censor wished to avoid mentioning: the cruel burning of heretics. One almost wonders whether it was Verdi’s revenge against Rome for its earlier treatment of Il trovatore. Sacerdotal implacability is also reflected in Aida’s ancient Egyptian setting. Amneris laments the inhumanity of the priests who inflict the entombing of Radamès, heedless of her threat that one day she will be in power and (presumably) will take her revenge. Yet there remains a distinction in both these operas between Church and God or Isis. The former might be depicted as fanatical, narrow and authoritarian; God, however, is usually portrayed as above reproach – the one Spectator, one might surmise, who understands most about the travails of the characters. As the heretics burn at the end of Act iii in Don Carlos, a solitary celestial voice soars above the ensemble to welcome their souls to heaven. O tello

For Verdi’s final extended prayer scene for a woman, he returned to ‘Ave Maria’. This time, there was no difficulty with the censor. As with I Lombardi alla prima crociata, the inclusion of a prayer at this juncture was a deliberate choice by Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito. In Shakespeare’s play, the audience learns of Desdemona’s prayer only from her reply to Othello (‘Have you pray’d tonight, Desdemona?’ ‘Ay, my lord’). Three reasons lay behind its addition in the opera. The libretto’s compression of Act v had eliminated the change of scene between Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ and Otello’s fateful entry – and thus presumably the moment when Desdemona (offstage) said her prayers. Given that Otello makes direct reference to Desdemona’s act of devotion (he does not want to kill her soul, by murdering her before she has confessed her sins), it was necessary to find space for her ritual. The prayer also provided a brief moment of respite, both musically and dramatically, between Desdemona’s sadness and agitation

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during the ‘Willow Song’ and the brutality of her forthcoming murder. And, finally, this gesture of religious devotion cements Desdemona’s embodiment of stainless goodness. What marks this prayer out from those in Verdi’s earlier operas is its unusual shifts between notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’, and the way these separate planes are nonetheless both present in each moment. Desdemona begins the ‘Ave Maria’ in sotto voce declamation of the traditional text on a single note, then moves into a more personalised and emotionally heightened section before once again resuming a barely audible ritual murmuring (according to Beghelli, it is possible to repeat the entire prayer in the bars of rest provided); her devotions are concluded by a soaring arpeggio on ‘Ave’ and the final ‘Amen’.92 Ricordi’s disposizione scenica, reflecting the mise-en-scène for the first performance (supervised by Verdi himself ), provides valuable insight into the governing ideas: The first part of the Ave Maria has entirely the character of a simple prayer, as a result of the words which almost literally follow the original Latin text. Only after the word ‘Gesù’, at the start of ‘Prega per chi adorando a te si prostra’, is the purely religious feeling overcome by the human feeling. The sorrow of her soul sends to DESDEMONA’s lips words that are more heartfelt, almost a reflection of that soul. Such a feeling should be accentuated, and it has its high point at the line, ‘Prega per chi sotto l’oltraggio piega la fronte …’ which is a direct allusion to herself. It is necessary to caution, however, that these various colourings must not in any way be exaggerated. Rather, they must stay within a generally tender and melancholy tone of voice, which is the characteristic quality of the piece. In short, she is always a woman, on her knees and praying, so it is natural that she does not resort to vocal inflections or overly dramatic gestures. Calm re-­enters Desdemona’s heart. Here again, the religious feeling predominates, and here again are the literal words of the prayer. After the final ‘Prega’, Desdemona rests her forehead on the prie-­dieu and repeats the ‘Ave Maria’ more fervently. After these initial words, she continues the prayer mentally, moving only her lips, and only the final words ‘nell’ora della morte’, almost recited, are distinguishable. Then she gets up slowly, extending her hands towards the effigy, and says with a very sweet voice, ‘Ave!’, then, ‘Amen!’, bowing to the Madonna. She starts towards the bed immediately, during which she undresses. Then, she gets into bed and goes to sleep.93

The most ‘idealised’ section in terms of sentiment (the Latin prayer) is therefore conversely most ‘real’ or authentic in its use of declamation and a single intoned note; the more ‘real’ or human emotion (‘Prega per chi adorando a te’) finds exposition in idealised musical expression. The cantabile beginning ‘Prega per chi adorando a te, si prostra’ offers a subtle contrast to Leonora’s ‘Madre, pietosa Vergine’ in La forza del destino. While Leonora phrases her spiritual relationship in terms of a self-­absorbed lament or even, in her downward melodic gestures, a kind of flagellation, almost all Desdemona’s phrases in the cantabile

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begin with a rising movement (the only exception being ‘misero anch’esso’, her reference to Otello). Desdemona’s upward musical reaching suggests a more open, transcendent communion. This quality is also depicted physically in the moment when she rises from her kneeling posture. As evident from the disposizione scenica, this was originally positioned just prior to the final A♭ major arpeggio on ‘Ave!’ Later scores, however, often reserve this movement until after the ‘Amen’. Standing before the arpeggio undoubtedly would have favoured the soprano’s vocal need for support (especially given the requirement that the phrase be delivered with ‘voce dolcissima’); but it also produced a physical gesture representing Desdemona’s own ascent into heaven as a direct result of her piety. Delaying this movement to a standing position until after the ‘Amen’ robs it of any visual significance; it becomes merely a necessary and unremarkable part of her preparations for bed. Finding singers who could perform this role in the manner imagined by Verdi proved almost impossible. His rather long correspondence on the issue, part of which is reproduced below, illuminates his perceptions of the character of Desdemona and the compositional strategies he employed to embody her in musical terms. Romilda Pantaleoni, who created the role, proved less than satisfactory, as Verdi had feared back in 1886 on learning of her success in Ponchielli’s Marion Delorme at Rome: ‘Such a passionate, fiery, violent artist, how will she be able to control and contain herself in the calm, aristocratic passion of Desdemona?’94 (Something of Pantaleoni’s indomitable temperament might be gleaned from her insistence on being strapped to the mast in order to savour a fearful storm at sea when returning from performances in Otello in Latin America.)95 Shortly before the première, Verdi was even more alarmed at the deterioration in her singing, probably owing to overwork (she was singing the title role of Aida while rehearsing Otello). Although Pantaleoni garnered largely favourable reviews from the Italian critics,96 Blanche Roosevelt was more dismissive, claiming that the soprano’s ‘naturally fine and dramatic’ voice was poorly schooled and ‘rarely in tune’ in the upper register; she was also ‘short, slightly cross-­eyed, and of a physical plainness, which dwarfed the already insignificant Desdemona’; and although she ‘acted very well in the first and third acts’, her performance was less effective in the final act.97 (Hearing Pantaleoni sing the ‘Ave Maria’ to Boito’s piano accompaniment at a private salon a couple of nights later reconciled Roosevelt rather more to the soprano: she was struck by Pantaleoni’s ‘great charm’ of ‘voice and manner’, claiming ‘she merited more praise as Desdemona in private life than Desdemona lying on her death-­bed, visible to the great public of La Scala’.)98 Verdi’s own reaction to the soprano’s performances was more in keeping with Roosevelt’s judgement than that of the other critics: ‘Let’s have no illusions, Pantaleoni was not good’, he wrote to Faccio shortly after the La Scala run of Otello had ended.99 As other theatres began to make plans to stage Otello, the search for a suitable Desdemona became even more intense than that for an ideal Violetta some thirty years previously. Verdi was forced to articulate his ideas about the required kind of singer

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more plainly. He wrote to Ricordi on 22 April 1887 regarding forthcoming productions at Rome and Brescia, concerned that the proposed prima donna, Adalgisa Gabbi, despite (or because of ?) her youthful singing, was apparently much ‘inferior’ to Pantaleoni and ill-­equipped ‘for a subtle part like that of Desdemona’: Even la Pantaleoni, in spite of her dramatic instinct for high-­strung parts, could not feel and understand Desdemona. To judge terre à terre, the character of Desdemona, who allows herself to be mistreated, slapped, even strangled, who forgives and commends herself [to God], seems rather stupid! But Desdemona is not a woman, she is a type! She is the type of goodness, of resignation, of sacrifice! Such beings are born for others, unconscious of their own self! Beings that partly exist and that Shakespeare has put into poetic form and has deified by creating Desdemona, Cordelia, Juliet, etc. etc. – these are types that perhaps can only be compared to the Antigone of the ancient theatre. – This is the way that Desdemona ought to be understood! But who could do it? Goodness knows!!!100

This letter demonstrates that Verdi was well aware that Desdemona’s subjection to her husband’s violence might rightly brand her as ‘rather stupid’; we should also note from his correspondence to Clara Maffei that he himself was sometimes impatient of tendencies towards self-­sacrifice in his female acquaintanceship.101 To Verdi, Desdemona was not therefore ‘a woman’, but an essence of selflessness: not ‘real’ but (as he wrote on another occasion) ‘true’.102 Verdi’s distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘realism’ was shared by other artists of his generation who found themselves similarly uneasy with the aesthetic demands of the new photographic age. Writing in 1879, the renowned sculptor Giovanni Dupré (whom Verdi had first met in Florence during the rehearsals for Macbeth in 1847) compared the approaches of the ‘idealist’ and the ‘realist’: the first locked into his own visions and the precepts of past artists, the second too reliant on reproducing ugly, quotidian images. The artist that pleased Dupré was someone who combined both perspectives: one who was ‘free in imagining, free in feeling, free in the ways of expression and style, but at the same time strongly, tenaciously, tied to truth and beauty’.103 It was a description that might well be applied to Verdi. However, Verdi’s notion of the ‘truth’ of Desdemona – or at least her purpose in the opera’s narrative – was also governed by his ideas of theatricality, which might be explained by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s much later notions of ‘presence-­effect’ and its capacity to impact on the body.104 Within Gumbrecht’s argument, presence-­effect is dependent on a certain distance between the fictional and real worlds: ‘aesthetic experience draws its fascination (in the literal sense of the word) from offering moments of intensity that cannot be a part of specific everyday worlds.’105 Verdi’s idealisation of Desdemona was matched by his remarks elsewhere that there was none so evil as Iago.106 The potential ‘effects’ (or Gumbrecht’s ‘moments of intensity’) of the opera lay

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for Verdi in Otello’s disorientation between these polar distillations of human essence embodied by Desdemona and Jago. Their ‘unreality’ produces the very dynamic that is conditional for the intensity of experience for both Otello (as a character) and the spectator; and it is primarily (and conversely) the intensity of an experience that makes that experience seem ‘real’ for the audience, regardless of the ‘unreality’ of certain factors or agents. What was ‘true’, therefore, was not something that was true as a mirror reflection (or, as Verdi once said, a mere ‘photograph’),107 but true as something that is experienced authentically by the spectator. Singers, required to respond in more pragmatic terms to the fleshing out of a character, seemed to be struggling with the role of Desdemona, however. Writing again to Ricordi on 5 May, Verdi complained about Gabbi’s performance at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome: Ah, this Desdemona is a very difficult part; I was dreaming of talented or at least instinctive artists for this part, and I do not see them, nor do I find them! Muzio writes to me that Gabbi (good with regard to voice) sings the ‘Willow Song’ badly … she hurries the first triplet too much and holds too long the final C that follows the F. The usual pretensions of those that do not have talent. For this role I wanted either Teodorini or Borghi-­Mamo, or Turolla, or even Ferni, all of whom have instinct: but everyone gave me poor news about their voices. Poor Desdemona!108

Six days later, he responds to Ricordi’s news that the Teatro Regio at Parma wanted to produce Otello in the coming September; the discussion again revolves around the choice of a Desdemona. Gabbi, he wrote, was nothing more than ‘mediocre’: ‘The Ave Maria?’ you will say! … My God! But the effect stems from the mutes that make the audience so deaf [to what it hears] that it no longer understands the deficiences of the composition and execution … In short, the true Desdemona has yet to be found … For me the only excellent one would be la Ferni. La Ferni can sing, and she sings more than all the others. Desdemona is a part in which the thread, the melodic line never ceases from the first note to the last. Just as Jago has only to declaim and snigger, and just as Otello, now the warrior, now the passionate lover, now crushed to the point of baseness, now ferocious like a savage, must sing and shout, so Desdemona must always, always sing … Therefore the most perfect Desdemona will always be the one who sings the best.109

Desdemona’s embodiment of pure spiritual essence was thus, in Verdi’s view, performed through the purity of her singing. The role is conceived almost as a throw-­back to an earlier epoch, when voice operated in a stratosphere somehow still part but not wholly reflective of bodily experience and earthly sentiment. Finding the right voice and technical ability for the role was only part of the problem. It also required a certain physical stillness and deportment that differed from the restiveness that had become the imprint of naturalistic acting, exemplified by Eleonora Duse with (as Pirandello described) her ceaseless play of gestures and the

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‘continuous, restless, momentary flow’ of her body.110 Boito’s guidance on how the role of Desdemona should be played contrasted sharply with such approaches of the new school of performance: ‘The ladies who must portray this character are advised not to use their eyes in all sorts of ways, not to move their body and their arms all about, not to walk with steps as long as a pertica [five metres], not to look for so-­called “effects”.’111 Yet singers often appeared to fall either into the category of inexpressive ‘blocks of wood’112 or alternatively moved too much. Verdi in 1889, still trying to find his ideal Desdemona, described one singer (Aurelia Cataneo) as ‘stupid’: ‘She baptised herself as such when she said to you: “They told me to move!” etc. For God’s sake, if she had had a little sense she would have replied that in an Ave Maria one neither shouts nor gesticulates.’113 Verdi and Boito seemed to be searching in vain for a singer who could imbue an almost statue-­like stillness with all the power of an impassioned plea, like one of Bartolini’s marble figurines. S ingers and nuns

Perhaps the perfect Desdemona was not to be found in the theatre at all. There are curious echoes of her fate in another conjunction between opera and religion: Francesco Giarelli’s articles published in La scena illustrata about two singers who became Carmelite nuns. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary (the Mother and Queen of Carmel), the Carmelites were a penitential, enclosed order. Giarelli’s first account just a few months after the première of Otello in 1887 was an interview with suor Beatrice, once the Spanish contralto Teresa Dolores de las Nieves (famous in 1870),and now in an unidentified convent.114 The second article, published six years later, contains a long written statement by suor Crocifissione, the Italian soprano Emilia Bianchetti, from her convent in Paris. 115 Both nuns – according to Giarelli – abandoned their singing careers through unrequited love (de las Nieves through bereavement, Bianchetti through enforced separation from her aristocratic lover); both posited their previous lives in the context of Satan’s works; both embraced a life of extreme mortification and ideas of an early death, following the rule of Teresa of Avila. On being addressed by her birth name of ‘Teresa’, suor Beatrice replied: ‘I am no longer the daughter of Lucifer of one time, when plunged in the horrors of the century, my wickedness extended to even bearing the name of the seraphic virgin.’116 And yet she perceived at least one link between the contralto Teresa Dolores and St Teresa di Gesù, through their voices: the saint ‘also sang with a deep voice the glories of God, while I sang the enticements of Satan’.117 In the second article, in 1893, Giarelli introduced suor Crocifissione, formerly the soprano Emilia Bianchetti, whose voice of ‘golden limpidity’ had signalled a great future ahead of her.118 Instead, she fell in love with a young Genoese count; his family refused the match and sent him away. She took refuge in a Carmelite convent in Paris, and now described her life as a nun: ‘Work, penitence, prayer and mortification … Our

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order is the most severe of all. It requires a special grace to be able to bend one’s own body and spirit to such austerity.’119 Her days were spent in acts of penitence: The horsehair shirts, the bracelets with metal points, the knotted cilices, are produced by our hands … We also make constant use of them. We call them ‘the jewels of Saint Teresa’. Our pockets abound with nutshells fortified by external barbs. And when Satan assails us with his immodest visions, we grip them tightly. The hands bleed: but the temptation disappears … Added to that are solitary confinement, the lash, the discipline, the whip and the series of bodily chastisements that we inflict on ourselves. You see: the divine Founder … has omitted nothing in order to ease our access to paradise.120

The nuns’ poor diet leads to hydropsy, particularly in the older sisters, but this was a blessing: ‘It reunites them sooner with Christ.’121 A living death, then, or slow suicide. The only joy permitted or, apparently, experienced, was in self-­harming. All close human relationships were discouraged: there were no friendships between the nuns, and family visits were permitted only twice a year. And there was no escape: Easy to open for those who enter, the doors of the Carmelite convent remain inexorably closed to those who want to leave. Once our vows are professed, we are dead to the world, and rise again in Christ … And it is this solitude in life and death that forms our incommensurable happiness. Satan with the enticements of art and of earthly affections had driven me to the threshold of hell. But the shadow of the cross has dragged me back again. The woman has been extinguished in the Carmelite nun. We almost all suffer from chlorosis and anaemia. The rule of St Teresa is the supreme atrophising agent for the blood. We are armoured against the congestions of passion. Today I am thirty-­six years old: I am decrepit and dying. What more is wanted from me?122

Giarelli’s comments were appreciative (almost excessively so) of the sacrifices these women made, even if, in the interview with Teresa Dolores, he expressed horror at the severity of her existence. It is hard, from a modern perspective, not to find something unsettling in the nuns’ reading of the purposes of mortification as a form of assured entry into Paradise; their dwelling on the fleshly details displays a fin-­de-­siècle absorption in the decadent, decaying body and the ecstasy of pain. If nuns are brides of Christ, does not physical torment erupting from their holy relationship constitute a divine form of domestic violence? Can moral purity really emerge from slavery to a monastic rule made some 400 years previously? Giarelli would have us think so. The singer’s once abundant body (Giarelli recalls Dolores’ decolleté in her previous role as Maddalena in Rigoletto, now not even ‘a memory’) is shrivelled, compressed into an anorexic outline; her limpid voice is reduced to the ‘three notes’ of the Liturgy of the Hours. 123 If Leonora’s privations in La forza del destino (the hair shirt of the penitent, the rationed food, the isolation) and Desdemona’s subjection to the physical suffering inflicted by her husband seem eerily similar to these enclosed lives, one might argue that for the most part Verdi’s earlier religious heroines demonstrate a rather different

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attitude to their faith – and one, too, that had its echoes beyond the stage. In 1895, padre Giovanni Semeria, sympathetic to the aims of the feminist organisations and a leader of Democrazia cristiana, exemplified a new stance towards women, urging: ‘Leave, leave … the domestic walls.’ Even if woman was destined for domesticity, he argued, ‘she has, however, energies capable of acting in a larger sphere: the conditions of the time call woman to social action’.124 The women who heeded his call were, like Giselda and Giovanna d’Arco, concerned with changing the world. For them, faith was a banner that led to new experiences, new challenges, new life.

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When, in 1854, the Turin periodical Il trovatore described love as ‘the most suitable of all human pasLeonora, Il trovatore, Act i sions for setting to music’,1 it was voicing long-­held European ideas of analogies between love and music, from Guido Casoni’s dictum in 1591 that ‘love is music’2 to Stendhal’s claim in 1822 that ‘the habit of ­listening to music and the state of reverie connected with it prepare you for falling in love’.3 The relationship between love and music was nowhere more evident than in opera. Requiring few words yet revelling in a multitude of harmonious repetition, love was ideally suited to opera’s compressed narratives and formal structures.4 As Tchaikovsky remarked, in matters of love ‘words are not necessary – and where they are ineffectual, the more eloquent language, i.e., music, appears in all its power’. 5 As a dramatic locus, therefore, the theme of love created a heightened emotional plane where the presence of music seemed not only justified but almost inevitable: it was a passion that engendered music as much as the music itself expressed passion. And yet in some respects, Verdi appeared less conscious – or less persuaded – of the supposed indispensability of amorous passion to opera. His early operas were seen as more effective in displays of grand style than affection;6 his Macbeth was criticised for having no love interest at all.7 Verdi was impatient of such views. In a letter to Ricordi on 9 March 1848, he complained of Cammarano’s reluctance to set Cola di Rienzi (based on Bulwer-Lytton’s novel) because although there were two ‘wonderful’ female roles, neither centred on love: ‘My God! Is it possible that one can never ever move or want to move away from treating subjects in the restricted, feeble style with which they have been dealt with until now? Why make love always the mainstay of drama?’ Neither Nabucco nor Macbeth had a romantic element, he argued, but both were ‘stupendous topics’.8 Only when Verdi abandoned the epic tales he had set during the 1840s for the more intimate, domestic dramas of the 1850s did he begin to focus on romantic sentiment. Even then, some modern critics have remarked on the lack of duets centred on the mutual affirmation of love that commonly appeared in the works of other composers of the period.9 From what we can gather, Verdi’s professional reticence towards emotion was similarly apparent in his private life. No love letters written either to his first wife, Margherita Barezzi, or his second, Giuseppina Strepponi, or indeed other possible companions, such as Teresa Stolz, have ever been made public, although they might of course still exist.10 We can guess at something of his tone in such transactions from Strepponi’s correspondence. In 1849, preparing for her (first?) visit to Busseto, she complains of ‘T’amo, il giuro, d’immenso, eterno amor’

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his formality or brusqueness: ‘But good grief ! At Busseto one forgets to love and to write with a little affection?’11 On 3 January 1853, she thanks him for his letter and ‘for having thought about me on the first day of the New Year, and the eleventh of our ­acquaintanceship! If I’ve not written to you, it is because I know your indifference towards such things.’12 But in an earlier letter that same day, she makes it plain that he must have written with some degree of warmth: ‘I’m very glad that you find yourself lost without me, and I wish you so much boredom as to make you renounce the barbarous idea of leaving me alone, like a saintly hermit!’13 In contrast, Strepponi herself is more fulsome: without him, she declares, she is ‘a body without a soul’;14 he is both her ‘Magician’ and conversely her ‘Nuisance’ (‘Pasticcio’, the soubriquet he also used for her);15 a fortnight later she is still experiencing ‘an incredible sadness’ without him. 16 Seven years later, her prose is even more effusive, as she distinguishes between public perception of Verdi as a ‘genius’ and her own intimate knowledge: And yet the quality that obliges the world to doff its hat to you is something about which I never think, or almost never. I swear to you, and you’ll have no difficulty believing it, that many times I am almost surprised that you know music! For however divine this art, and however worthy your genius of the art you follow, yet the charm that fascinates me and which I adore in you is your character, your heart, your indulgence for the mistakes of others while you are so hard on yourself. Your charity full of modesty and mystery – your proud independence and boyish simplicity, qualities proper to your nature that knows how to conserve a wild virginity of ideas and feelings in the midst of the human cesspool! O my Verdi, I am not worthy of you and the love you bear me is a charity, a balsam to a heart that is sometimes very sad beneath the appearance of cheerfulness. Continue to love me, love me even after death so that I may present myself to divine justice rich in your love and prayers, O my Redeemer! I re-­read this scrawl that perhaps I ought not to send to you, but I don’t have the courage to copy it out again. However much it might be the pure expression of my feelings, I should have written it in another style and with calmer ideas. Forgive this spleen that has pursued me for some time, and which is not the predominant fault of my character, but rather of yours. Oh, finally here is your defect, your sin. I am delighted that you’ve got at least one.17

Strepponi’s letter reveals more about her own nature than Verdi’s, but it nonetheless provides a glimpse of their partnership: she, openly adoring and almost painfully grateful for his affection; he, more diffident and severe, with a propensity for ‘spleen’. Emotion for Verdi was thus seemingly a largely unspoken matter, even within the most private domain of intimate relationship. As Strepponi implied, there was something of a paradox that this brusque, reserved man should devote his working life to an arena that called on quite different qualities in its expression of sentiment. Yet this tension produced a potent contribution to opera’s portrayal of feeling. Always pursuing character and effect, Verdi elected to set libretti that depicted what we might describe (to steal a term from Italo Calvini) as ‘amori difficili’, bringing to the operatic stage particularly contentious relationships – even when

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considered within the frequently intemperate emotional climate of opera itself. If Verdi’s operas of the 1840s were often known for their martial clamour, those from 1849 centred on sentimental volume. The reasons for his change of direction are unclear, although we might note three possible impetuses: the development of his relationship with Strepponi into an acknowledged partnership; the catastrophic, bloody end of the 1848 political uprising and the sense of mourning that lay heavily across the peninsula; and Verdi’s own need for new artistic challenges. Whatever the cause, his heroines of this period negotiate an extreme emotional terrain, confronting the dangers of their own desires in an often hostile social territory. Love, one of the great themes in the discourses of nineteenth-­century culture and society, was a complex and contested term.18 The bonds between husband and wife, parents and children, and brothers and sisters produced the nuclear family, which in turn was considered to be the foundation of modern society. Such ideas can be traced back to the French Revolution,19 and in Italy surfaced some years later in the discourse of the Risorgimento. In 1848, Niccolò Tommaseo declared that ‘A country is never born without family; and the family always precedes the country’; 20 in 1860, Mazzini urged that the ‘family is the motherland of the heart’.21 After Unification, this concept became legally enshrined in the constitution in order to support the new state, and was central to debates about morality and social order.22 A typical example is Giuseppe Mastriani’s comment in 1866 that the family was the source of civilised society: patriotism is first engendered by parental example, and so the state prospers; religious feeling and morality are similarly transmitted through familial practices; thus ‘on the family depends the integrity of civilised life, the progress of nations and the possible happiness of humankind.’23 Love’s role in facilitating the formation and continuity of the family was therefore regarded as vital. Yet love equally could imperil both family and society by encouraging the formation of ties across familial, national, religious, class and ethnic boundaries. The Ottocento philosopher Girolamo Venanzio summarised Plato’s account of love’s mutability and enigmatic character: [I]t is rich and beautiful, squalid and bare, without habitation and roof, sleeping in doorways and on the streets; enticer to beautiful things; virile, audacious, powerful; a shrewd hunter and assiduous manipulator; circumspect scholar, eloquent philosopher, enchanter, magician and sophist; neither wholly mortal nor immortal; now born and grown in a day; now dying, and then immediately resurgent; a forthright acquisitor, and a ready loser.24

Love’s self-­loyalty, transient nature and unknowability (we can feel it, but not ‘know’ it, said Venanzio) made it an unstable partner in the construction of the ‘new’ society. While certain aspects of love were therefore sanctified, others were discouraged or even demonised. Of particular importance was the distinction between spiritual and

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sensual pleasures, and between those that served society (through procreation and stability) and those that served the individual. Such attitudes touched both genders, but had a special significance for women. Yvonne Knibiehler analyses nineteenth-­century women’s consciousness of the body as ‘the enemy of the soul’, both as an obstacle to salvation and as the site of pain from pregnancy and childbirth. Rather, she says, the heart was ‘at the centre of feminine identity’. She cites the influence of the iconography of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which an opened breast displays a wounded heart, symbolising ‘a direct and intense communion that does not transpire through reason, nor science, but through the miracle of love’.25 Women were encouraged to consider themselves as the embodiment of an earthly love that aspired to celestial example, as guardians of moral virtue, and as suffering made sublime. If woman’s sense of her own body was ambiguous, it was equally so for men. Taught to both venerate and denigrate women, to see some women as untouchable and others as freely available (even regardless of the wishes of the women themselves), to prize chastity but pursue sexual licence, many men similarly found the domain of personal feelings and desires a troubled area. ‘Love’ was thus a state of being circumscribed by the social and cultural mores of the period, which moreover fluctuated across the half-­century span of Verdi’s output: what provoked love, how it was expressed, even its very nature were matters of debate and prescription. ‘ S ogno  d ivin ! ’

Musing on her lost lover, Amalia in I masnadieri (1847) recalls the ecstasy of their embraces as a ‘sogno divin!’ (‘divine dream!’). Her sentiments almost certainly would have found an echo among some of her audience. If the universality of love was an oft-­repeated maxim of the period (in 1855, the Corriere delle dame declared that ‘Love belongs to all classes’),26 in reality it remained merely a dream for many women. The obstacles to their happiness were generally less complex than those experienced by Amalia (whose joy was blighted by the prejudice of her beloved’s father, the scheming of his brother and her lover’s propensity for banditry), but perhaps similarly painful none the less. First and foremost was the inability to select a partner freely. As in much of Europe in that period, marriage was in essence a family decision. 27 The system of the dowry, which persisted in Italy during much of the Ottocento, ensured that for numerous women marriage was little more than a commercial transaction.28 Marriages were largely contracted for money, position and security; affection and compatibility figured as secondary considerations in the choice of a husband. One extreme example of the vicissitudes experienced by some women in this ‘marriage trade’ is provided by Maria Luigia, the Duchess of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, to whom Verdi dedicated the vocal score of I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843). Born

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in 1791, Maria Luigia was the eldest daughter of Franz II of Austria (then Holy Roman Emperor)29 and his second wife, Maria Theresa. Her adulthood was shaped by her adolescent marketability as a political pawn. In 1809, Napoléon Bonaparte decided he must have an heir and annulled his marriage to Joséphine de Beauharnais. After consideration of various possible brides, his choice finally alighted on the eighteen-­year-­old Maria Luigia, with the intent of forging an alliance with the country he had recently so decisively defeated at Austerlitz. The anxiety that Napoléon’s decision provoked in Maria Luigia ripples through a letter to her father: My dear father … I learnt today that Napoléon intends to divorce his consort; I must confess to you that this news has profoundly disturbed me. The thought that I might be his future wife induces me to make a confession that I entrust to your paternal heart. You have repeatedly had the goodness to reassure me that you would never do violence to my inclinations … Trusting that I would never be able to place my future happiness in better hands than yours, I await your decision with filial respect …30

It is plain from this letter that Maria Luigia had long feared that she would be married against her will, and that her father had promised otherwise on various occasions. Now, however, that promise was about to be broken. Austria, still dealing with the severe territorial and financial consequences of the earlier war with the French, was in no position to refuse Napoléon’s demands. As the Austrian ambassador to France (Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg) revealed in his correspondence with Chancellor Metternich, the young archduchess had little say in the matter: Do not be alarmed if I tell you that it would be necessary to sacrifice her [Maria Luigia]: a refusal, however received, would transform him [Napoléon] and all who surround him into implacable enemies. In such case we would have to renounce every hope of enjoying some years of peace. Our downfall would very soon follow the refusal. Can one hesitate when it is necessary to choose between the end of the monarchy and the unhappiness of a princess? Millions of people would be sacrificed. Would not the destiny of a princess who saves her country perhaps be glorious, even if this gesture had to mean her total unhappiness? 31

In the face of such arguments, the sacrifice of Maria Luigia’s happiness was duly made. Her subsequent letters to friends voice obvious reluctance about the forthcoming marriage (which took place by proxy in Vienna on 11 March 1810), albeit indications that the strictures about the ‘duty’ she owed her family and country had also had their desired effect.32 Initially, things seemed to have gone better than Maria Luigia feared. Napoléon made himself charming and appears to have genuinely cared for her, supposedly even telling the surgeons at the difficult birth of his much-­wanted son and heir in 1811 to save the mother rather than the baby.33 The marriage itself, however, was relatively short­lived – largely because it failed in its design to establish lasting peace between France and Austria.34 Open hostilities were resumed in 1813. When Napoléon was defeated at

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the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig and subsequently abdicated in 1814, Maria Luigia fled Paris with her son, eventually returning to Vienna. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 decreed the couple’s future: Napoléon was sent to Elba (and later to St Helena, following the battle of Waterloo); Maria Luigia was appointed governor of the duchy of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla. There, she soon developed a liaison with her chamberlain, Adam Adalbert, Count von Neipperg, bearing him three children in secret before Napoléon’s death in 1821. 35 Once widowed, she married Neipperg in a private morganatic ceremony; her much­loved children were eventually brought to court and acknowledged. And with the experience of a different, happier relationship, Maria Luigia seems to have reviewed her past in a new light. In 1832, three years after Neipperg’s death, she described the ‘infinity’ of marriages in Italy that ended in disaster: The parents of the fiancé are motivated solely by two reasons that overwhelm all others: that of continuing their family and of procuring a daughter-­in-­law whose dowry can increase the splendour of their house and fortune if already considerable, or of alleviating them if in financial difficulties. The parents of the young woman, if they have several children, are very happy to rid themselves of one of them; and the mother of no longer having to supervise a young woman who she believes must not be allowed to go out, and in consequence often forces to remain at home. Rarely do the engaged couple see each other before the business is concluded; I believe that the parents are too afraid that they might not like each other. Once the contract is settled they are allowed to get to know each other, and they become, so to speak, almost enamoured. The young woman is fascinated because to her everything seems like a paradise after the strict order she has been used to at home, and the couple go together to the altar without having reflected sufficiently on the future and without having thought about the consequences of that ‘yes’ that ties one to the other for life. The first months of their marriage pass in love and pleasure. Everything is new for the young wife: balls, parties, theatres, society; she has enjoyed nothing of all this in the paternal home. Her husband spends all his time close to her, he thinks only of her, but little by little, when this sentiment abates, a terrible void begins.36

One wonders if this account of ‘a terrible void’ was a reflection as much of Maria Luigia’s own experience during her marriage to Napoléon as it was of the fate of the young women she encountered in Italy. Maria Luigia was writing in 1832,37 but her assessment of social practices and the importance of the dowry in Italy held good for much of the century. The anonymous author (C. A.) of an 1851 tract, Voto per l’emancipazione delle donne, challenged those parents who hastened their daughters into marriage ties that not having been chosen through ‘reciprocal sympathy and esteem often become chains of martyrdom’.38 A similar perception emerges in the writings of Cristina di Belgioioso some sixteen years later:

­Romanc In her present position, woman very rarely obtains a moderate state of happiness, and even if she does obtain it, even more rarely does she keep it if she outlives her youth and beauty. Educated to please man and to be passionately loved by him, she is usually not consulted on the choice of partner or husband, to whom her love will be due exclusively for their entire lives. Only the worth of the fortune, name, position and social station of the suitor is valued and nothing more, under the puerile pretext that after a few months or years of marriage personal attractions are no longer noticed, and that the only lasting elements of happiness are wealth and the satisfactions of  pride.39

Too often, Belgioioso claimed, young women found themselves married to men who inspired ‘neither love, nor trust, but rather fear and aversion’. Instead of the careless happiness their dreams of love had promised, they were forced into cold, silent resignation, with the fulfilment of their duties as the only satisfaction: ‘Woman, reputedly so weak and inferior to man by nature, has made in silence the most heroic sacrifice, has made the most intense effort, and achieved the most miraculous victory that a human creature can attain.’40 Like Maria Luigia, Belgioioso’s views were presumably influenced by her own unhappy early marriage at the age of sixteen in 1824, which lasted at most four years, before she informally separated from her husband (on the grounds of his adultery). The emphasis that women of progressive (and sometimes suffragist) views placed on this matter of choice prefigured that well-­known adage of second-­wave feminism in the 1970s: ‘the personal is political’. In the nineteenth century, where patriarchal domination of the nuclear family was a metaphor for state control, women’s path to greater autonomy began in the home  – and above all, in their right to choose a partner. Those dreams of independent choice were fuelled by the myth of romance. Idealised love, the ‘immenso, eterno amor’ described by Leonora in Il trovatore that overcame all earthly obstacles and signalled lasting ties, had deep roots in Italian literature, where the enduring tales of devotion in the platonic relationships between Dante/Beatrice, and Petrarch/Laura stood as exemplars of unconsummated, unrequited love. A slightly different model was provided by the most famous novel of the epoch, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (which first appeared in embryonic form in 1823 and found final shape in 1840/2). Manzoni used the tale of two virtuous peasants’ attempt to marry in the seventeenth century as a symbol for the struggle for political freedom: Renzo and Lucia survive a long series of trials and separations until their fidelity, goodness and belief in amore are rewarded by marriage at the end of the book. Later feminists would argue that the idealisation of romantic love was a means of subjugating women and perpetuating a marriage system whereby women moved merely from the rule of their fathers to that of their husbands.41 Paradoxically, however, the feelings engendered by society’s valorisation of romantic love also increasingly opened the route for women to challenge patriarchal control. In 1856, Pietro Thouar struggled with an important question: should parents allow the marriage of their daughter to

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be determined by ‘amore’ and the choice of the couple themselves?42 It was a question that gained ever more currency as the years passed, and one that would eventually remodel society.43 As Harry Oosterhuis writes, the notion of ‘true’ love ‘became the reigning standard to justify sexuality’, leading to sexuality’s eventual uncoupling from moral, reproductive, familial and economic factors.44 The fictional discourses around love encouraged the development of these new ideas of personal liberty, often in conflict with familial commands. The freedom (or its lack) to choose a partner was thus a pervading motif of the period in literature and on the stage. Operatic plots, as the unnamed censor writing in La civiltà cattolica declared in 1854, made much of the tension between father and daughter as a narrative strategy: ‘a father, who either from pride, avarice, vengeance or caprice, opposes the nuptial inclinations of a young daughter’. 45 It was certainly a common enough trope in Verdi’s operas; almost all his young heroines exhibit the desire of making their own choice of a husband, with various consequences. An early example was Verdi and Cammarano’s 1845 setting of Voltaire’s Alzire, ou les Américains, reducing the long debate between the drama’s eponymous heroine and her father Ataliba on her right to choose to a much more pithy exchange in the opera. When Alzira is told by Ataliba that she must marry Gusmano, the killer of her (seemingly) dead lover, Zamoro, her response is direct and immediate: ‘No’, she declaims ‘in tuono deciso’ (‘in decided tone’). This stage direction is perhaps especially necessary given that limited musical space is provided for Alzira’s rebellious comment. Her succinct refusal (a crotchet-­held d′′) falls on the second beat of the bar; Ataliba’s response on the following beat and on the same note on which his earlier phrase had finished (as if he barely registered her intervention), is equally swift: ‘Quando il padre impone / Ubbidisce la figlia’ (‘When the father commands / The daughter obeys’). Alzira’s expansive vow (‘O! … Pria la morte!’), made judiciously after her father’s exit, is the defining statement of her later actions – although it proves not to be her own death but Gusmano’s that she foretells. Alzira’s resistance eventually triumphs despite the strictures of an age that promised dire consequences to filial disobedience. Her success perhaps owed less to her own determination, however, than to Voltaire’s treatment of the sensitive political overtones of an arranged match with the scion of the ruling foreign power. Another Verdian father, significantly of northern European provenance, is more understanding than Ataliba.46 Luisa Miller (1849) is the first of Verdi’s ‘domestic’ dramas. Although Miller fears for his daughter’s happiness with the mysterious Carlo, he refuses to forbid the relationship. ‘Sacra la scelta è un consorte’, he sings in Act i: ‘Non sono tiranno, padre sono io, / non si comanda de’ figli al cor’ (‘The choice of a husband is sacred, / I am not a tyrant, I am a father, / One does not command the heart of one’s children’). Even after learning that Carlo is actually Rodolfo, son of the hated Count Walter, Miller’s anger is mollified when Rodolfo swears to honour his oath to marry Luisa. Given that Luisa intends an ostensibly good match with the son of the

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local landowner, there is perhaps little to fear. Verdian heroines rarely make the mistake of falling in love with someone below their social station. Alvaro (La forza del destino) may be of Inca heritage, but he is also of royal blood; Manrico, the secret amoroso of Leonora (Il trovatore), initially appears as a wandering troubador and the son of a gypsy, but is ultimately revealed (to the audience, if not to Leonora) as an aristocrat. The union of young lovers in Verdi’s operas is more commonly imperilled by other factors, such as ethnicity, nationality and religion, as is evident in I Lombardi alla prima crociata, La forza del destino and Aida – or, as in Luisa Miller and La traviata, by the designs of the hero’s father to ensure a socially acceptable wife for his son. There is one exception to this upwardly mobile trait of Verdian heroines. The twenty-­year time span of Simon Boccanegra (1857; rev. 1881) reveals the family history of the opera’s corsair hero and the high-­born woman he loved, Maria Fiesco. Maria’s fate dominates the unfolding of the narrative, although she is a character we never see and only apprehend through the descriptions of others. In the prologue we learn that her ‘impuro amore’ with Boccanegra had resulted in an infant daughter (now in the care of Boccanegra), while Maria herself has been imprisoned in her family’s palazzo, her father Fiesco still implacably opposed to her marriage with her lover. Maria’s laments are the only human sounds now to be heard within those ancient walls; the flickering flame of her candle as she paces through the rooms at night is the only visible sign of her existence. And yet even this nebulous presence shortly dissipates into pure spectrality, with the announcement of her death. The prologue ends on Boccanegra’s grief  – doubled by the mysterious disappearance of his daughter – juxtaposed with the news of his election as Doge. In the ensuing acts set two decades later, Boccanegra demonstrates that some fathers can learn from the mistakes of others. When he is finally united with his (now adult) daughter Amelia, Boccanegra finds himself faced with another young woman determined on her own choice of husband – a man, moreover, whom Boccanegra justly describes as his ‘enemy’. The argument between father and daughter is intense, and reveals an odd disjunction between Verdi’s views of the role of Amelia and his musical depiction of her character. His description of Amelia as a ‘modest, quiet, thin, wispy young woman’ recalls the ghost of her mother;47 during the revision process in 1881, he queried the potential casting of Anna D’Angeri on the grounds that ‘the power of her voice and personality would not be suitable for playing the role of a modest, withdrawn girl, a kind of nun’.48 And yet Amelia requires the kind of heft possessed only by sopranos with a certain steel in their voices. Her demand to be united with Gabriele Adorno in the Allegro agitato of her scena with her father in Act ii (‘Figlia!’) is a spirited and unequivocal response about the consequences of any denial of their match. ‘Con lui morrò …’ (‘I will die with him’), she declares; and then when her father asks ‘L’ami cotanto?’ (‘Do you love him so much?’), her defiance is plain. Her expansive declaration, ‘L’amo d’ardente, d’infinito amor’ (‘I love him with a passionate unending love’) with

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its final phrase leaping from f′′ to b♭′′ and then arching down two octaves in arpeggio requires evenness of strength from top to bottom. Even the most nun-­like of women, in Verdi’s imagination, can be transformed by love into a blazing crusader. Boccanegra thus finds himself on the opposite side to that which he had occupied with Maria in his youth. This time, however, things will be different – Maria’s daughter will have her man, enemy or no. Despite this rare lieto fine for lovers in the Verdian canon, celebrated in the wedding hymn we hear in the final act, the overall tone of the opera remains sombre.49 One might expect a sense of peace and resolution at the end: although Boccanegra, poisoned by Paolo, is dying, he has defeated the powers of darkness, put down an uprising, ensured his daughter’s happiness, forgiven Fiesco for the death of his beloved Maria and secured the future leadership of the community by appointing Gabriele as the next Doge. A happier tragic ending could hardly be conceived since Giovanna d’Arco, replete with glory on the battlefield, strode confidently to heaven in 1845. And yet the music speaks very differently here, partly because of the emphasis on low male voices, partly because Boccanegra himself never shakes off the grief of Maria’s loss. Verdi himself described the opera many years later as ‘too sad, too desolating’.50 While Boccanegra finally accepts his daughter’s decision with some grace, the earlier, more brutal reaction of Fiesco finds further development in the characters of the marchese and his son in La forza del destino (1862). In the hours before her planned elopement with Alvaro, Leonora is racked with anguish at the thought of leaving her kindly father. Can so loving a parent really be opposed to the fulfilment of her happiness, she wonders? Her filial feelings ironically cause the fatal delay in her departure and lead to her father’s death. On discovering her with Alvaro, the marchese’s affectionate accents (earlier described by the conscience-­stricken Leonora as like ‘knives’ in her heart) are transformed into vicious epithets flung at both Alvaro and her: ‘Vil seduttor! Infame figlia!’ (‘Vile seducer! Infamous daughter!’). He promptly disowns Leonora, contemptuously declaring that that Alvaro is not even worthy of his personal revenge. It is plain that the marchese’s idea of ‘love’ for his daughter depended primarily on his notions of ‘honour’: a concept here attributed to the opera’s setting of seventeenth-­century Spain but one that still held sway in large parts of Italy and resulted in much violence against both women and men.51 Codes of honour, arbiters of social status that depended on masculine control of female sexuality, were at their most extreme in southern Italy, but evident to a lesser extent throughout the peninsula.52 The blood toll demanded by the servicing of these codes was considerable. In the seven years following Unification, according to Paolo Fambri (a keen duellist himself ), some 3,000 duels were fought.53 Such events were in part responsible for Italy’s homicide rates – the highest in Europe by a large margin.54 The penalties for women who transgressed honour codes were arguably even more extreme, in the sense that duelling between men implies a degree of matched abilities,

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whereas male on female violence is rarely of similar ilk. In La forza del destino, Leonora discovers that her forbidden love imperils not only her life and that of Alvaro, but those of her father and brother. Even as he lies dying, fatally wounded by Alvaro’s accidental discharge of his pistol, the marchese curses his daughter as she tries to help him: ‘Lungi da me. Contamina tua vista la mia morte!’ (‘Get away from me! The sight of you contaminates my death!’).55 Yet for all the guilt and grief that Leonora then endures, her severance from home and family, and her years of penitence as a hermit, her proscribed passion for Alvaro continues to haunt her. As we saw in the previous chapter, her final aria in Act iv, ‘Pace, pace, mio Dio!’, is a desperate plea for release from her endless reveries on a man with whom she can never be united but can never cease loving. Oblivion arrives via the thrust of her vengeful brother’s knife, as he lies himself dying after his duelling with Alvaro. The dreaming of young women figures in many of Verdi’s operas; it has especial significance in I masnadieri, Rigoletto and Il trovatore.56 All these heroines conjure up particularly intense images of their beloved. Their abandonment to such reveries was in itself an act of rebellion. According to Mastriani, illicit fantasising on ‘longed-­for, distant and prohibited things’ was harmful for young women.57 Even as late as 1897, Anna Vertua Gentile warned her female readers against that ‘febrile ardour that nurtures the idle spirit with dreams and fills the heart with chimeras, consuming and destroying it’. No good could come from such flights of longing, she continued: ‘Imagination or fantasy is almost always the cause of unhappiness.’58 That unhappiness is evident in the extremes of sacrifice made by Verdi’s young heroines: Leonora commits suicide in a fruitless attempt to rescue Manrico; Gilda permits herself to be murdered to save the Duke; Amalia implores Carlo to kill her rather than leave her (he obliges, albeit with initial reluctance). The women’s fevered dwelling on their lovers reads therefore as an indication of the peculiar vehemence of their feelings; giving way to these private, metaphysical transgressions of rationality foreshadows their later, more concrete actions of self-­forfeiture. It also emphasises the degree of their idealisation of their lovers. These women are less in love with ‘real’ men, than in the sway of perceived qualities that, at least with regard to Carlo and the Duke, are revealed to be sadly mistaken. Amalia’s cavatina, ‘Lo sguardo avea degli angeli’, is the most unambiguous imagining of her lover. In this articulation of her ‘sogno divin’, Amelia makes it plain that her love for Carlo was physically enjoyed and expressed, dwelling on the delight of their kisses: Lo sguardo avea degli angeli che Dio creò d’un riso! I baci suoi stillavano gioir di ­paradiso! Nelle sue braccia!

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women Un vortice d’ebbrezza n’avvolgea. Come due voci unisone, sul core il cor battea! Anima uniasi ad anima fuse ad un fuoco istesso, e terra e ciel parevano stemprarsi in quell’amplesso. (He had a look of the angels / whom God created from laughter! / His kisses exuded / the joys of paradise! / In his arms! / A vortex of elation enveloped us. / Two voices as one, / heart beating on heart! / Soul united with soul / fused in the same fire, / And earth and heaven seemed / to dissolve in that embrace.)

Although a similar passage appears in Schiller’s original text (Die Räuber, 1781), it occurs at a later moment in the drama and, despite some references to kisses, is rather less explicit – a formal song that Amalia sings sadly to her own lute accompaniment, believing that Karl is dead. The diegetic nature of the song also suggests that Amalia has elected to sing it because of its appropriateness to her own sentiments, rather than it constituting a self-­authored declaration. In Verdi’s opera, Amalia believes that Carlo is still alive. And her words are most definitely her own: the stage directions (the cavatina is to be sung ‘as if drawn from impromptu thought’) tell us so. Her eulogy thus carries the weight of the memory of actual experience, and the implicit hope that such experiences may be renewed. Amalia’s insistence on the physical and emotional effects of Carlo’s embraces strikes a different tone from that of many earlier Italian libretti (often censored for moral reasons),59 and indeed clashed with the epoch’s ideas about women’s supposed sexual passivity.60 The inclusion of such explicit material here, accompanied by actual embraces on stage later in the opera, might have been due to the fact that Verdi and Maffei were writing for a London theatre. Yet Verdi’s music is strangely uneasy with the sensuality of such words. The stage direction might be responsible for the halting rhythm of Amalia’s opening phrases. Only on the words ‘Nelle sue braccia! … un vortice d’ebbrezze n’avolgea’ does the music open into a broad sustained phrase. Curiously, it was marked ‘con passione’ in Verdi’s autograph score, although changed to ‘con espressione’ in Ricordi’s printed versions: a subtle but telling difference. The initial intention of this direction had been altered by the adjustments Verdi made in order to suit Jenny Lind’s voice. The addition of decorative triplets undercuts the strong passion of the earlier version, while the fractured phrases also detract from the erotic implications of the words. Written for a singer noted for her piety and declared discomfort with all things theatrical, the fioriture added by Verdi at the later stage of writing disguise the sense of the words as much as they reveal Lind’s vocal accomplishments. 61 The positioning of the cavatina during Amalia’s solicitude for the sleeping, elderly Massimiliano demonstrates the way a daughter’s care (or in this case, a substitute

­Romanc

daughter) might hide other, far less appropriate thoughts. At the opera’s première in London, however, any such nuance escaped at least one critic from the Daily News: [T]he old Count Maximilian is discovered sleeping on a couch, and Amalia watching over him. This tableau, as presented by Lablache and Jenny Lind, was beautiful. Her figure bending over the old man, her face beaming with tender pity, and her soft accents, praying, with celestial sweetness, that his sleep might be tranquil, were moving in the extreme; but we were quite unable to comprehend the composer’s design in immediately putting into her mouth an air full of brilliant fioriture. Notwithstanding the exquisite manner in which it was sung, its want of dramatic truth seemed to be felt by the audience.62

Here, there is an evident misunderstanding of the cavatina’s content; the critic has read aural meaning solely as relating to Amalia’s visual image of tending to Massimiliano. This, after all, was the desired image of womanhood at the epoch (one that would be enshrined by George Elgar Hicks as the final picture in his triptych Woman’s Mission in 1863). That Amalia could be engaged in one dutiful action and yet lost in fantasies of her exiled lover underlines the subversiveness of women’s dreaming. And the fantasy becomes a form of prophecy. Amalia describes the elation that enveloped her in Carlo’s arms as ‘come due voci unisone’ (‘two voices as one’). Sure enough, when she and Carlo finally find each other again, they sing in unison – a marked contrast to her earlier duet with Carlo’s villainous brother Francesco, when, repelling his sexual advances, she rejects his music in favour of  her own. Verdi’s next dreaming virgin was Gilda in Rigoletto, whose onstage encounter with her lover in Act i is entirely enclosed within reverie. Her initial fantasy in fact summons him into existence like Mephistopheles responding to Faust’s call. Gilda’s arching phrase on how either ‘dreaming or awake’ her heart calls to him (‘Sognando, o vigile sempre lo chiamo, / e l’alma in estasi le dice T’a–’) is completed triumphantly by the Duke himself (‘T’amo!’) as he emerges from his hiding-­place. If initially alarmed by his appearance, Gilda soon finds herself actually inside her dream: the Duke’s impassioned eulogy to ‘amore’ surpasses her expectations of this moment (‘Ah de’ miei vergini sogni son queste le voci tenere sì care a me!’) (‘Ah, these are the tender voices, so dear to me, of my virginal dreams!’). And once he has all too soon departed, Gilda lapses again into rapt contemplation. The stage directions record that ‘Gilda remains staring at the door by which he left’ as she begins ‘Caro nome’, a musical lingering on that enchanted name of Gualtier Maldé, falsely given by the Duke. Her physical immobility finds some echo in aural terms. The aria’s first quatrain of descending phrases are shaped like a series of sighs, but the separated quavers check the momentum, as if Gilda can hardly bear to exhale but wants this instant of secret delight to last for ever. To at least one critic of the day, Marco Marcelliano Marcello, Gilda’s aria seemed musically to embody sexual innocence in itself and drew from the listener a response oddly similar to that of the Duke: ‘This is a melody so virginal, so fresh, and embellished

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with such elegance, that it enamours and seduces.’63 While Gilda’s mixture of intense absorption and palpitation could evoke a voyeuristic sexual response from others, she herself remains oblivious to such interpretations. Unlike Amalia, Gilda talks not about her lover’s body but simply his name, forever engraved in her heart ‘fin l’ultimo sospiro’ (‘until the last breath’). And yet while her embellishments around this idea create the effect of girlish play, an enjoyment of the sweet illusion of new love, the aria is also a foreshadowing of serious intent – Gilda’s naïve vow will be rigidly kept. If not quite her ‘ultimo sospiro’, which she reserves for her father, the Duke is indeed granted her penultimate thought: ‘A lui, perdonate’ (‘Forgive him’). And already this dreamy idyll begins to shade into the beginnings of nightmare, even if Gilda herself remains unconscious of the dark stealing across her bright vision. The final phrases of ‘Caro nome’ are cleverly intruded with the voices of the courtiers, as Gilda disappears into the interior of the house, still heard but no longer seen: an acoustic effect that will be echoed in the final scene of the opera in the Duke’s careless repetition of an entirely contrasting statement, ‘La donna è mobile’ (‘Woman is fickle’), as he leaves the inn while she lies bleeding her life away in the street. Gilda has of course fallen prey to one of the most feared masculine incarnations of the period: the seduttore. The act of seduction (that is, the deflowering of young women on the promise of marriage) was a criminal offence in most states prior to Unification and part of the civil code from 1865.64 Its destruction of a woman’s social capital had often devastating results; Virginia Paganini described the ‘seduction of innocence’ as a crime above all others.65 As we can see, Gilda is seduced not only by the name of her beloved but by the dream of romance itself. Her relationship with this stranger had begun propitiously on holy ground, in church at prayer, where her eyes met his: ‘dagl’occhi il cor parlò’ (‘the heart spoke from the eyes’). This was a common trope in Italian literature. In Fosca (‘Passion’), Igino Tarchetti described the single glance that plunges Giorgio and Clara into their affair (‘Love, the most complex and powerful of all the passions, is at the same time the most simple in its birth. A man and a woman meet, they see each other, they look – it is enough’).66 But it was also born from social reality: where the genders were often kept so rigidly separated, the gaze took on especial significance and was in consequence policed where possible.67 Gilda’s return of the Duke’s gaze was a clear transgression in a period where young women were counselled to lower their eyes when outside the safety of the domestic fortress. 68 Her attraction to his physical beauty is her first step towards her doom.69 To Gilda, romance is all: the Duke’s sighs and sweet words are to her the ineluctable signs of intent devotion. To him, they are merely the tricks of his seductive trade: When asked if she will love him, Gilda cautiously returns the question ‘E voi?’ (‘And you?’); the Duke’s response, however, is immediate: ‘L’intera vita … poi …’ (‘My whole life … so …’).

­Romanc Example 3.1  Rigoletto, Act i

­ A more knowing woman might have been alerted by the speed of this assertion and the greater weight the Duke gives to that suggestive ‘poi’, which surely illustrates that his romantic declaration is but the precursor to the real and more physical business of his dalliance. However, the Duke’s experience in the arts of seduction enables him to mirror carefully Gilda’s dreams, telling her exactly what she wants to hear (as in fulfilling her desire that he be a poor student). Leonora in Il trovatore similarly falls for a mysterious stranger. Yet as she reveals in her double-­aria ‘Tacea la notte placida’ (Act i), she was wooed not so much by the sight of her lover, as by the sound of his voice. True, as she reveals to her companion, Inez, in their opening recitative, she first met him as an unknown knight, armoured in sable, who conquered the listings at the tournament; she herself bestowed the victor’s wreath on his brow. Then, as civil war engulfed the country, he vanished; their fleeting acquaintance was nothing more than a ‘sogno d’aurato’ (‘a golden dream’), and her days passed in sorrow. And then – and here the Andante begins with its light thrumming in the strings – unexpectedly she heard his disembodied voice on the evening air. She was beguiled too by the sublime setting of this aural encounter: the complesso of the serene night and silver moon, the soft plaintive chords of the lute and the melancholy

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verses the shadowy troubador sang. Most of all, perhaps, she was enraptured by the sound of her name on his lips. The effect of his voice is such as even to blind her to physical realities – hence her unfortunate blunder later in the act when she mistakes the conte di Luna, Manrico’s sworn enemy (and, unbeknown to both, his brother), for the troubador. Like Amalia, Leonora turns to images of heaven to explain her feelings; ‘Gioia provai che agl’angeli / solo è provar concesso! / Al core, al guardo estatico, / la terra un ciel sembrò’ (‘I felt the joy that is conceded only to angels! / To the heart, to the enraptured gaze, / the earth seemed like heaven’). This imagery underlined the earthly paradise supposedly created by human love – which, in the eyes of some, was merely a reflection of divine love.70 In recounting the details of that first meeting to Inez, Leonora perhaps expects that her friend too will be seduced by that enchantment; instead, she is roundly counselled to forget Manrico. For at least one critic in 1853, that female advice was hardly enough. Mazzucato threw a disapproving eye on Leonora’s liberated state from the encumbrances of patriarchal family: And who in fact is Leonora? Who is this young enamoured woman, who disposes so freely of her heart, of herself, without a grandfather, a father, an uncle, a relative, someone who protects her? Rather than an honest, modest girl, one would almost say she was a thoughtless and capricious widow.71

The attempt by Inez to wrest Leonora from her spellbound state simply arouses her to a cabaletta (‘Di tale amor, che dirsi’) in which she reveals that her heart is intoxicated by this love. She can live only if near this mysterious stranger, she declares; and if she cannot live with him, she will die for him. As with ‘Caro nome’, Leonora’s double aria is no mere empty platitude but, as the end of the opera reveals, the articulation of real intent. All three heroines are emboldened to the most piteous sacrifices for the men they love. Other women die for their men in Verdi’s repertory, but few men are arguably less deserving of such attention than the Duke in Rigoletto or Carlo in I masnadieri. Even Manrico shows scant gratitude to Leonora for her suicidal attempt to save his life, preferring instead to accuse first her of infidelity and then (once he has realised the truth) himself for his blindness. But for all the emphasis on the epoch’s adhesion to the idea of female self-­sacrifice, it is worth noting that the constancy of these heroines flew in the face of other ideas about women. Belgioiso summarised the main complaints about women: ‘the thoughtlessness, inconstancy, volubility and submissiveness of women has become proverbial, and no one would dream of contradicting or disputing such an old axiom. Everyone accepts it, and no-­one examines it.’72 Even one of Verdi’s own eventual librettists reveals such a prejudice. In a review for La perseveranza on 13 October 1863, Arrigo Boito drew an unflattering comparison between the public and women:

­Romanc The public is a woman in everything, in virtue, in ugly vices, in reasoning, in heart. At its worst, its sins are thoughtlessness, pertinacity, concupiscence, all singularly feminine sins; [to which] one can also add the woman-­like gossipy ways of our public. At its worst, it is easily charmed, easily bored; and thus stubborn when it clashes with the wrong person; coquettish when it listens to whoever praises and strokes it softly, but little equal to harsh truths. At its best, its gifts are love, submission, modesty; then it turns towards beauty with the passion of a poet, and humbly hangs on the words of genius, with ardent greed for knowledge.73

In contrast, Verdi’s conscientious, loyal heroines demonstrate few such failings (Gilda’s portrayal is in fact designed precisely to disprove the Duke’s belief that ‘la donna è mobile’). Their dreams are both fiction and reality: indications of the depth of their desires that are none the less pursued with relentless vigour regardless of the consequences. Emboldened to acts of daring far beyond the usual narrow circle of bourgeois female existence, love as it appears in the minds of these young women is worth the ultimate sacrifice – their own lives. Such action might seem excessive. But what else remained for them? In valorising their dreams, even to the grisly end, these women at least escaped the fate of existence that might otherwise await them. Anna Maria Mozzoni drew a bleak picture of the life of the middle-­class woman: You realise that if you want to pass life tranquilly you are forced to suffocate every dream of glory, virtue, liberty and love, and that the mission that is inexorably mapped out for you is a life full of the boring, trivial and daily practices of domestic life, so that material, automatic, continuous work, without rights, without reward, without independence, without rest and without dignity, is your part.74

In this scheme of things, grand gestures of the operatic kind were but little appreciated by the moralists. Anna Vertua Gentile complained that a young relative had extravagantly declared herself ready to make ‘any sacrifice’ for her husband, but in fact she failed to make ‘the little, everyday sacrifices’ that were necessary for domestic happiness.75 The refusal of Verdi’s heroines to bow to this inexorable suffocation, to pursue instead their own choices, might be seen in itself as a form of (albeit circumscribed) resistance. Other women increasingly questioned even ‘amore’ itself. In 1885, La scena illustrata published an article by a writer signing herself only as ‘Carmelita’. Entitled ‘Amore o musica’, it was a response to a question posed by the editor and drawn from Berlioz: was it music or love that had the greater power to elevate sentiment? The author, presumably writing from bitter experience, argued that she believed in music, but not love: ‘Love! A word empty of sense and meaning: created by men to poetize their brutal desires … and by women in order to glorify their abandonments.’ Music, in contrast, had been fashioned by angels and was ‘the arcane language with which every human

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creature speaks to God!’.76 Music, she claimed, aroused men and women to religion and patriotism; love only blinded both sexes: Love! You are at the window on a warm summer evening. Inebriated by the acrid scent of the jasmine and the acacia, you hear the soft murmer of ‘I love you’ (studiedly false): and ‘you are as beautiful as an angel’ (said with the intention of masking another phrase less pure, less sublime), and your flight towards paradise will be made with the wings of Icarus. The inflamed gust of hate, of abandonment, will dissolve the affection that joined those ridiculous wings to your body and you will fall prostrate to the earth … Love? Of a gentle and honest man, you make a blind, famished wild beast, like the wolf of Dante, as intransigent as Pius IX’s Syllabus [of Errors]. You disturb his dreams: ‘Tacea la notte placida’ sweetly deludes the sleep of even the most surly and insensitive of men. A mere suspicion furnishes the arm of Otello with a sharpened knife in order to strike blindly.77

The dismissal of that much-­fêted flight to paradiso as nothing more than a mundane part of the reproductive process was perhaps the clearest sign of women’s growing disillusion with the period’s mask of romance – or at least, where it figured as merely a means to manipulate the unwary (as ‘Carmelita’ clearly perceives in her reference to Leonora’s aria from Il trovatore), or where it confounded sense and led to violence (as in Rossini’s Otello). Nor was Carmelita a lone voice. In Neera’s Indomani (1889), the unhappy Marta is told by her mother that the celebration of ‘amore’ in poetry, music and art was merely a commercial activity that took place only because ‘true love’ between the sexes did not exist; the discourses about love did not gesture towards its presence but rather confirmed its absence.78 For women like Marta and ‘Carmelita’, the equation of ‘love’ and ‘music’ had become a profoundly more complex and unsettling idea than it had been for Casoni almost 300 years earlier. Their doubts about what love held for women related to other dark aspects of sexuality and marriage – features, as we shall see in the following chapters, that also emerged in Verdi’s operas.

­4

­Sexuality

Perhaps no other single passage in Verdi’s oeuvre constituted such a provocation to the period’s conservative ideas about women as Violetta’s paean to the pleasures of sexual liberty and independence. Taken Violetta, La traviata, Act ­i in isolation, the infectious brio of ‘Sempre libera’ exemplified a disturbing disregard for the code of honour (which rested on man’s ability to protect the purity of his wife and daughters), the social duties of women as wives and mothers enshrined in law, and religious concepts of female chastity and obedience to male authority. And it spoke of the body in a context that had long been troubling for Italian moralists. Violetta’s use of her body as a means of purchasing or experiencing pleasure lay in the dangerous realm of sensation. In 1836 (reprinted again as Sull’educazione: Desideri in 1851), Niccolò Tommaseo articulated a typical distinction between ‘passion’ and ‘affection’:

‘Gioire, Di voluttà nei vortici perire. Sempre libera degg’io Folleggiar di gioia a gioia.’

Passion is a destroyer; affection is the only true creator. Passion emboldens and torments the soul; affection relieves and warms it. Passion is intolerant, blind, imprudent, provocative; affection is constant, human, magnanimous. Passion draws to itself hate, distrust, contempt; affection [attracts] sympathy, active pity, love. Passion is a torrent that stuns, drags along and devastates in order to conquer; affection runs quietly but inexhaustibly, and through various streams descends to bear the joys of life into the lowest and most secluded places.1

Hazardous for both genders, the violent, vehement feelings of ‘passion’ held especial perils for women.2 In Doveri delle donne, Giuseppe Mastriani stipulated that the enemy of female virtue was ‘passion’, which unfettered by rationality led inexorably to ‘moral slavery’ and even madness.3 As Violetta exemplifies, however, other ideas were infiltrating Italy in the early 1850s: some relating to much older traditions (particularly in the countryside), others to the development of cities and industrialisation, the printing press and the new mania for reading books and newspapers, and yet others to external theoretical sources. The French novels and plays that became a much-­criticised source of entertainment in Italy brought whispers of different notions of social interaction between the genders. 4 That body of literature owed something to the radical utopianist Charles Fourier and his ideas of social and individual harmony. In a complex analysis of the Séries passionnées,5 Fourier argued that ‘passion’ was an integral, natural part of human experience, and that moral repression of such feelings placed man and woman in constant war with

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themselves and each other. In the case of women, lack of social and political equality exacerbated matters further. Ideas of propriety and social mores ‘deprived women of liberty in love’, making them slaves to the stronger sex accorded all the freedom women were denied. Hence, Fourier declared, the ‘feminine character’ was forced into an ‘obligatory hypocrisy’.6 The dark veils of hypocrisy and secrecy that hung over the period are only one factor that hinders our attempts to understand the complexities of nineteenth-­century women’s relationship to sexual activity and passion. Antonia Pasi and Paolo Sorcinelli ask how can we appreciate women’s attitudes to such matters of heart and body in a time so different from our own: when women endured multiple pregnancies, contraception was crude, ineffective and discouraged (later forbidden) by Catholicism, sex education was virtually non-­existent, hygiene practices were lacking, and where women were denied equal legal rights with men?7 Opera’s engagement with at least some of these issues was palpable, but oblique. The theatrical stage itself was an erotic arena in which the interplay of the exposure of women’s (and men’s) bodies, the outpourings of often illicit sentiments, the long associations between female performers and courtesans, and the element of fantasy all conspired to create a titillating atmosphere. Physical contact between the genders was nonetheless carefully limited. In Verdi’s operas (up until his final two works), kisses are occasionally referred to, but never stipulated in the stage directions. Instead, embraces are more usual. In Giovanna d’Arco, the heroine cements her much-­contested abandon to Carlo’s importunings by collapsing in his arms on ‘T’amo!’ – although swiftly withdrawing in a paroxysm of guilt when she hears the angels’ warning about the perils of earthly affection. Leonora’s dutiful embrace of her father in La forza del destino is followed by her enclosure in Alvaro’s ardent caress. A sense of the body is yet conspicuous in Verdi’s operas by other means. We might argue that in fact he brings the ‘body’ on stage in a manner quite different from previous composers, through characterisation (we need think only of the required ‘ugly and malignant’ appearance of Lady Macbeth,8 Rigoletto’s physical deformity and Violetta’s disease); through the athletic shifts he exerted on the act and techniques of singing (the uneven phrase lengths that altered breathing patterns, the wide leaps, the extended high notes, the raised tessitura of baritones and mezzo-­sopranos); through the physically focused injunctions to the singers that littered his scores (con passione, un grido, con slancio and so on); and through the rhythmic vigour and variation in his scores that was read by critics such as Abramo Basevi as visceral potency. Passione in this sense was regarded as a fundamental feature of his operas. Yet in the greater part of his operas, the sexual body per se seems less apparent. Indeed, some modern critics argue that if Verdi’s music was reserved in matters of romantic love, his portrayal of sensuality was all but non-­existent.9 (It is not, as we will see, a view wholly shared by critics of his day.) Much has been made of his claim in 1844,

­Sexualit

in reference to a proposal that he set Hugo’s Marion Delorme, that he did not like to see ‘whores’ on stage.10 But a later letter, written on 7 February 1856, makes it plain that he had in fact seriously considered setting this drama: Many years ago, I myself had an outline made of Marion Delorme. Mapped out according to my ideas (as might well be supposed), it was totally different from the drama that you’ve sent me. To tell the truth, this libretto is not like those of all the young men who try to make their operas an imitation of the libretti of Romani and Cammarano, but it is not as sufficiently candid as I would like. I don’t mean that it is not well made and beautiful, but it doesn’t tally with my ideas. You know that for the last twelve years I’ve been accused of setting to music the worst libretti that had been or could be made, but (you see my ignorance!) I have the folly of believing, for example, that Rigoletto is one of the most beautiful libretti, save the poetry, that there may be. You will understand by that the bizarreness of my ideas; but nevertheless it is now too late to convert me.11

In the twelve years between these contrasting letters about Marion Delorme, of course, lay two operas, Rigoletto and La traviata, one of which dealt with rape and the other with the figure of the courtesan. With regard to the first, on 8 September 1852 Verdi refused a request from the impresario Carlo Antonio Borsi for an additional aria for his wife, the soprano Teresa De Giuli for a forthcoming production of Rigoletto, claiming that there was no place in the narrative bar one: There would be one place, but God help us! We would be flagellated. It would be necessary to see Gilda with the Duke in the bedroom!! Do you understand me? In any case, it would be a duet. A magnificent duet!! But the priests, the monks and the hypocrites would cry scandal. Oh, happy were the days when Diogenes could say in the public piazza to whoever was questioning what he did: ‘Hominen quaero’!12

Was Verdi was expressing a genuine desire to set this part of the drama? Or simply mischievously taking the opportunity of punishing Borsi for his request by painting the possibility of a very explicit scene a due for his wife? Censorship undoubtedly determined what Verdi was able to present on stage; what he might have wished to do without such fettering can only remain speculation. Certainly, if he was genuinely opposed to theatrical depictions of ‘whores’, it is difficult to know why he even attended the stage version of Dumas’ La Dame aux camélias (1852, following the publication of the novel in 1848), let alone set it to music;13 or indeed why he later regarded Zola, the creator of a series of controversial sexually emancipated women, as a new kind of Shakespeare.14 Above all, the circumstances of Verdi’s own personal life hardly accorded with the period’s strict conventions. His relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi (who had previously given birth to three illegitimate children and miscarried or aborted a fourth, by two or more lovers), and his much-­cited defence of their ten-­year cohabitation prior to their clandestine marriage (which finally took place on 29 August 1859) suggests adherence to or at least acceptance of the notion of ‘free

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women Example 4.1  Rigoletto, Act i

­ love’ – then increasingly in vogue among the more radical and artistic ­communities.15 Similarly suggestive is his support to Clara Maffei both during the active process of and in the long years following her formal separation from her husband (occasioned in part by her relationship with Carlo Tenca, another friend of Verdi’s) in 1846.16 It seems unlikely, then, that Verdi was a moral prude. But if censorship or simply his own sense of delicacy ruled the degree of explicitness in the narratives of his opera, sex could be sublimated in music. While the stage directions in Rigoletto require Gilda and her father to embrace on various occasions, no actual physical contact between Gilda and the Duke is ever similarly prescribed although it figured prominently in both the text and directions in Hugo’s drama. Yet at the end of the ‘Andantino’ between Gilda and the Duke in Act i, delineating the moment when Gilda cedes to his ardour, the two lovers share an unusual double cadenza, which in its lipping and dipping might indeed read as a kiss made into music.17 The two voices entwine and caress in a series of decorative phrases that embellish each other’s line as much as their own. The subsequent two bars of rest for the singers arguably leaves the space where this musical kiss might indeed become physical; but this presumably depended both on what censors would allow and on the choice of the singers. The most extended description of the sensuality of Verdi’s music during the epoch was made by Basevi concerning La traviata: ‘the love depicted by Verdi in this opera is voluptuous, sensual, deprived wholly of that angelic purity that is found in the music of Bellini.’18 In La traviata, Basevi declared, ‘all breathes lascivousness and voluptuousness’: a particularly expressive example was Alfredo’s phrase ‘Di quell’amor ch’è palpito’ (later repeated by Violetta in ‘Ah, fors’è lui’). Basevi’s evaluation of the sensuality of the phrase rested on its descent of an octave, ‘bearing thus in itself, in a certain way, the image of baseness’. Place this alongside the upward moving lines of ‘A te, o cara amor talor’ in Bellini’s I puritani, he argued, and ‘the difference of sensual love from the angelic kind so well dressed in the notes by Bellini’ was immediately apparent. 19 Whether this perceived ‘voluptuousness’ was Verdi’s initial intention in La traviata, he returned to a not dissimilarly shaped descending phrase in Aida (1871) when Amneris,

­Sexualit Example 4.2  La traviata, Act i

­ Example 4.3  Aida, Act ii

­

dressed and perfumed by her slaves, yearns for the presence of Radamès: ‘Ah! Vieni, amore mio, m’inebria, / Fammi beato il cor!’ (‘Come, my love, fill me with joy, / Make my heart glad!’) (Act ii, scene i). The chromaticism here suggests a heavy sensuality, particularly in the context of the slaves’ action of pampering and adorning Amneris’ body. Both Carmen (Bizet, 1875) and Dalila (Saint-­Saëns, 1877) would shortly avail themselves of a similar chromatic descent over an octave to signal eroticism. What, if any, meaning might this musical language of sexual desire have had for female spectators? After all, this was a period in which women’s bodies were not only

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mysterious to the opposite sex, but often equally so to women themselves. The cult of the Madonna from the 1850s combined with the formation in the next decade of the ‘new’ state of Italy following Unification (with its emphasis on family as the core of ­citizenry) brought an increased emphasis on female purity and chastity. The subsequent impact on many women is evident in various accounts of domestic sequestration and a lack of sexual education about menstruation and intercourse. 20 In his comments on the importance of modesty as the protector of female virtue, Mastriani counselled that young girls should be kept in a state of absolute ignorance about their bodies. 21 In such circumstances, the first sexual contact on the wedding night was understandably for some, in the words of the editor of Cordelia as late as 1909, a ‘trauma’: [A] young girl having left the vigil of school or the methods of a rigid education, who has never revealed more than two fingers of skin lower than her neck or above her wrists … will have to undress to her undergarments in the presence of a young man, get under the blankets of the same bed with him, and suddenly experience her most secret shame, often with depravity and brutality.22

It is hardly surprising that sex remained a continual problem in some marriages. 23 However, what was prescribed by moralists and religious authorities was not necessarily a full or accurate reflection of women’s private experiences. Many women had far more extensive physical relationships during courtship than was previously thought. The rigorous policing of meetings between engaged couples, at home under watchful chaperonage, was only part of the story.24 In their study of Casalecchio, a small town near Bologna, David Kertzer and Dennis Hogan reveal that more than 40 per cent of brides in 1880 were pregnant: a figure that rose to almost 60 per cent by the outbreak of the First World War.25 Italy was not the only country to experience high levels of bridal pregnancy; studies of various communities in Britain, France, Sweden and Belgium present similar figures.26 Given that sex by no means always leads to pregnancy, we might surmise that the number of women engaging in sexual activity outside wedlock was even greater. Nor was such activity limited to a particular social class. As the statistics for Casalecchio demonstrate, pregnancy was more common where both partners were literate.27 Education and urbanisation, therefore, led to greater sexual activity before marriage: not least because women in the cities managed to avoid the levels of familial supervision experienced by those in the poorer agricultural communities. 28 These rising figures suggest that the Marian cult had little real effect in stemming the tide of women’s increasing engagement in pre-­marital sexual activity. This is not to suggest that sexual relationships outside marriage were socially accepted or unproblematic; on the contrary, they were fraught with difficulties, frequently hidden and often the cause of pain and heartbreak. Some women in these statistics were almost certainly the victims of rape; others presumably engaged willingly in sexual activity. One young woman who became pregnant and was later charged

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with prostitution (which she angrily denied) claimed that she had submitted to the advances of a married man on a ‘whim and from a natural urge’ for sex, after four years of widowhood.29 Such a confession would not have been to her credit in the eyes of some. Women’s enjoyment of sex was considered either to be non-­existent or, at best, merely part of the initial mating process, to be replaced by other affections once the children were born.30 An article in the Corriere delle dame in 1852 claimed that motherhood sublimated female sexual desire, and that no respectable woman felt more for her husband once she had become a mother than ‘a spiritual sensuality’.31 Such ideas were given supposedly scientific confirmation later in the century in the writings of Cesare Lombroso (among others), who in 1891 declared roundly that women disliked sex. He claimed that he had often been consulted by women who described their husbands’ sexual demands as ‘torture’, and that 80 per cent of new brides confessed to being ‘nauseated’ by marriage, and would have resumed their single state if possible.32 (His last remark, we should note, was hearsay, supposedly from a Catholic priest by way of Alexandre Dumas; however, studies in Italy almost eighty years later in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that many women, particularly in the south, continued to ‘consider sexual relations almost entirely as part of female duties’ toward their husbands.)33 Lombroso’s conclusion was that ‘feminine love is a function subordinated by motherhood’, and that any apparent signs of sexual yearnings in women were merely part of their desire to procreate and/or maintain the security of their relationship with their husband.34 This idea of female sexual passivity, even frigidity, was nevertheless gradually countered by arguments that some women’s difficulty with sex was largely due to a lack of education of both genders. Jules Michelet’s L’Amour (1859), published in Italy in 1863, acknowledged female pleasure in the sex act although still framing it within the context of conception;35 more radical some years later was a trilogy of books by the anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza – Fisiologia dell’amore (1873), Igiene dell’amore (1878) and Gli amori degli uomini, saggio di etnologia dell’amore (1886) – which in sum demonstrated that physicality was a natural part of sentimental relationships and not limited to procreation.36 Mantegazza’s consideration of erotica in countries outside Europe in Gli amori degli uomini was designed to combat the sexual ignorance of Western civilisation, and to show that women could partake fully of the abundant sensations that sex offered, provided men were willing to learn about the specific nature of the female body.37 Gilda’s palpitations, Amalia’s sighs and Amneris’ languor might thus have been read as unhealthy, even unnatural indications of a latent sensuality by some; as a kind of incomprehensible fiction by others; or as revelatory of the hidden real desires of women by yet others. Some of Verdi’s characters not only experience sexual feelings but use them overtly as a means of manipulation. If in 1849 the composer was compelled by the Teatro di San Carlo to reduce the role of the duke’s mistress, Lady

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Milford, in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe to the much less interesting Federica von Ostheim for Luisa Miller,38 Verdi’s later operas made fuller use of the period’s binary oppositions of virgin/whore. In Act iii of Rigoletto, the aptly named Maddalena was initially introduced by the Duke’s demand to Sparafucile: ‘Tua sorella e del vino’ (‘Your sister and some wine’) – a line from Hugo’s text that emphasised Maddalena’s character of easy virtue, and which was immediately altered by the Venetian censors to ‘Una stanza e del vino’ (‘A room and some wine’). While the only stage direction denoting the physical relationship between Gilda and the Duke is that requiring him to kneel before her on his entrance, a very different kinesis between prostitute and aristocrat is here described. When Maddalena enters, ‘The Duke runs to embrace her, but she eludes him’; later, he takes her hand (on the line ‘Ogni saggezza chiudesi / nel gaudio e nell’amore’); after the quartet, he reaches for her again with the entreaty ‘Maddalena …’, but once more she escapes him with the excuse of her brother’s entrance; his last whispered words to her before he goes up to the bed are surely mention of a later assignation. All such instances (and more) are also found in Hugo’s drama; the decision by Piave and Verdi to include these embraces but remove the ones stipulated earlier between Blanche and the king was presumably made in order to enhance the difference between the virginal heroine and her sexually experienced rival – and of course, because the scene of the Duke’s betrayal in the inn would make little sense without them. Nonetheless, there are some small but important adjustments to Maguelonne’s character in the operatic adaptation. Like Gilda, Maddalena/Maguelonne is attracted to the Duke’s physical beauty, mentioning that he resembles Apollo – but where Maguelonne merely argues ‘Il m’aime fort’, Maddalena asserts ‘io l’amo … ei m’ama’ (‘I love him … and he loves me’).39 In attributing sentiment to Maddalena, Verdi and Piave undercut the aspect of commerce that otherwise lay behind her relationship with the nobleman. Indeed, the Duke’s life is saved and Gilda’s lost through the emotional efforts of both women. It is Maddalena’s tearful insistence that ‘Dobbiamo salvarlo!’ (‘We must save him!’) that persuades Sparafucile to agree to murder a different victim and leads to Gilda’s terrible decision. Maddalena plays a crucial but contained role in Rigoletto. More expansion of the character of the sexually-­conscious woman was offered to Eboli (Don Carlos) and Amneris (Aida). Like Maddalena, the darker timbre of their mezzo-­soprano voices reveal their erotic awareness. Neither, however, is a working girl, but rather princesses who might otherwise have made suitable partners for their chosen men. Sensuality is therefore repositioned in the characters of outwardly respectable women. Both actively solicit the attentions of their chosen men; both are rebuffed; and both, in their jealous fury, are subsequently the instrument of their beloved’s mortal danger. Their rage and their sexual assertion are part of the same panorama of extreme passion, just as the rich, deep tones of their voices are matched by exhilarating forays into their upper registers. Ultimately, both deplore their lack of emotional continence. Amneris’ solitary

­Sexualit

figure prostrate on Radamès’ subterranean tomb, dressed in mourning and with her voice ‘soffocato dal pianto’ pleading ‘Pace, t’imploro’, is the iconography of a woman ­subjugated by her own passione. Eboli’s ardent soliciting of Don Carlos is partly the result of a simple error. Believing that she is the target of his affections, she invites him to a nocturnal assignation – he, assuming her unsigned letter comes from his adored Élisabeth, attends. Only when Eboli removes her mask, after protestations of love have been made on both sides, do they each realise their mistake. In Eboli’s case, puzzlement swiftly turns to anger (‘Mais je suis, moi, une ennemie dangereuse!’) (‘But I am a dangerous enemy!’), and the already perilous fate of Élisabeth and Don Carlos hurtles toward disaster. Verdi had a clear understanding of Eboli’s sexually assertive profile, as his letter of 1 December 1882 (during the revision process of the score) reveals. He rejected Du Locle’s suggestion to soften her character by omitting her invitation to Carlos and thus make their meeting a chance encounter: As to making Eboli less odious, I am always of the opinion that it is necessary to show even the most odious characters to the public just as they are. Eboli is and can only be a coquine! And by presenting her thus, she becomes more interesting when her crimes against the Queen are revealed.40

Eboli’s ‘crimes’ included not only her betrayal of Carlos and her theft of Élisabeth’s letters, but an adulterous relationship with the king. Her admission of the latter act to Élisabeth was a point that Verdi said had been so far neglected, but which in his view was ‘beautiful and very important’.41 Cut from the original score before the Parisian première, it now returned in different form: an almost exact setting of Schiller’s original words on a broken descending declamatory scale (see Example 4.4). And yet the overall portrayal of Eboli differs noticeably from her counterpart in Schiller’s drama. Don Carlos endured the most complex history of all Verdi’s operas, undergoing a series of revisions from its first performance in 1867 until the final version in 1886;42 the character of Eboli arguably suffered most from the changes.43 One ambiguous aspect of her admission to Élisabeth in the revised version are the words ‘Séduite! … victime!’ Schiller also uses the word ‘seduced’ (‘Verführung’), but not ‘victim’; and even so, Élisabeth hears only part of the story. In the play, Eboli was certainly pursued by the king – but her liaison with him was entirely of her own choosing, and was entered into out of spite once she had been rebuffed by Carlos. She decides to abandon ‘virtue’ in favour of power. This part of the narrative is missing from all the operatic versions, and the implication of the 1884 setting followed by her aria ‘O don fatal’ (again without precedent in Schiller) lays all the blame on the king and the curse of her beauty. Not only is the extent of her sexual manipulation hidden in the opera, Verdi and Du Locle also initially attempted to portray her in more heroic light, rousing the rebellion in male garb to save her adored Carlos.44 Again, this crucial scene was lost in the

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women Example 4.4  Don Carlos, Act iii (1884 version)

­ p­ re-­performance cuts at the 1867 première,45 and all that remained were a couple of phrases at the end of her aria (‘Un jour me reste … Je le sauverai!’) (‘One day remains to me … I will save him!’) followed by her masked appearance in the mob of insurgents and her brief urging to Carlos, ‘Fuyez! fuyez!’. The new scene of Eboli’s confession brought special mention from the critics at the La Scala performance in 1884 (where the opera was given in Italian). In La perseveranza, Filippi wrote that there was ‘a new recitative with which Verdi has stupendously dramatised the situation where Eboli confesses her guilt to Elisabetta, and the Queen banishes her’.46 The Corriere della sera was even more fulsome: during the exchange between Eboli and the queen, the audience experienced ‘delicious, inexpressible shivers, because it found itself before the true musical tragedy, before a music which expresses step by step the sentiments of the characters’.47 And far from alienating the audience,

­Sexualit

the ‘odious’ Eboli often outshone Élisabeth in performance – this was certainly the experience of Pauline Guéymard at the Parisian première, and also, as the Corriere della sera revealed, of Giuseppina Pasqua at Milan in 1884: Eboli is a sympathetic and eminently artistic role. And Giuseppina Pasqua knew how to make her sympathetic … To her natural gifts of a beautiful and resonant voice is added the merit of knowing how to sing with expression and security. Her elegant stage presence contributes to give much emphasis to the character she represents.48

As Verdi knew full well, in those lilting strains he had composed for the ‘Chanson du voile’ and his insistence that Pasqua’s costume be ‘more elegant, more seductive, more provocative’, sex rather than virtue most often gained the applause. 49 R ape

Eboli’s use of the term ‘seduced’ had a specific meaning in Italian culture and law: it implied the physical act of defloration. While obviously there were instances when this was an agreed act, there were also cases when it was not and yet others when exactly what happened remained unclear. Elizabeth Hudson raises a critical question with regard to Rigoletto: has Gilda been raped – or seduced?50 If the latter, then her act of martyrdom and her persistence in her affection for the Duke have more logic: even, perhaps, a kind of defiance. Hudson points to the lacuna of an operatic equivalent to the scene between Blanche and the king in Hugo’s original drama, and argues that Gilda’s own account of what happened between herself and the Duke is further truncated. By ‘reading’ Gilda’s music in the ‘Piangi, piangi’ duet with Rigoletto against the ostensible meaning of the text, Hudson discovers that Gilda is not a ‘terrorised, shuddering girl, but rather a young woman embracing passion and finding the first glimmers of her self-­identity’.51 It is true that at the beginning of Act iii, Gilda, despite her abduction and deflowering, remains convinced that the Duke’s feelings for her are genuine: when Rigoletto asks her if she would still love him if he betrayed her, she replies: ‘Nol so … ma pur m’adora’ (‘I do not know … but he adores me’). But can we rescue Gilda so neatly from her passivity? I am less sure. The scene in Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse provides much information that is missing in Piave’s libretto. Blanche clearly resists the king both verbally and physically (pushing him away from her, and eventually fleeing the room); he nonetheless uses a variety of tactics to deal with her reluctance. He delineates triumphantly the extent of his power: La France, un peuple entier, quinze millions d’hommes, Richesse, honneurs, plaisirs, pouvoir sans frein ni loi, Tout est pour moi, tout est à moi, je suis le Roi! (France, an entire people, fifteen million men, / Riches, honours, pleasures, power ­without limit or law, / All is for me, all is mine, I am the king!’)

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And when Blanche tries to use her father as a counter-­authority, he makes it plain that he owns Triboulet too. As Blanche fails to be impressed by this royal swagger of manhood, the king resorts instead to impassioned suasion, assuring her that he did not mean to distress her. When this, too, does not produce the desired effect and Blanche locks herself in his bedroom, he triumphantly produces the key and follows her; the scene ends. We might read this moment as confirmation of rape – that where bluster and pleading have failed, violence will inevitably follow.52 On the other hand, however, perhaps the earlier part of the scene exemplifies the gist of the king’s approach; once safely behind locked doors, he will continue to bear down on her with the weight of his power and also, one might say, with his charm, until Blanche finally resists no longer. In other words, does he threaten or persuade? If the latter, then intercourse, given Blanche’s reluctance, would be coercive sex – but perhaps not precisely, given the absence of outright refusal, violent rape per se. Moreover, at the beginning of Act v we learn that her relationship with the king has continued for a month and that although she is aware he has wronged her, she nevertheless loves him and believes he loves her. However, although Hudson’s thesis for Rigoletto is possibly supported to some extent by Hugo’s original drama, we cannot base our speculation on the events of the missing scene on Gilda’s subsequent behaviour alone. Such reasoning presupposes a modern understanding of rape. In nineteenth-­century Italy, coercive sex and sexual violence were regarded rather differently, and the relationship of a woman to her attacker was often complex. It was a common enough crime. For example, rape and attempted rape constituted more than half of all cases processed before the courts in the Principato Citeriore, a rural territory south of Naples and dominated by Salerno, in the period 1849–62.53 But only the most severe cases, or those that could not be hidden, generally found their way to the courts.54 As Giovanni Greco states, we must assume the actual figures for sexual violence and coercion were much higher.55 Rape – and particularly the rape of a virgin – had long been considered in Italy as a crime against honour and social value, rather than against the body and psyche. 56 Thus punishment was about trying to correct the loss of value. Prior to Unification, those cases that were prosecuted were dealt with differently from state to state. 57 In Bologna under pontifical law, for example, the courts required men convicted of rape and impregnation to choose between three available penalties: either marriage with the victim; or the payment of all ensuing childbirth costs; or jail. 58 The latter could range from a four-­month term (1832) to three years (1857). The fact that marriage was even an option demonstrates that rape – even if this meant deflowering a virgin – was by no means considered as precluding a subsequent affectionate relationship. 59 The cases that came before the courts reveal that some women did indeed continue a sexual ­relationship following rape, perhaps out of fear, or confusion, or because they had no other choice. In contrast, by 1837 the Codice penale toscano had rescinded a similar law

­Sexualit

(article 98), on the grounds that it was ‘incompatible with the freedom of consent in marriage’.60 Penalties also depended on the status of the victim. The Italian codes in both Tuscany and Sardinia had lesser punishments for rapes of prostitutes; in contrast, the Austrian code differed on the grounds that ‘the prostitute, when opposed to the rape, has the same right as honest women to the protection of the law’. 61 This was a surprisingly modern perspective during the epoch. On occasion, more commonly in southern Italy, forcible sex was even a deliberate strategy to enforce marriage; a rapist targeted a woman as a future wife, knowing that many women and their families would agree to matrimony with the man who had ‘taken’ their honour.62 Women themselves recorded such incidents, or similar. One of the key works of early twentieth-­century Italian feminist literature is Sibilla Aleramo’s largely autobiographical Una donna (1906).63 Aleramo’s adolescent protagonist, like Gilda not yet sixteen years old, enjoys a mild flirtation with a colleague in her father’s factory where she works; he then rapes her in the office.64 She is appalled; he is apologetic. But far from fleeing him, she marries him in the belief that no other option was now available to her – only to discover his first act of violence was by no means his last. An additional factor in such dark, confused scenarios was the reality that sex, even within a loving relationship, frequently constituted a painful, even brutal act for many women.65 For young girls knowing so little about what to expect, it must have been extremely difficult to know what was ‘normal’ sexual behaviour and what was not. In short, in the context of the period, it might have been possible for Gilda both to be violated by the Duke and yet still feel emotionally bound to him. Little more than a child, she had, after all, been ‘groomed’ by her assailant, in a manner not dissimilar to that employed by paedophiles on their young victims. We might argue that images of female behaviour such as that represented by Gilda contributed to this misreading of rape as a sign of uncontainable male passion rather than more accurately as a misogynistic exertion of power – and that the experiences of other women such as Sibilla Aleramo arose directly out of such fudging of the truth. Yet if today we find Gilda’s self-­sacrifice incomprehensible, so too did some nineteenth­century male commentators. Abramo Basevi described Hugo’s Blanche as possessed of an ‘insano amore’, contributing to the immorality of the drama by continuing a relationship with the man who has stained her honour and then committing suicide to save his life.66 Ermanno Picchi was even more direct. On 7 July 1853, in the Gazzetta musicale di Firenze, he asked of  Verdi: What would [Verdi] reply to his daughter if, taken to Rigoletto, she asked him what the Duke did to poor Gilda? Is it thus the theatre is meant to be an educator? And meanwhile those would-­be geniuses drag it into the mud; and, for the wretched satisfaction of [making] an effect, demoralise, brutalise and divide the public. Today beauty is sought in the most peculiar formulae, in the most atrocious crimes, in the most repugnant immorality. 67

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A few months later, on 29 September, Picchi returned to this theme of what such an opera might teach its spectators: There you will learn that when you’re at the keyhole (or better, at the crevice of a wall, if it has one) in order to see what’s happening in the room, and you see preparations for the killing of a man, instead of arousing the neighbourhood in order to save him … you must allow yourself to be killed for him – even more so if the person who is doing the looking is a woman, and if the one who must be killed is the lover who has betrayed her. Perhaps in such circumstances another woman, if generous, would have shouted for help or hammered immediately on the door in order to interrupt that bloody work, or, if vengeful, would have left him to be killed.68

One might counter that if Rigoletto provoked debate about coercive or violent sex and its consequences, if it required an explanation to young women about what exactly they were witnessing, and even more, if it questioned what ought to have been Gilda’s response to such abuse, then it was indeed serving an important purpose. Far from acting as a role model for young women, Gilda was therefore read initially by some as an ‘Awful Warning’ about a distorted femininity. To return to Hudson’s point: given the impossibility of showing on the censored stage the actual events between Gilda and the Duke, what clues exist within the remainder of the opera? This is a valid question. Gilda’s death also happens offstage, but Verdi provides an enactment of the fatal blows through the storm. Perhaps her sexual encounter with the Duke, although unseen, is also ‘heard’ twice within the music: once in real time, and once in imagined recall. The audience know full well what is happening to her during Rigoletto’s remarkable ‘Cortigiani, vil razza dannata’, and his monologue might function also as a potential mapping out of Gilda’s own reactions to the Duke’s importunings: first bravado, then anger, then pleading and finally grievous capitulation. Certainly, these two climactic events in the lives of both father and daughter reach conclusion at the same time. That such a pattern might have a ring of truth can be seen by juxtaposing this fantasy rape with a real occurrence. In 1854, a nineteen­year-­old shepherdess and servant found herself similarly the target of the ruler of her small world in Ascoli, her padrone Carlo: I became prey to the seduction of the most dishonest young man ever known to live under these skies, that is, my employer Carlo. I affirm that I was seduced and betrayed by him because thus it was in reality, as I, a young woman, knew no coquetry, I had never looked a man in the face. A year ago the aforementioned man began to play the languishing lover with me, he was coming very often to my house, and he was staying there also for a long time, like a young man wholly idle; he knew nothing other than women and indolence, but because he always found me shy and looking at him with lowered eyes, he never had the courage to attempt me and seduce me, and I believed myself safe from his brutality and kept myself steadfast in my honour, for the space of six months. At the beginning of April, on a holiday, I took the animals out to pasture in the copse. Carlo appeared, he found me

­Sexualit alone, he drew near me, he sat down close to me, and set to talking about various things; I was listening to him, then he passed to speaking of dirty things, I then got to my feet, but he retained me; having taken me by my arm he proceeded to say bad and dishonest things. Finally, he told me openly that that time I would not escape, and that he had been coming after me for a long while and never had the opportune occasion arrived, and by force, if not by will, I would satisfy him. Not being able to protect myself with force, I then recoursed to prayers and exhortations that he would not do so much wrong to me, but he was deaf, he was saying only by force or by will, and then he suggested: ‘If you do it willingly, it will go well for you and I can repay you because I am your padrone and you are my cattle-­g irl; if by force it will go badly for you and your family, because I will become an inexorable padrone.’ At such words I yielded, I lay down supine on the ground, giving him all liberty of my body, which, having undressed me, he used in carnal sin and then attended to his business. 69

Did the Duke also threaten Gilda ‘by force or by will’? Or did he use another very similar phrase that appeared in many women’s accounts of their rapists’ demands: ‘by love or by force’?70 If Gilda’s rape might be seen as reflected in Rigoletto’s own pattern of anguish, the opera nonetheless perhaps gives a later space to her own processing of her encounter with the Duke. Her deflowering occurs in bodily terms in Act ii, but still within the fiction of his ‘love’. Arguably it is only as Gilda witnesses his flirtation with Maddalena in the tavern in Act iii that she understands the true nature of that physical act. In her tears in the quartet, in those self-­directed commands not to explode with grief, she perhaps realises for the first time that his thrusts were not passion but assault. The spasms that shake her might constitute both a bodily response to the shock of betrayal and a physic­ alised reliving of her own first sexual encounter. Knowing now the extent of the Duke’s cynicism and cruelty, why then does Gilda save his life? Piave’s libretto retains some key elements of the drama that bear directly on her motives for self-­sacrifice, and dispenses with others. Of the latter, the first – and perhaps most crucial – excision is an exchange between Triboulet and Blanche after they have witnessed the king’s flirtation with Maguelonne: triboulet: 

Laisse-­moi te venger! blanche, brisée:  Hélas! – Faites         Tout ce que vous voudrez. triboulet, avec un hurlement de joie: Merci! blanche:  Grand Dieu! vous êtes       Effrayant. Quel dessein avez-­vous? (triboulet: 

Let me avenge you! Alas! – Do / whatever you ­wish. triboulet, with a cry of joy: Thank you! blanche:  Good God! You / frighten me. What are you planning?) blanche, broken: 

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Blanche, shattered by the king’s deception, thus slips from the ideals of virtue, and sanctions her father’s designs for revenge. (He, of course, does not tell her exactly what he intends to do.) The removal of this exchange in the opera significantly alters the relationship between Gilda and Rigoletto. In the play, it leaves open the question as to whether Triboulet would have proceeded with his schemes without his daughter’s agreement; he has, after all, already waited a month for her feelings of love to subside. Rigoletto, although also having waited for an unspecified period, is plainly determined on his own course, with or without Gilda’s assent. Piave’s version thus exonerates Gilda entirely from any complicity in the proposed murder, conversely heightening her act of self­sacrifice. In fact, Gilda seems motivated by the need to prove her moral superiority over the Duke. As we saw in the previous chapter, his canzonetta ‘La donna è mobile’ is actually an unconscious depiction of himself, of his own fickleness and emotional superficiality. If the Duke has rebelled against her love, Gilda declares, she will none the less give her life for his. Through this exaggerated sacrificial gesture, she exposes his worthlessness and asserts her own moral value. In attempting to see Gilda as a ‘real’ woman, however, we may lose sight of a wider political context – one that had its roots in a much earlier epoch. In the late eighteenth century, Vittorio Alfieri laid out his concept of ‘tyranny’ and argued that man should not marry, because he could not protect his wife against being ‘seduced, corrupted or even taken’ from the tyrant or his ‘powerful satellites’:71 But in our enlightened and very agreeable times a violent rape cannot happen, because there is no woman who would deny herself to the tyrant; and any vendetta, even if it happened, would be impossible; because there is no father or brother or husband who would not esteem themselves honoured by such a dishonour.72

Similarly, fatherhood too should be avoided; given a father had to choose between killing either his children’s bodies or their ‘soul and intellect’, he merely endured the miserable fate of ‘educating victims for tyranny’.73 Tyranny, Alfieri declared, destroys all genuine feeling: men do not love their wives and children, because they never feel they truly belonged to them.74 As for those who support the tyrant, the ambitious men who surround him, they are prey to a ‘mixed monstrous affection’, because ‘whoever receives favours from the tyrant’ was at the same time ‘always ungrateful’ – and thus was even worse than him.75 Alfieri’s ideas found further shape in his tragedy Virginia, written and revised during the same period (1777–90). In this play based on an actual uprising in ancient Rome, Virginia is the daughter of one plebian hero, the centurion Virginio, and engaged to another, Icilio. Yet she has become the target of Rome’s absolute ruler, Appio Claudio, who has determined that if she will not have him by choice, then he will use force. Appio engineers for Virginia

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to be accused of being born a slave, and therefore subject to his will. The concept governing the subsequent unfolding of the narrative is the deliberate sacrifice of innocent life as a means of provoking the people to rebellion. On hearing the false accusations about Virginia’s origins, her mother Numitoria declares that the people will flock to their aid: ‘the defenders / of an innocent virgin are in their thousands’ (Act i, scene ii). Her confidence is misplaced. The multitude does not rise, not even when Icilio is killed, not even as Virginio makes one impassioned plea after another in defence of his daughter. Finally, Virginio accedes to Virginia’s pleading for death rather than dishonour, and kills her himself. In his ‘last pledge / of love’ he bequeaths her ‘freedom and death’ (the words the popolo themselves uttered earlier in Act ii in support of Icilio when he asked what remained of life when ‘honour, fatherland, heart and liberty’ had been taken away). As Virginio consecrates his daughter’s blood to the gods, the crowd begins to stir and he whips up them further: ‘Romans, do you now move yourselves to anger? It is late: / Life can no longer be restored to the innocent.’ Only then do the people begin to revolt (‘Appio is a tyrant: he dies’, they shout), and the curtain falls on ‘great tumult and clamour of  arms’.76 Verdi (who in 1837 had set verses from Alfieri’s Saul to music) was very familiar with this play, naming his two children, Virginia and Icilio, after its protagonists. 77 And he might have seen in Le Roi s’amuse a curious refraction of Alfieri’s ideas. Triboulet’s castigation of the courtiers (‘Courtisans! courtisans! démons! race damnée!’) bears remin­ iscences of the curses Virginio heaps on the crowd in Act v, as he desperately seeks to secure his daughter’s freedom: Oh impious herd of despicable slaves! Are you by fear thus palsied? You forget, So that you may prolong a wretched life, Your honour, and your children, and your country. I hear a scarce distinguishable murmur; But no one moves. Ah vile, ah doubly vile! May each of you have such a lot as mine; If possible a worse: of property, Of honour, children, wives, and liberty, Of arms, and lastly robb’d of intellect, Ah may the tyrant, amid lengthen’d torments, Take from you, what is scarcely now your own, Your infamous and prostituted lives, Which you would purchase at so vile a price.78

Even more significant are the parallel deaths of the two daughters, Virginia and Blanche. But in Hugo’s play all is reversed: while Virginio is a warrior hero, Triboulet is a deformed buffoon; Virginio is openly opposed to Appio, Triboulet is one of those colluding satellites; Virginia rejects Appio, Blanche embraces the king; Virginio

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deliberately kills his daughter, Triboulet does so by accident. Yet both the outcome – the death of the heroine – and the political implications are arguably the same. We need not take literally Hugo’s denial of a subversive subtext,79 nor the preface to the printed libretto of the opera claiming that it falls into the category of works such as Lucrezia Borgia and Caterina di Guisa, where ‘the picture of the most terrible and violent passions is counterposed with that of their deplorable effects, and of the tremendous punishment that follows them’;80 nor even Verdi’s claim in a letter to Marzari (president of the Fenice) that the ‘moral’ of the tale lay in the curse laid upon Triboulet/Rigoletto. 81 In this story without a hero, Hugo’s aim was surely to demonstrate the dangers of appeasement and support of tyranny. As in Virginia, an innocent daughter is the sacrifice to encourage the crowd to revolt and turn on the oppressor. The political delicacy of the opera can be viewed in the different versions – as Clara di Perth, Viscardello and Lionello – that were developed for performance in the papal states and southern Italy. Not only were all religious references excised, but the Duke makes a promise of marriage to Gilda/Clara in their scene in Act i; there is no stupro, but merely a ‘joke’ kidnapping (all Rigoletto’s references to his daughter’s ruined prospects of the altar are removed); rather than asking for ‘un letto e del vino’ (let alone the original version, ‘Tua sorella e del vino’), the Duke merely asks ‘da sedere e del vino’, (‘a chair and some wine’), thus disguising Maddalena’s character as a prostitute; instead of committing suicide to save the Duke, Gilda/Clara knocks on the door in order to beg for his life; Maddalena does not collude in the murder, but is pushed aside by her brother; and at the end, Gilda/Clara miraculously lives. The nuances of the opera’s political hue are further apparent in a curious book entitled: Gli ultimi giorni del Carlo III, duca di Parma. Racconto popolare d’un profugo parmigiano, trascritto da un brontolone milanese. Published in 1861, this volume was neither a history nor a novel (or so claimed its anonymous author), but rather ‘some observations’ told to him by a parmigiano about the assassination of Maria Luigia’s heir, Carlo III. The author’s purpose in recounting these events to a wider public was to illustrate that ‘absolute, unlimited power’ especially in small towns is necessarily a ‘source of tyranny’ – and that the patience of the oppressed has its limits.82 The opera of Rigoletto weaves its way through the volume in various guises, providing names for some characters (Maddalena and Giovanna), chapter titles (Le Roi s’amuse, ‘I cortigiani’) and epigraphs: all insinuating that there were direct parallels between the Duke and Carlo III. In one chapter, Rigoletto appears as itself, in a production at the Teatro Regio. The author comments on the astonishment that the opera was allowed by the censors, and describes how at Parma the music had aroused ‘furore’: ‘The Parmigiani, who hated the duke [Carlo III], were in raptures about certain allusions to that libertine.’ 83 The chapter relates the conversation of three individuals (two supposedly known personally to the book’s author) attending the production, whose gaze is primarily on the spectacle of

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Carlo III stretched out in his box enjoying himself. One of the men is the brother of one of Carlo’s mistresses. The men’s dialogue begins with an allusion to Sparafucile, and it soon becomes plain that they are plotting the assassination of Carlo. Their discussion is abruptly truncated when they become aware that they are being watched, and instead they concentrate (or pretend to) on the performance. How much is fact, and how much is fiction? Carlo III was indeed assassinated by an unknown assailant in via Cavour on 26 March 1854, shortly after leaving the opera house. The previous year, Rigoletto had been given thirty-­six performances at the Teatro Regio, to popular and critical acclaim. Did the opera play any part in stoking antipathy toward Carlo III, and thus his murder? Or was the anonymous author simply spinning tales? P rostitution

What might have become of Gilda if she had not entered that grim doorway? Would she have found a new life at Verona? Or would she have slipped into the trade moralists believed was an all but inevitable consequence of the loss of virginity outside marriage: prostitution? The preface to the printed libretto of Rigoletto stresses that one difference from the French original is that Gilda, unlike Blanche, does not become ‘una fille seduite et perdue’ – that is, her relationship with the Duke does not continue for a month as it does in the play.84 Two years after Rigoletto, however, Verdi turned precisely to this theme of the ‘lost’ girl, in La traviata. Gilda’s innocence and respectability were forcibly stolen from her; Violetta sold her virginity and reputation willingly. Both, in some measure, find that the ideal of romance is sullied by the reality of the body. The acknowledgement of Gilda’s body as a sexual site of abuse undoubtedly provoked much comment. But is difficult to think of an opera that had as much effect in contributing to the debates around women’s control of their sexuality as La traviata. In Italy and elsewhere, the opera attracted large female audiences. After a production in Florence in 1858, which was neither sung well nor dressed lavishly but which nonetheless provoked a warm reception from the audience (at least, ‘the audience in skirts’), a critic in L’Italia musicale wrote in exasperation that ‘women, in a very singular way, are mad for this music – as they were and always will be for that litany of sighs and words of love’(original emphasis).85 Other critics such as Basevi feared the potentially corrupting effects of its moral landscape: It’s apparent to everyone that today La traviata is an opera favoured by a great part of the fair sex. One does not therefore wish to accuse it of nurturing less than honest sentiments; but rather to warn of the danger of this spectacle – which insinuates poison into the soul, unnoticed, until it is already master of  us. In certain respects, artists have a responsibility similar to that of the priest, who is not only the keeper but the perfecter and propagator of public morality. 86

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Women’s fascination with Traviata (evident not only in Italy but throughout Europe) meant that this was one opera that remained in the repertoire throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.87 Verdi might well have anticipated such popularity. As Charles Bernheimer makes plain, French novelists of the 1830s and 1840s had long discovered that stories about prostitutes with ‘hearts of gold’ and ‘purified by love’ were financially advantageous. 88 Marguerite Gauthier had been preceded by her best-­selling counterparts, most notably Fleur-­de-­Marie in Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (serialised 1842–3) and Esther in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847). Despite Parent-­Duchâtelet’s belief that prostitution should be hidden from society,89 the prostitute herself became a particular icon of the period: enjoyed carnally in real life by men, and then consumed with equal appetite in the imaginary by women readers. The Foreign Quarterly Review in 1843 marvelled that Sue had earned ‘three francs a line’ for a tale that the critic regarded as ‘preposterous, improbable, impossible’, full of ‘absurd caricatures’. 90 It seems unlikely that Verdi, ever with a keen eye for money, would have failed to realise the possibilities for an operatic heroine of this type. We might thus begin by seeing Violetta as Marie Duplessis thrice prostituted: once by herself in lived experience; then by her lover, Alexandre Dumas fils, as the semi­fictional Marguerite Gauthier; and lastly in her incarnation as Violetta Valéry, by Verdi and Piave. Such a perspective might seem extreme, but it serves to underline that many of these representations of courtesans were made for economic reasons and that they hid, rather than revealed, the reality of the prostitute’s life. The always tenuous relationship between Violetta and reality moreover changed across the period. On her arrival, she might have been thought of in the terms Fourier used to describe high-­class courtesans such as Ninon de l’Enclos and Laïs, whom he regarded as possessing an ‘immense superiority’ over ‘women of the moral class’. 91 The courtesan in Fourier’s view was in some respects a prototype of an emancipated woman, in whom female potential could be fully realised. But there were also other women who, if not precisely courtesans, nevertheless inhabited the fringes of that world. One of the recently most discussed aspects of La traviata is whether in some way it accorded with Verdi’s own reality – or, to be more specific, that of Giuseppina Strepponi. To those who have suggested that the idealisation of Violetta in comparison to her earlier appearances as Marguerite in both novel and play was owing to Verdi’s desire to valorise Strepponi, Julian Budden responded that Verdi would have been appalled to think that any comparison could be made between Strepponi and a prostitute.92 But Verdi was certainly conscious that others saw her in adjacent terms. One much-­cited piece of evidence is his letter to his father-­in-­law, Antonio Barezzi: In my house there lives a lady, free, independent, a lover like myself of solitude, possessing a fortune that shelters her from all need. Neither I nor she owes to anyone at all an account

­Sexualit of our actions. On the other hand, who knows what relationship exists between us? What affairs? What ties? What claims I have on her, and she on me? Who knows whether she is or is not my wife? And if she is, who knows what the particular reasons are for not making the fact public? Who knows whether that is a good thing or a bad one? Why should it not be a good thing? And even if it is a bad thing, who has the right to ostracize us? I will say this, however: in my house she is entitled to as much respect as myself  – more even; and no one is allowed to forget that on any account. And finally she has every right, both on account of her conduct and her character, to the consideration she never fails to show to others. With this long rigmarole, I mean to say no more than that I demand liberty of action for myself, because all men have a right to it, and because I am by nature averse to acting according to other people’s ideas, and that you, who at heart are so good, so just and so generous, should not let yourself be influenced, and not absorb the ideas of a town which – it must be said! – in time past did not consider me worthy to be its organist, and now complains, wrongly and perversely, about my actions and affairs.93

What perhaps is most pertinent about this letter is Verdi’s ‘demand’ for both privacy and ‘liberty of action’: features that were emblematic of his character, and that perhaps governed his behaviour more than any other doctrine.94 And yet he and Strepponi found that freedom only in Paris in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In Busseto, they were the subject of gossip; Strepponi was openly criticised.95 She was similarly unable to accompany him publicly to either Venice (for Rigoletto and La traviata) or, and most particularly, Rome (for Il trovatore) – at least, until the mid 1850s, when she began using his name rather than her own, thus passing herself off as his wife. 96 It was not simply a matter of facing annoying tittle-­tattle or social ostracism. In the papal states, couples accused of living together (‘concubinaggio’ or convenienze) could be denounced to the religious authorities and imprisoned.97 Release from prison was often dependent on agreement to marriage. To have flaunted their unconventional relationship in states under pontifical jurisdiction would have courted obvious risks for Verdi and Strepponi’s liberty and freedom of choice with regard to marriage. There seems little doubt that Verdi recognised that Strepponi’s cohabitation with him (and her earlier pregnancies outside wedlock, even though these were presumably not public knowledge) constituted a loss of her honour in society’s perspective. As long as he refrained from marrying her – for reasons that remain unclear98 – her reputation was perpetually imperilled. On 11 August 1855, Il trovatore (a periodical that, as its title suggests, was generally a keen supporter of the composer) included a short item: ‘It is said that at last maestro Verdi has married Signora Giuseppina Strepponi.’ 99 If such comments were made by friendly journalists, one wonders about the rumours the couple faced from more hostile sources. The storia d’amore between Verdi and Strepponi, whose eventual marriage in 1859 provided settled domesticity (although not without its problems, particularly in the 1870s), certainly had a very different outcome to that of the protagonists of La traviata.

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While on stage Violetta and Alfredo saw their love stolen by disease and prejudice, offstage Verdi and his companion refused to cede their happiness to moral convention and forged a life-­long partnership. It is hardly necessary to state that while their apparent lieto fine could be lived – and even publicly known – it could not have been shown on stage. In those early years of the first performances of La traviata, critical interest focused on the moral composition of its central character. Shorn of many of the grim realities of her origins evident in the novel, Violetta is a prostitute only in the merest shadow of the term. One example of the debate she aroused in London is provided by the discussions around two sopranos who offered different interpretations of the role, Marietta Piccolomini and Angiolina Bosio;100 but similar issues are apparent in the Italian press about Piccolomini and Virginia Boccabadati. On 18 October 1856, Il trovatore compared Boccabadati’s rendition of the role with that of Piccolomini in the previous year: The Violetta of the past year was rosy, fresh, dewy, I would almost say demure; a virginal halo surrounded her like that which crowns the dawn. The Violetta of this year is pallid, emaciated, withered by debauchery; the repeated emotions of a life of wearisome sensuality touch her; the melancholy ray of an approaching sunset illuminates her. The expiring of [Piccolomini] made you weep with pity, the death of [Boccabadati] lacerates the soul and brings you close to desperation. [Piccolomini] was more fascinating, [Boccabadati] more moving; the former more ideal, the latter more true … If in the first act Boccabadati was less lively and ingenuous than Piccolomini, if in the second she does not reach the same dramatic heights, in the third she was sublimely true; too true, we would say, so great was the passion with which she interpreted the death of Violetta. Piccolomini was a young girl who died the victim of love more than of disease, modest and almost resigned; Boccabadati is a woman who dies destroyed by vice, to whom this amorous passion is the final ruin: the first was a saint; the second, a martyr. 101

Boccabadati herself seemed moved: at the curtain calls, she appeared weeping, ‘doubtful of her triumph as if [it were] a dream’.102 We might distrust such comments, were it not for Boccabadati’s private correspondence about an earlier production in Rovigo in 1854, which reveals that she too was intensely disturbed by the last act of the opera, unable to prevent herself from shedding tears on stage.103 These continual comparisons between attrici cantanti in the press constitute a discourse on Violetta’s identity. The different nuances evident in ways of playing the role had broader significances in demonstrating how varied the character might be (an important point in a period that regarded women as inherently lacking ‘individuality’) and in influencing how her transgressive behaviour was judged. Moreover, these various representations were interpreted differently by spectators, according to personal taste and cultural conventions; if for this critic in Turin, Piccolomini’s playing turned

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Violetta into ‘a saint’, for another in London she was merely a ‘willing grisette’. 104 Boccabadati’s impassioned portrayal of the character as a ‘martyr’, although probably merely a product of an increased realism in playing that last scene, was framed by external developments in Turin around the figure of the prostitute that would eventually spread across the whole of  Italy. Prior to political unity, official attitudes towards prostitution in the various Italian states ranged from ‘tolerance to prohibition’.105 But in 1855, Camillo Benso di Cavour, then prime minister of Piedmont-­Sardinia, instituted a series of regulations of prostitution that included the establishment of state-­supervised brothels (‘Case di Tolleranza’) on the French model initiated by Napoléon in 1802, which restricted prostitutes’ freedom of movement and imposed a system of compulsory medical surveillance. Cavour’s legislation was largely drawn up by Casimiro Sperino, a specialist in venereal disease, who maintained that government scrutiny of prostitution was a means of reducing the spread of syphilis within the army. The underlying ideology owed much to the work of Alexandre Parent-­Duchâtelet on prostitution in Paris in 1836. He had argued that as history had proved that prostitution was ‘inevitable’, the authorities should concentrate on the surveillance and management of prostitutes, ensuring that their presence was discreetly hidden from view.106 The decision to sanction but occlude prostitution at a time when Verdi’s new opera (among other cultural manifestations of the prostitute) was gaining large audiences and increasing the visibility of the female sex worker is intriguing. Only a year before the arrival of the new legislation in Piedmont, Verdi had written to De Sanctis in Naples: Ah! You like La traviata? This poor sinner so unfortunate at Venice! I will try hard to make her the honour of the world. In Naples, no, because your priests and monks would be afraid to see on stage certain things that they do very well in obscurity – and that it would be much better to do in the light of the sun in the public piazza in the manner of Diogenes.107

There were also difficulties with the opera at the Teatro Apollo in Rome in 1854. Verdi fulminated to Luccardi that ‘the censor has ruined the meaning of the drama. He has made la Traviata pure and innocent. Many thanks! Thus he has ruined all the situations, all the characters. A whore must always be a whore. If the sun shone at night, there would be no more night. In short, they don’t understand anything!’108 The title was changed to Violetta, and the preface to the censored version of the libretto refigured the heroine in new garb: now she is merely a young, rich orphan, who ‘has closed her heart to every affection, every love; and because she is often afflicted by the serious illness she has suffered from since infancy, she finds delight only in squandering her ­fortune, gathering around her those friends who, like her, love to amuse themselves in parties and banquets’.109 Violetta’s subversive cabaletta (among many other adjustments to the libretto) was altered accordingly:

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Censored version

Sempre libera degg’io Folleggiar di gioia in gioia Vo’ che scorra il viver mio Pe’ sentieri del piacer.

Innocente ognor degg’io Trasvolar di gioia in gioia Perché ignoto al viver mio Sia lo strazio dell’amor.

No longer ‘sempre libera’, this Violetta is confined to the blank unknowingness of innocence. Whether or not the growing popularity of La traviata was a contributing factor, the new legislation on prostitution implemented in Piedmont was then formally adopted by the new kingdom of Italy on 15 February 1860 in a decree known as the regolamento Cavour, and later extended to the entire state following the last stages of Unification in 1870.110 The official enshrining of ‘tolerance’ through the control rather than the prohibition of prostitution stemmed from the belief that for men sex was a justified and virtually uncontrollable ‘need’. Where marriage was delayed for social or economic reasons, or where sex within marriage was problematic, men were supposedly often inclined towards masturbation (considered harmful because it purportedly weakened men’s health and fertility), seducing respectable women or even sexual violence. 111 Prostitution, in enabling men to avoid these dangers to themselves and others, was thus regarded as a deplorable but necessary evil. In 1891, Cesare Lombroso, the architect of relatively short-­lived but influential theories of criminology, claimed that the prostitute was the female equivalent of the male criminal, but her effect on society was ‘less perverse, less damaging and less alarming’.112 In fact, the prostitute actually contributed to social wellbeing, by acting as ‘a valve for security and morals’ and a ‘useful outlet’ for ‘masculine vice’: thus ‘one might say that woman, even where she most lowers herself, where she most sins, is still beneficial to us’.113 This was indeed the image of the prostitute as martyr, bearing the burden of male lust for society at the cost of her own wellbeing and dignity. And that cost was considerable. Regulation admitted a change of attitude towards prostitution – a deliberate organising and control by the state. The high level of surveillance is demonstrated by the seventy-­seven separate articles of Cavour’s Act, ‘Istruzione sulla prostituzione’. Brothels could be visited unannounced at any time, and the compulsory medical examinations (twice a week in the initial legislation, and for which the women had to pay a tax) were often brutal. Moreover, controlling prostitution in effect meant controlling all women, particularly given that article 19 forbade prostitutes from ‘stopping on or frequenting the streets, the piazzas, or public promenades’, or from leaving their house after seven o’clock in the evening between October and March or after nine during the spring and summer months.114 Even respectable women

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discovered alone at night on the street could thus be subject to arrest and a forced medical examination on the grounds of prostitution.115 And if La traviata might have had some initial claim as the prostitutes’ ‘own’ opera, they now had little opportunity to experience it: Cavour’s legislation not only enforced a curfew, but actively forbade prostitutes to attend the theatre.116 In a society where ‘normal’ women were defined as sexually passive and icons of obedience and duty, who then was the aberrant prostitute? This was a question that had absorbed Parent-­Duchâtelet in France at the beginning of the period, and drew increasing attention from Italian sociologists, scientists and anthropologists as the century progressed. Statistical studies, such as Giuseppe Tammeo’s La prostituzione. Saggio di statistica morale (1890) collated sociological information on geographical provenance, class, trade, age and so on.117 Tammeo’s view (possibly coloured by his evident sympathy for aspects of female emancipation) was that the prostitute was created by society, by poverty and by men’s lust;118 that she was on the same continuum as the devout wife, with no ‘essential difference of nature’ between them;119 and that in fact all society ‘was only one vast casa di tolleranza’.120 Science pursued another, more insidious agenda: one dedicated to charting precisely the prostitute’s ‘difference’ from the ideals of femininity. In 1892, Raffaele Gurrieri subjected a number of women – both prostitutes and so-­called ‘normal’ women – to electric shocks on different parts of their bodies, including genital areas, in order to discover whether levels of physical sensibility (extending to pain) were different; his experiments revealed that prostitutes in general experienced much lower levels of sensibility than ‘respectable’ women.121 Lombroso examined prostitutes’ genitals, facial characteristics and voices. He concluded that although greater abundance of pubic hair was a common feature and some evidence of enlarged labia and clitori was also apparent, there was no direct correlation of ‘vice’ with organic genital abnormalities. 122 Relative beauty was a noted characteristic (‘the so-­called passing beauty of youth … courtesy of the abundance of the fatty tissue of the abdomen, the freshness of the flesh and the lack of lines’),123 which Lombroso ascribed as a Darwinian response to the prostitute’s trade requirements of attracting sufficient custom. But the ‘delicate and attractive features’ of her face were supposedly short-­lived: as youth disappeared, the jaw and cheekbones became heavy with flesh, making the face ‘somewhat virile, more ugly than a man’, with deeply etched lines like a ‘wound’.124 This was not just the normal process of ageing, in Lombroso’s view, but the irrefutable sign of the prostitute’s degeneracy. Virility was also an identified feature in the voice of the prostitute. Lombroso claimed that Parent-­Duchâtelet had remarked on the masculinity of prostitutes’ voices, which had been attributed ‘to the effect of bad weather, the air and alcohol’. 125 Citing the ­evidence presented by Masini (who had tested fifty prostitutes, forty-­two of whom had a ‘virile voice’ and ‘the larynx of a man’),126 Lombroso himself had come to believe that the true cause was congenital: prostitutes ‘have masculine voices because they have

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masculine larynxs’.127 Given the frequent arguments about men’s need for sex, it might be assumed that the prostitute’s supposedly virile characteristics would also be cited as causative constituents in her willingness to engage in the sex act. On the contrary, if moralists feared that prostitution was a product of an excess of passione, Lombroso claimed that prostitutes suffered not from unrestrained libido but from ‘moral insanity’ (‘pazzia morale’).128 Indeed, they demonstrated ‘notable sexual frigidity’,129 a factor Lombroso argued was necessary to their profession as women capable of arousal would find continual sexual activity too fatiguing. In all this long discussion, there is perhaps only one echo of Violetta’s sobs. Lombroso makes a curious comment that prostitutes were prone to ‘intermittent goodness’, which ‘at certain moments shows them far from their habitual egotism’. 130 His assertion is based on anecdotal accounts by Parent-­Duchâtelet, Lecour and Tolstoy about prostitutes’ generous support not only of one another in times of crisis and illness, but also of their wider communities when need beckoned.131 It seems possible that cultural representations of prostitutes such as La traviata also played their part in developing this image. Yet this reference to some prostitutes’ propensity toward selfless acts figures only briefly in Lombroso’s otherwise comprehensive classification of their ‘abnormalities’.132 Regulation and science thus dehumanised and separated the prostitute from society: she was no longer a ‘normal’ woman fallen on hard times, but an entirely different creature exhibiting a distinct pathology. Critical reception of the representations of the prostitute also increasingly revealed a harder edge, as La scena illustrata reveals when discussing Dumas’ original drama in 1885: [T]he prostitute dies consumptive, consumed perhaps by her very excesses. Thus the sinful woman – even if revealed as capable of the most noble and supreme sacrifices, even if she is rehabilitated and finds in the height of her emotions a second virginity; even when she is pardoned and the future, irradiated by all its softness and sweetness, returns to smile on her – has nothing more to hope for: the ineradicable and inexorable past seizes her again, nails her to her bed of pain and extinguishes her. Morally, it is a salutary lesson. 133

Even forgiven, even spiritually renewed, Marguerite could not escape her core identity and past deeds. Yet if the moral lesson of Marguerite Gauthier/Violetta Valéry as disseminated in such comments was meant to control women’s sexuality, it did not succeed. The trend of the period, as women moved into the cities, away from the protection of the family, was towards greater sexual independence. The earlier associations of the figure of the prostitute with suggestions of female emancipation, however, conversely shifted – not just in Italy, but across Europe. Abolitionists (so-­called because they viewed prostitution as white slavery) against state-­controlled prostitution included prominent figures in the European women’s suffrage movement, who saw it as a repressive system for

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punishing women for the spread of venereal disease while exonerating men from their own responsibilities for sexual health. In her attempts to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain, Josephine Butler demanded in 1871: ‘Shall we have liberty in lust, or shall we have political freedom? We cannot retain both.’134 Butler’s visit to Italy in 1875 brought Italian feminists into the campaign. Anna Maria Mozzoni described the regulation of prostitution as ‘this shame of humanity’ and a ‘monstrosity, which I would willingly call the delirium of … a disturbed and diseased society’. 135 She argued that prostitution was a sign of women’s inequality: poverty and lack of employment (and low wages in comparison to men even when in employment) reduced women to the extreme of selling their bodies.136 Women also began to construct their own accounts of the prostitute. Emilia Viola­Ferretti (writing under the pseudonym Emma), produced a novel in 1878 that illustrated many of Mozzoni’s arguments and offered a stark contrast to Violetta’s heady life of luxury and free love. Supposedly based on fact, Una fra tante relates the story of Barberina, a barely literate country girl who arrives in the city to find work, and instead through poverty, illness and ignorance is tricked into entering a brothel. She refuses to comply with her clients’ sexual demands, until finally the brothel-­madam loses patience and arranges for her to be gang-­raped by three coarse and brutal young men.137 Barberina’s ensuing delirium eventually secures her removal to hospital, where despite her accusations against the brothel-­madam she is formally registered as a prostitute. Only the intervention of a sympathetic priest, who engineers her illegal escape from the city and back to her family, saves her from being returned to the brothel to work off the money she now owed. The novel makes thinly veiled references to the juxtaposition of the ‘fantasies’ of theatrical depictions of prostitution that provided entertainment and the sordid realities of lived experience in the case di toleranza.138 Above all, it points a finger at society’s collusion with the sex trade, as exemplified by both Barberina’s first ‘respectable’ client, who although touched by her plight refuses to do anything concrete to help her, and by the other women in the brothel, who hear her screams during the hours of her rape but again take no action. The need for active intervention was similarly emphasised by Virginia Paganini’s La missione della donna (1884). Paganini begged women to demand the suppression of the case di tolleranza, where their barely adolescent sons lost ‘every sense of respect for women’ and contracted diseases that imperilled future generations. 139 To male arguments that the world was ever thus, Paganini advised that women should respond that society had already progressed, because whereas at one time woman ‘was considered the property of man, who could buy and sell her’, she was now recognised as being ‘endowed with reason equal to man’, with her own tasks and responsibilities. Paganini also importantly delineated the way in which some women arrived at prostitution. She describes a typical seduction, with the victim first abandoned by her lover and then falling prey to other men; rejected by society and her family, condemned to ‘ignominy’,

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the unfortunate woman turns by necessity to prostitution. Paganini counselled mothers to watch over their daughters, but most of all to do more for these victims: ‘The redemption of the fallen woman is the most holy of women’s missions.’ 140 These and other efforts by the abolitionists finally had some limited success. In 1888, Crispi’s government passed amendments to the regulations that slightly shifted the focus away from the individual prostitute (for example, removing compulsory registration and medical examinations) to ensuring better management of the brothels. 141 And where was Violetta in all this? Like the moralists, Mozzoni saw the representation of the courtesan in La traviata as presenting a romanticised view of the harsh realities of a sex worker’s life, one that persuaded other young women that prostitution was a viable career option.142 Certainly, by the late nineteenth century, the opera had become an anachronistic depiction of the prostitute’s life. Yet La traviata perhaps fulfilled another function. Wanrooij makes the point that the efforts of late nineteenth­century scientists and anthropologists at constructing a ‘biological destiny’ for the prostitute in effect ‘made it possible to ignore male responsibility’.143 Nature, rather than poverty or seduction, supposedly formed the prostitute; society, exempt from blame, could only shrug its shoulders and exploit her. In this context, La traviata, with its heroine’s elegance, passion and humanity, struck a rather different note. At Violetta’s deathbed, the two men who in their separate ways truncated her happiness, hastened the progress of her disease and reduced her to poverty, arrive to ask forgiveness. Germont’s presence at this scene was a feature entirely of the opera, and his apology is fulsome: ‘Ah, tutto il mal ch’io feci ora sol vedo!’ (‘Ah, only now do I see the ill deeds that I have done!’). Perhaps, in those later decades, this tableau of male culpability and remorse offered a salient counter to the prevailing trend and acted as a reminder that the prostitute’s fate lay in the hands of all. If so, it was barely heeded. Only after women achieved suffrage in 1947, and then only after a long campaign fought by Lina Merlin, was state regulation of prostitution finally abandoned in 1958 – over a hundred years after the implementation of the regolamento Cavour.144 L istening to the body

What were the effects of these operatic outpourings of passione on the female spectator? We have seen that Basevi feared the influence of La traviata back in the 1850s; he might have been even more alarmed had he read Marchesa Colombi’s much later collection of short stories, Senz’amore. In ‘Le affittacamere’, Maddalena falls in love with an actor, a lodger in her mother’s shabby boarding house, who persuades her to act out certain scenarios with him: ‘And she declaimed with emphasis some of the lines of the libretti that were her passion; the ones that always made her weep, especially those of Traviata: “Croce e delizia al cor”.’ But he abandons her, leaving her with a child growing in her womb, whose paternity he denies.145

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Differently, the petit-­bourgeois heroine of Neera’s Teresa begins to comprehend the possibilities of love at a performance of Rigoletto: The intense passion of that love story found a secret and intimate correspondence in the soul of the girl, to whom love had been revealed in suffering. The powerful creations of Rigoletto and the Duke, the sweet figure of Gilda, were more than characters: they were sentiments, they were passions made incarnate, and the terrible, human grandiosity of that work reverberated in her every fibre. Under the blows of that strong emotion, her spiritual nature strengthened, ennobling itself by grasping the contours of a secure ideal. In her mind, she fused her own love with that of Gilda. The memories, that already were beginning to fade, lost their personal imprint, blending with a quantity of other impressions and new aspirations. From that evening, she no longer thought directly about the young man who had aroused her first palpitations. She thought about love, vague, mysterious, unending; a tumultuous world, not yet entirely revealed, but that was appearing by degrees, with sudden flashes, with rapid wounds, with marvellous intuitions, grounded between the Duke’s mocking song and Gilda’s death-­rattle.146

Teresa’s sense that the protagonists ‘were more than characters; they were sentiments, they were passions incarnate’ is an interpretation of opera that surfaces in the work of a number of women authors of the period. In this respect, opera as passion opens up the restricted lives of these fictional spectators: it functions as an education in feeling for the character and as a signifier of feeling for the female reader. In identifying a particular work (in this case, Teresa’s favourite melody is Gilda’s ‘Tutte le feste al tempio’), it can even provide a form of soundtrack for the reader.147 The fate of both women spectators in these fictional narratives differs from that of their operatic heroines. Despite being abandoned by her lover, Maddalena remains proudly complacent: she christens her daughter ‘Aida’, and considers herself to have risen in the world. When her sister asks her what she would say if her former beau (an honest but humble artisan) renewed his declarations of love, she loftily explains that she could not possibly condescend to his level – she is now accustomed only to lovers of a different class.148 As for Neera’s Teresa, we might fear that her conscious alignment with Gilda will lead her to a similar misjudgement in her choice of man. Yet Egidio Orlandi, though as physically beautiful as Verdi’s heartless Duke, shares no other characteristic. On the contrary, he is all that Gilda wished the Duke to be: loyal, loving and desperately poor. It is his poverty that prevents their marriage, and which subjects Teresa to long years of servitude at her family’s beck and call – until, at the very end of the novel, she abandons convention and decorum and flies to his side. In short, these fictional spectators are selective in their appropriation of stage images, and rather more resilient than their operatic heroines. A more comprehensive and arguably less positive fictional response to opera’s representation of passion – although one that does not precisely concern Verdi – can

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be found in Matilde Serao’s novel Addio, amore! All’amica morta (1890). Her protagonist, Anna Acquaviva, attends the first night of a production of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (in Italian translation) at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Young, rich and beautiful, Anna is recovering from a failed elopement some months earlier. In the heavy heat of the opera house, she begins to renew her life by falling in love with her guardian, Cesare Dias (a relationship that ultimately leads to her suicide). Serao positions Anna’s psychological rebirth in the context of an audience that is simmering with repressed, unspoken fervour. Even in an abbreviated version, as below, the sheer weight of Serao’s description of the event bears down on the reader as if to reflect the inexorable, irresistible pressure of music and atmosphere on the emotions of her young heroine: Ah, how divinely Meyerbeer’s notes poured out from the skilful orchestra and the throats of the singers, rising in fluctuating waves to the high ceiling of the auditorium, breaking softly, caressing the ears and the souls of the listeners: and how many faces, induced by love made more passionate by the invincible suggestions of the music, concentrated in a single expression; how many eyes immersed in the languor of a long contemplation, how many pink mouths closed, silent, restraining the sweet words of love, suffocating the syllables of an adored name, giving themselves only to a smile that had the expansion of a flower, the eternal flower of the soul, the speaking flower of love … [Anna], taken by the unknown hand of her destiny, lost herself in the contemplation of that single focus of the theatre, her lips slightly parted, her eyes dimming with sweetness, throbbing at every expanded and amorous phrase of the music; but around her, all those who were young or still felt themselves young, all those who had an ardent heart, a mobile fantasy, lively spirit and faith in their future, all those who repented of a bad choice, all those who had already erred without repenting of the error, but repenting the [choice of] person, in short, all the neophytes, the converts, the sinners, the penitents of love were feeling the fatal law of passion, dawning or dying, vigorous or languid, a torch reactivated by the music, by the night, the heat, the needs of the heart, blazing more brightly through art, beauty, seduction, wealth. Truly, truly, that grand evening at San Carlo was an incandescent hotbed of passion, be it very secret, or scarcely transpiring, or so manifest that it was impossible not to see it; and the sad surprise of Valentina’s love, the vibrant drama in Raoul’s soul were two links of that long, strong and steadfast passionate chain, which conquered all hearts struck by that fatal law … And a revolution of joy, of abandon, occurred in [Anna’s] spirit. It seemed to her that she was no longer guilty, of having been absolved of her every transgression, of finding herself, in short, innocent and ingenious in the common law, of doing, in short, that which everyone else was doing … [S]he felt herself reborn, remade in moral and physical strength, recovered from the vertiginous eddies of existence; she did not have to blush, since everyone loved as she did, and she had the right to love like everyone else. Certainly, as already the tears wept in the voices of Valentina and Raoul, so too would the sobs of desperation break out in her love, in the loves of others, tonight, tomorrow, within a year: and what did it matter? In love there are those who possess a divine unconsciousness and abandon themselves with the fervour of ingenuity, the hope

­Sexualit of virtue, and the marvellous illusions of youth: and there are those who know perfectly their destiny and abandon themselves equally, seeing everything and wanting to accept everything, suffer everything, to the end. In that contemplation of her beloved, Anna was not the first to lose herself sweetly, without blushes, without remorse … How much time passed? She never knew. Twice her sister Laura spoke to her: she did not hear, did not respond. Truly, the hot and soft stupor of incipient passion held her.149

Serao provides an evocative illustration of what might be termed today ‘emotional contagion’. Like Neera, she demonstrates that the images on stage acquired meaning according to what the spectators themselves brought into the theatre; but she goes further in elaborating that these individual and private acts of apprehension and interpretation were supported by a sense of the communality of experience. Her long eulogy to the power of opera to confirm and sanctify passione, and even to legitimise subversive sexual behaviour within its audience, offers one perspective on the importance of these aural imprints of the body to the female spectator.

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As the storm clouds give way to stars at the end of the first act of Otello, Desdemona finds in her husband’s embrace the ecstatic fulfilment of their troubled courtship. Their mirrored phrases  – Otello’s ‘E tu m’amavi per le mie sventure / ed io t’amavo per la tua pietà’ is delicately refashioned and then Desdemona, Otello, Act i, scene iii returned by Desdemona – reveal the reciprocity of their feelings. And Verdi’s setting of Otello’s hungry ‘Un bacio … ancora un bacio’ exhibits a more explicit sensuality than anything in his earlier writing, making it plain that the relationship between Otello and Desdemona is as physically intimate as it is spiritually close. This brief hour of married bliss was what so many of Verdi’s young heroines longed for. Yet while some of Verdi’s operas charted the obstacles to marriage, others revealed the problems awaiting those who overcame them. Episodes of conjugal happiness are rare indeed among the couples who feature prominently in I due Foscari, Macbeth, La battaglia di Legnano, Stiffelio, Un ballo in maschera, Don Carlos, Otello and Falstaff. The Macbeths share a hurried moment of fervour in Act i as they plan their murder of Duncano, but their relationship begins to spoil as soon as the old king’s blood stains their hands. As for Otello and Desdemona, he at least seems to know that their story should have ended on that night, under those stars: ‘Venga la morte! e mi colga nell’estasi / di quest’amplesso / il momento supremo!’ (‘Come, death! and gather me in the ecstasy / of the supreme moment / of this embrace!’). Beyond that serene, enraptured hour lies only the lurching descent into madness and a quite different experience of death from the transcendent crossing Otello envisaged while in Desdemona’s arms. In only one opera, I due Foscari, are the perils to marriage portrayed as an external agency: the political circumstances of a corrupt Venice, where the Doge is manipulated by the implacable vengeance of the notorious Council of Ten into acceding to the punishment of his own son, Jacopo Foscari. Lucrezia Contarini’s stalwart efforts to rescue her husband Jacopo ultimately come to nothing. Nonetheless, their marriage is portrayed as of integral importance to Jacopo’s survival – exile with his family might be bearable; without, it is intolerable; he expires in the boat leaving the Venetian lagoon. In the other operas, however, marital happiness is threatened by a quite different force: adultery. ‘Mio superbo guerrier! Quanti tormenti, Quanti mesti sospiri e quanta speme Ci condusse ai soavi abbracciamenti! Oh! com’è dolce il mormorare insieme: Te ne ­rammenti!’

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What could Ottocento women expect from marriage? In the 1850s, a blushing bride might well have been presented with a copy of La sposa e la madre, edited by Pietro Thouar. A collection of various essays and poems by a wide range of authors (male and female), this manual for the pursuit of a rewarding married life presented an optimistic picture of the pleasures ahead. Occasionally, there is a moment of caution: Thouar’s own contribution advises mothers to ensure that their daughters have realistic expectations of ‘the obstacles and dangers’ that marriage holds. 1 The effectiveness of such warnings was nevertheless hampered by other, more eulogistic depictions of the future awaiting the newlyweds. If romantic love was rarely an anticipated feature in unions derived from the marriage market, bonds of companionable intimacy were instead projected as a more valuable and longlasting alternative. An item in Thouar’s book entitled ‘L’amicizia nel matrimonio’ posits friendship in marriage as the ‘most sublime affection that unites elevated souls that search neither diversions nor vulgar pleasures’ – a relationship that is ‘more delicate, more tender, more affectionate’ than that between male friends (which rather suggests this essay was aimed as much toward the husband as the wife).2 Some – probably many – women undoubtedly found their new roles as wives and mothers fulfilling. Even given the inequalities of the Italian legal system both before and after Unification, marriage often brought greater independence and status for women than was to be found in the family home. For middle-­and upper-­class women, running a household – especially a large establishment – was a career in itself. From what we know, Giuseppina Strepponi, although chafing at the isolation she experienced when Verdi was away, appears to have found at least the first twenty-­odd years of her role as the composer’s mistress, amanuensis and later wife as rewarding as her previous existence as a prima donna on the opera-­house circuit.3 Stability and status perhaps compensated in this case for the difficulties of her earlier precarious, often lonely independence.4 And home-­making could bring its own pleasures, even when money was tight. In her memoirs, Neera expressed the delight she had found in the crafts of needlework and knitting, priding herself on having made all her son’s clothes herself: ‘Economy practised for tradition and with pleasure was an element of strength and serenity. I have known to a great degree the pleasure of refashioning an old skirt and of piling into the drawers so many pairs of stockings made by myself stitch by stitch. In these humble tasks there is a pride of creation, of a battle overcome, of time well spent, which is in itself a reward and an inducement.’5 Even given that Neera was recording her experiences from the nostalgic perspective of many years’ distance, her satisfaction in the accomplishment of such tasks has a ring of  truth.

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Other women experienced great difficulty. For some, the problem lay not so much in the roles of wife and mother in themselves, but rather in the lack of choice women had in determining the boundaries of such roles. The metaphor that most often recurs in social and cultural discourses to describe the transition from the anticipation of marriage to the actual experience of being a wife was the awakening from a ‘dream’. Books such as Thouar’s manual, however well intentioned, did little to provide a realistic picture of what lay ahead for those hopeful brides. As feminist ideas became increasingly articulated in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it fell to women such as Anna Maria Mozzoni to speak more bluntly: One unhappy day, young woman, you will make a sad survey of the friends of your adolescence to see how many of your beautiful dreams have been fulfilled, and you will see this one fallen into the clutches of a brutal husband to whom the law lends a strong hand – that one widowed at an early age with a troupe of children, who vainly offers her intellect and physique for work denied to her by custom and prejudice, and who suffers hunger – another, seduced and impoverished, who has had to tear from her breast the child of illicit love and give him to public charity without knowing his destiny – yet another, young and beautiful, caught in the odious twisted threads of an indissoluble marriage with a man cadaverous in mind and body – and the last who, pressed by misery and surrounded by pedlars of human flesh, was handed over by them to the sluggish lusts of a decrepit Nabob for a price that they pocketed and which she pays in person.6

The destruction of dreams was exactly how the Sicilian poet Mariannina Coffa Caruso (1841–78) described her transformation from daughter to wife. Initially affianced to a young musician, Ascenzio Mauceri, she eventually ceded to the demands of her disapproving family and in April 1860 married a much older man, a comparative stranger, Giorgio Morano (from Ragusa). From the outset, the marriage was a disaster. Morano frowned on her already established career as a poet; her health suffered; her children died. Secretly, she resumed correspondence with Mauceri. In one letter, she contrasted her idyllic adolescence with the reality of an unhappy marriage: On one side the dreams of my girlhood, the cult of innocence, love, art, the future with its perfume of cherubs – on the other, the bitter reality of life, the cult of misfortune, the graves of my daughters, the harp without harmony, love without comfort … Eight years of martyrdom, eight years of wars with base weapons, and without noble adversaries, eight years of isolation and silence … What has life been for me? What joys, what compensations, what satisfactions has it given me?7

Perceiving nothing but ‘darkness and disillusionment’, she longed now only for ‘annihilation’ and ‘the final sleep!’. The ‘dreams’ of Coffa’s youth had thus become a hideous distortion – that is, she both retained the dream of her lost love (relived through her letters with Mauceri) as a bulwark against the harsh reality of her present, but was also prey to emotional and mental disturbances, including hallucinations.

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Did Coffa draw her imagery from fiction? Or did fiction reflect reality? Certainly, in Verdi’s operas the reveries of his young heroines as they project a future happiness – a meeting, a marriage – shade into the darker hauntings of his unhappy wives. All draw in one fashion or another on this metaphor. The life that had been dreamt has dissipated into nightmare, longing for a future transmuted into grieving for a lost past. Even in Desdemona and Otello’s brief idyll, the couple reminisce more about what has gone before than anticipate possible joys to come. Later, on the final, bitter night of her life, Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ reprises the melancholy lament that she heard as a child and that now seems to have been an omen of her own plight. Images of death are evoked much sooner in the narrative by some of Verdi’s other unhappy wives. Lida in La battaglia di Legnano (1849) reveals her desperation in her opening aria. Despite her role as wife and mother, she longs only for oblivion: Quante volte come un dono Al Signor la morte ho chiesta! L’esistenza è a me funesta … È la tomba il mio sospir. Ma son madre! … madre io sono! Darmi un figlio Iddio volea! Ah! per me divenne rea Sin la brama di morir. (How many times have I asked / death as a gift from God! / Life is wretched for me … / And I sigh for the tomb. / But I am a mother! … I am a mother! / God wanted to give me a son! / Ah! for me it has become a crime / Even to long for death.)

Lida’s brief joy on discovering that her former lover, Arrigo, is still alive turns to a yet darker mood when he accuses her of betrayal in marrying someone else, and she begs him to kill her. All Verdi’s unhappy wives fantasise in one fashion or another about the release of this ‘ultimo sonno’ (‘final sleep’), as Coffa described it. Their pain arose from the peculiar complexities posed by adultery in the nineteenth century. In 1873, Paolo Mantegazza directly attacked the hypocrisy surrounding this topic: It is written in the laws that adultery is a crime, subject to the gravest penalties, and in practical life adultery is the most common and most venial sin we know; it is not only tolerated but celebrated, and almost admitted as a social institution. According to law, homicide is punishable with death, and many who have become assassins for love’s sake are borne in triumph by the people, or at least absolved. The incitement to prostitution is considered a very serious crime, and many gowned legislators sell their daughter to a rich husband who cannot love her, who will never love her, and who will drag her down to the irresistible necessity of adultery. And this is not prostitution? Either man is not worthy of the laws which he imposes on himself, or he is lost in a dizzy maze; he is either an arrogant blockhead or a brazen liar. Man is a little of all this, but he is chiefly a hypocrite.8

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That hypocrisy extended throughout all layers of society. Many of Italy’s senior political protagonists (Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi) had affairs as bachelors with married women,9 or as husbands had mistresses (such as Crispi, who while prime minister was outed as a bigamist and forced to resign).10 Even in the full flood of his romantic phase with Strepponi in 1853, Verdi had some kind of dalliance with an unidentified woman in Venice, as his coded letters to Piave demonstrate;11 his later and much-­disputed relationship with the soprano Teresa Stolz in the 1870s found its way into the popular press and caused considerable pain to Strepponi.12 How such relationships were managed depended on the individual temperaments of all involved. Verdi’s publisher, Giovanni Ricordi, for example, provided for his ‘compagna’, Marietta Ventura, in his will and required her to be considered as ‘my legitimate wife’.13 As Mantegazza suggested, however, the hypocrisy of the age lay not just in pretending that adultery did not exist, but in refusing to recognise that the system of arranged marriages directly provoked illicit liaisons – and that these had very specific consequences for women. In an epoch that regarded the bourgeois family as the foundation of its fortunes, love rarely came more forbidden than in the form of female adulterous passion. Throughout Europe, female adultery was commonly regarded (in Lynda Nead’s words) as ‘the most transgressive form of sexual deviancy’.14 Society’s definition of the adulteress in such terms was due primarily to the impact of her actions on the structure of the family: in particular, the imperilling of the legitimacy of heirs. This was an essentially middle­class anxiety – the aristocracy, the disposal of whose property had long been regulated through complex procedures, was more at ease with the notion. 15 Indeed, part of the problem in Italy lay in the practices of previous generations. The convention of cicisbeismo – a woman taking a lover with her husband’s consent – that dominated the Italian upper classes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was condemned by both liberals and moderates of the 1830s and 1840s, intent on building the new bourgeois society.16 Comparing cicisbeismo with both past and modern mores in Europe, Cesare Balbo claimed that nowhere had there been a custom ‘so base, so coarse, so weak, so scandalous as that of the cavalieri serventi’.17 Even Cristina di Belgioioso, whose own rapport with marriage was decidedly complex – she married wilfully at sixteen a notorious womaniser, and later left him to live independently (where she enjoyed a number of serious affairs, eventually giving birth to a child – her estranged husband provided it with paternity) – saw such practices as illustrative of female duplicity, and therefore in some way emblematic of the old, decadent Italy. She described how aristocratic women of the early part of the nineteenth century were accompanied by the cavalieri serventi, patiti and galanti, and how these customs excited ‘the displeasure and indignation’ of liberal sympathisers.18 Yet while the old system had allowed some consolation for the emotional sterility of arranged marriages,19 the new emphasis on marital fidelity without a concomitant support for marriages undertaken solely for sentimental reasons led to a burgeoning of adultery. As Roberto Bizzocchi points out, where once there had

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been ‘controlled liberty’ in the eighteenth century, in the Ottocento there was now ‘control without liberty, passable only by hidden transgressions’. 20 In terms of the penalties exacted for such infractions, women felt the weight of this ‘control without liberty’ more acutely than men. Italian law – like that of a number of other European countries – treated female adultery more harshly than male.21 In most states prior to unity and in the country as a whole post-­Unification, women could be imprisoned for between three months and two years for adultery (a sentence that stemmed from article 308 of the Codice Napoleone il Grande pel regno d’Italia, 1806);22 an added twist was that the husband could determine whether this punishment was imposed. Similar redress was not available to wronged wives. As article 150 of the Codice civile (1865) states, while men could apply for legal separation on the grounds of their spouse’s infidelity, women could do so only under very limited circumstances: Separation can be requested for reasons of adultery or voluntary abandonment, and for reasons of excesses, torture, threats and grave injuries. The action of separation is not permitted on account of the husband’s adultery, unless he maintains his concubine in the marital home or notoriously in another place, or there are other contributing circumstances such that the fact constitutes a grave injury to the wife.23

Adulterous husbands were subject to imprisonment from 1899 only if, as above, they introduced their mistress into the family home or kept her too obviously elsewhere. 24 Most significantly, men who killed their erring wives received a punishment considerably lighter than that for murder.25 The disparity did not go unchallenged. Even a vehement opponent of divorce such as Alfredo Oriani referred in 1886 to the relevant clause in the penal code as ‘absurd and harsh’.26 De Giorgio describes the law as ‘the institutionalised triumph of double morality’, and claims that by the end of the century the reform of legislation on adultery was recognised by most intellectuals as ‘a first step towards modifying the social-­judicial conditions that enchained women in inferiority’.27 Was this position reflected on the operatic stage? The answer to this question is both yes – and no. Adultery was a common theme in the opera house during the nineteenth century: it even ushered in Italian operatic romanticism in the form of Bellini’s Il pirata (1827), with its hero, Gualtiero, returning from exile to find his beloved Imogene married to his mortal enemy. The thematic popularity of adultery across the period undoubtedly reflected social interest, but there were pragmatic reasons for its use too. Dramatically rich in conflicts – between lover and spouse, social expectations and personal experiences, desire and guilt – marital infidelity presented vivid possibilities for an art form that sought ‘situations’ above all: secret meetings between lovers, the discovery of a partner’s liaison and the emotional and practical consequences of such knowledge. Plots delineating female adultery (either actual or supposed) occurred throughout the period. The theme of male adultery in serious opera, however, flourished primarily

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in the earlier decades of the century, particularly where it provided opportunities for the newly dominant prima donna in the role of the wronged wife. The vengeful figure of Medea was a popular choice (Cherubini, 1797; Mayr, 1813; Pacini, 1843/rev. 1845), while a cluster of operas on adulterous husbands, possibly influenced by the success of Bellini’s Norma (which owed something in at least one scene to the tale of Medea), is particularly visible in the 1830s.28 Yet in Verdi’s operas, male infidelity is reserved for the Duke in Rigoletto and Philippe II in Don Carlos. In the first opera, we learn nothing of the reactions of the Duke’s wife to his philandering, nor do we ever meet her; only her portrait stares mutely down from the wall, a succinct indication of her status as passive spectator of her husband’s sexual antics (which include abduction and rape).29 Indeed, the duchess’s silence was emblematic not only of her wifely role but also of broader social reticence (as we saw from Mantegazza) about male adultery. Italian opera’s lack of interest in the male adulterer from the 1840s to the 1890s was symptomatic of an epoch when many middle-­and upper-­class husbands supplemented domestic relationships with the sexual services of mistresses, servants and prostitutes. Within the dominant discourses, controlled male adultery of this kind – that is, which did not ostensibly threaten the secure continuance of the marriage – was generally presented as morally dubious at worst, or at best as a laudable sign of the vigour of male sexual appetites. In that sense, the emphasis of Rigoletto on the ‘other’ victim of male adultery – the mistress rather than the wife – acknowledged that the philandering that created such bonds between men (see Rigoletto’s earlier complicity in the Duke’s activities) could have tragic consequences even when these did not involve the failure of the marriage itself. Some aspects of marital infidelity never found their way on to the Italian operatic stage, even if they emerged in other cultural guises. 30 Ibsen’s Ghosts, a play written mainly in Italy during 1881 but not performed there until 1892,31 created an outcry in many European countries with its depiction of the legacy of male adultery via the transmission of veneral disease to the son and heir. The commotion provoked by Ghosts suggests that theatrical exposure of such topics was avoided in part because it called into question consequences of sexual behaviour that men preferred to remain largely hidden from their wives – consequences referred to openly by Virginia Paganini in La missione della donna (1884)32 and later in fiction by both Anna Franchi (Avanti il divorzio, 1902) and Sibilla Aleramo (Una donna, 1906).33 If opera added little to the discourses around male adultery, its position regarding female adultery was more complex. While Italian law deplored but partly condoned homicide as a comprehensible male reaction to a wife’s infidelity (especially where discovered in flagrante), for much of the period on stage this extreme penalty was usually exacted from women who had been unjustly accused, as in Rossini’s Otello (1816) or Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda (1830).34 These wronged innocents, killed directly or indirectly by their husbands, pay a heavier price for presumed adultery than other heroines did for the actual act. Although death is often threatened to genuinely adulterous wives by

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their spouses, this punishment does not seem to have been inflicted or was otherwise thwarted (as in the two settings of Hugo’s Angelo, tyran de Padoue: Mercadante’s Il giuramento, 1837 and Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, 1876) in operas by the major Italian composers of the period prior to Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in 1892. Forgiveness, however grudging, of an erring wife was the usual stance until the latter part of the nineteenth century – provided that the male rival was excluded from any possibility of continuing the relationship by a duel, murder or execution.35 The wives themselves were often reconciled to their husbands after demonstrations of repentance (such as Eleonora’s threat of suicide in Donizetti’s Il furioso nell’isola di San Domingo, 1833). Some conservative commentators, such as La civiltà cattolica, viewed the stage as deliberately colluding in moral decadence in its presentation of adultery;36 a more pragmatic perspective is that opera’s approach to female adultery served mostly to maximise the dramatic potential of the situation. Greater pathos was provided when an innocent wife stood accused, or when a husband struggled to overcome his rage and grief in dealing with a guilty spouse. Operatic female adultery scenarios were as much about notions of male sexual possession defined by the concept of ‘honour’ as they were about women’s choice of partner. Thus, a recurring feature of the representation of unfaithful wives is that their lovers were paramours from the past, believed dead or lost, as in Il pirata. Verdi’s first setting of adulterous passion was based on this premise. Lida in La battaglia di Legnano had sworn undying love to Arrigo: but on his presumed death (and that of her parents), she was forced to marry his friend Rolando instead.37 Again, this device had practical value, enabling composers and librettists to begin immediately with the action surrounding the adultery, rather than having to establish a relationship between the lovers. Pre-knowledge also created an aura of innocence about the resumption of the relationship, implying that a man who sunders female virginity, be it physical or emotional, has understandable if not legal rights over the woman. This element built in further layers of complexity to the plot. Arrigo is as angered by Lida’s ‘betrayal’ of his memory as Rolando is about her supposed infidelity. Lida, of course, is doubly wounded. In this opera, adultery plays a secondary role to the real theme – patriotism. First staged in Rome during the short-­lived republic in 1849, La battaglia di Legnano suggests that even the most grievous emotional wound between men – the stealing of another man’s wife – needs to be set aside if victory is to be achieved. Almost immediately, however, Verdi was at work with Piave on Stiffelio (1850), later revised as Aroldo (1857). It was one of the very few operas Verdi based on contemporary texts: in this case, a play by Émile Souvestre and Eugène Bourgeois, first performed in the Parisian boulevard theatres and also in Italy (in translation) during the late 1840s, and drawn from Souvestre’s earlier novel, Le Pasteur d’hommes (1838).38 Here, adultery moves centre stage; here, too, it gains a physical dimension. As with Rigoletto, however, we need to ask: what actually takes place between the guilty couple? Both Stiffelio and Rigoletto deal with an intimate act between man and

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woman, the nature of which is only alluded to in veiled terms; curiously, Verdi was composing both operas during the same period. Modern critics (with the notable exception of Roger Parker) often read Stiffelio as a straightforward tale of adultery; some, such as Gustavo Marchesi, are even puzzled that Verdi expended so much care on so antipathetic a heroine.39 As we will see, mid-­nineteenth-­century commentators, more accustomed to the epoch’s language of hypocrisy that coded sexual congress, found the precise nature of the relationship between Lina and Raffaele much less easy to identify. There were plenty of reasons for confusion. Stiffelio demonstrates the difficulty of trying to compress complex, lengthy narratives into the form of a libretto. In the move from novel to opera (via two separate dramatic adaptations for the French and Italian stages), the explication of Lina’s apparent adultery is increasingly reduced – culminating in a kind of homeopathic treatment of the sexual event, where only the trace of the original substance is left. In both the French sources of novel and play, Lina is tempted by the outside world of luxury and fascinations that contrasts with her quiet existence as the wife of a Protestant pastor (‘Rudolphe Müller’ in the novel, ‘Stifellius’ in the play). Her would-­be seducer Raphaël encapsulates in his very being this sense of devilish enchantment, as she reveals early in the play: ‘he divines the thoughts that you had not discovered yourself, he caresses your most hidden fantasises; in short, his whole being seems to be at the service of your desires’.40 Raphaël thus enters her mind before her body. For him, clearly, this is not enough. Lina’s repeated rejections of his advances and her avowals of fidelity to her husband only inflame his desire further. At this point in the tale, the novel and French dramatic adaptation begin to diverge. In the former, Stankar (Lina’s uncle here) is woken suddenly in the night by strange cries; going to Lina’s bedchamber, he finds her trembling and unwell. The doctor diagnoses that she is in the grip of a violent fever, but her behaviour suggests a psychological disturbance. For several days, she remains listless and withdrawn; when she meets Raphaël socially, she recoils from his touch, greeting his whispered request for a meeting with ‘a movement of horror’.41 It finally emerges that Raphaël had climbed into her apartment via the window, and using ‘surprise’ and ‘violence’ had raped her. 42 Moreover, he wants to do it again. On stage, however, description has to give way to action, necessitating a number of changes. The audience is made aware of what is about to happen (via Raphaël’s conversation with a servant, revealing that he intends to enter Lina’s room by a secret passage – we need not stress the symbolic implications); it then experiences the presumed sexual act at second hand via the means of a storm (a common theatrical device to account for offstage crises, one Verdi himself had already used in Il corsaro and would do so again in Rigoletto). All this has already happened prior to the rise of the curtain in Verdi’s opera. The narrative instead begins at the point of Stiffelio’s return after his three-­month absence,

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and therefore the opera spectator (seeing the story for the first time) does not witness Lina’s earlier attempts to resist Raffaele, nor the aftermath of his assault. Even more important is the loss of the lines later in the French play where, in her confrontation with Stifellius in the drama’s penultimate scene, Lina reveals explicitly the nature of her supposed ‘affair’ with Raphaël: stif.: 

Malheureuse! et lui! … n’avez-­vous donc pas accepté son amour? lina (avec force):  Non; je l’ai subi! car il a employé la ruse, la surprise, la violence! stif.:  Dieu! lina:  Oui, la violence! (Jorg paraît à la porte à gauche) stif. (avec éclat): Se peut-­il? Ah! dès que le crime est à lui seul, je reprends mes droits pour le punir.43 (stif.: 

Unhappy one! and him! … had you therefore not accepted his love? No; I have been subjected to it! because he employed trickery, surprise, violence! stif.: God! lina:  Yes, violence! (Jorg appears at the door on the left) stif.: (with a gleam):  Can it be? Ah! since the crime is his alone, I claim my right to punish him.) lina (forcefully): 

We can see that Lina stresses that she was the victim of this attack, even repeating the word ‘violence!’ twice, so there could be no mistake. In the Italian translation of the play (made by the actor Gaetano Vestri), however, this statement was markedly contracted: lina (con forza):  stiffelio: 

L’ho subito perché un infame tradimento … Ah! un tradimento … dunque ho diritto di punirlo!44

(lina (strongly): I was subjected to it by way of a vile treachery … stiffelio:  Ah! treachery … therefore I have the right to punish him!) Piave’s libretto for Verdi reduces Lina’s response yet further, to merely: ‘Fu tradimento’ (‘It was treachery’). The phrase receives little musical emphasis in the score, although rather more is given to Stiffelio’s terse reaction, ‘Fia spento … io n’ho il dritto’ (‘May he be killed … I have the right’), with its accented rise to g′ on ‘spento’ (see Example 5.1). It might be argued that Stiffelio’s response was supposed to make things clear. From the reviews and later criticism, however, it is apparent that this hurried exchange did not reveal the whole truth, particularly in the context of other information provided by the opera. The issue was further clouded by the manner in which this revelation is perceived by the characters. Here, there is considerable difference between Souvestre’s original text and the three stage adaptations. In the novel, the pastor preaches in church directly after discovering the ‘affair’ (but not the rape), and having already threatened to kill Raphaël. He recounts the parable of Christ’s protection of the adulteress – but when he reaches the words about ‘forgiveness’, he directs a tirade to Lina about betrayal, curses

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her and finally collapses at the foot of the crucifix. Later that night, unable to deal with his wife’s apparent infidelity or the conflict between his thirst for violence against Raphaël and his religious faith, he secretly takes poison. The pastor has much to do in his final hours. After a bitter exchange with Lina, where he insists their marriage has ended, he meets Raphaël in order to find out whether he would marry Lina were she free to do so. As only one of the two men can live, the pastor says, he is prepared to sacrifice his own life to save Lina’s honour and ensure her future happiness. It quickly becomes plain that Raphaël is not the least interested in a permanent partnership with Lina. He exits; Lina, who has overheard everything (including the

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pastor’s admission that he is close to death), arrives. Desperate to save her husband, she declares that she has always loved him. Now at last the whole truth emerges. On learning of the rape, the pastor shows none of the hesitation of the later theatrical versions, but clasps Lina to his chest, professing his eternal love and forgiveness. Stankar returns, pistols ominously in hand, to report Raphaël’s death. The pastor draws Lina into his embrace once again, murmuring ‘some words of love, of consolation’. 45 He dies shortly afterwards, but with a smile. The French play transposes the order of action, as well as introducing the notion of divorce. Rather than killing himself, Stifellius attempts to terminate his marriage. Lina’s revelation of the rape follows Stifellius’ insistence on a divorce, and emerges only because of her even stronger insistence (she speaks ‘avec autorité’, the stage directions stipulate) on being heard. After their exchange cited above, Stankar again emerges to announce Raffaël’s death  – not ‘murder’ he claims, but ‘expiation’. Then Jorg leads Stifellius to church, where he is to deliver his sermon; Lina follows, unseen by her husband. The stage is set with a gothic interior, in which there is a pulpit with two staircases. Stifellius mounts the one on the right; Lina enters, veiled, and kneels at the foot of the left staircase. Still disorientated by emotional turmoil, Stifellius finds himself at a loss before the congregation, until he opens the Bible and finds by chance the account of Christ’s protection of the adulteress. As he reads, Lina slowly mounts the stairs. Stifellius recognises her and directs the final words towards her – and as he pronounces the final ‘se leva pardonnée’, she falls on her knees on the uppermost step at his feet: Stifellius makes his final gesture of forgiveness by holding out his hand to her (‘Il tend la main à Lina’). Vestri’s Italian version of the play makes only one brief but telling change: Stifellius does not extend his hand to Lina. The alterations to this final scene in Verdi’s opera were significant, accentuating the extremes. Lina mounts the stairs on her knees in an excruciating crawl, presenting surely one of the epoch’s most abased depictions of the ‘fallen woman’. But equally, as Stiffelio sings the final words of pardon, his hand on the Bible, Lina rises to her feet, hands lifted high (‘si alza da terra e colle mani alzate’) – an amendment to the stage directions added in Verdi’s own hand – and exclaims ‘Gran Dio!’ Musically, Verdi underpinned this series of actions by having Stiffelio repeat the word ‘perdonata’ (‘pardoned’) four times in total, with growing intensity until the word is marked tutto forza as it evokes the final sanction, ‘Iddio lo pronunziò!’ (‘God proclaims it!’). Stiffelio’s act of forgiveness is reinforced by bringing in the chorus and full orchestra to reprise the same sequence in stirring fashion. In the final bars, Lina’s physical ascent to ­rehabilitation finds aural manifestation in her soaring c′′′ on ‘Gran Dio!’; the curtain falls. At least, that was the intention. Censorship did not permit this mise-­en-­scène in the first production of the opera at Trieste. While the music remained intact, Stiffelio’s allusion to the biblical parable of the adulteress was changed simply to a more general reference to clemency and forgiveness; in the final tableau, Lina remained penitentially on her knees, without

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the exalted rise to her feet and her hands reaching up to heaven; most ominously of all, perhaps, Stiffelio ‘si allontana’ (‘distances himself from her’).46 The transference of the sermon until after the news of the rape coupled with this ambiguous stage action indubitably raised many complications. Why was Lina so guilty? Why was Stiffelio so unforgiving? Critics struggled to comprehend. The Diavoletto (lambasting the work for various reasons), summed up the plot with heavy irony: A minister of the Assasverian religious sect discovers his wife is unfaithful, the seducer is killed by the father of the seduced, and the cuckolded husband after various changes of affection grants her pardon in a manner so doubtful that the audience remained open mouthed … A fine coup de théâtre!47

A review by the Gazzetta ufficiale di Venezia of a later production at La Fenice in 1852 described Lina as ‘more wretched than guilty’ and Stiffelio’s threat of physical violence to her (‘Il mio piè ti schiaccierà!’) as a ‘rather strong’ expression for a man of the cloth. 48 Basevi, writing six years later, identified the source of the confusion, and hazarded a possible interpretation of the narrative: However, it is not really clear how Lina might have erred through the cunning and betrayal of others; inasmuch as one does not know if the same thing happened to her as befell the wife of Filippello Fighinolfi of the Boccaccio. In fact, from some expressions, it appears that at one time she felt some sense of affection for her seducer. The love that Lina then confesses as having always borne her husband Stiffelio is something that needs greater development and proof in order to convince the spectator.49

Basevi alludes to the ‘Sixth Tale on the Third Day’ of Boccaccio’s Decameron, told by Fiammetta. Here, Catella, the wife of Filippello Fighinolfi, is tricked by a man (Ricciardo) avowing love for her into having sex with him in the belief that he was in fact her husband. Although Catella weeps and protests when she discovers the truth, she nonetheless soon discovers that Ricciardo’s kisses were more ‘appetizing’ than those of her husband, and begins to enjoy herself.50 To understand the widespread notions of rape and female sexuality that triggered Basevi’s allusion to this tale – and indeed, perhaps also shaped the theatrical adaptations of Souvestre’s novel – we need to turn to Michelet’s L’Amour. Written in France in 1859, this might seem adrift geographically and chronologically. However, Michelet’s treatise on love and marriage rested heavily on long-­established perceived ‘norms’ of behaviour and gender construction across Europe. In his section on the corruption of otherwise faithful wives, he asks: what constitutes female consent to the sexual act? He stresses in particular the power of ‘surprise’ and ‘force’ in overcoming a woman’s resistance to a seducer,51 and outlines the need to define the ‘degree of will’ and the ‘degree of constraint’. While one woman ‘has desired and ventured’, another ‘has not consented, not even with a thirtieth part of her will’:

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women ‘And the twenty-­nine remaining parts which have decided the act, how do you reckon them?’ Put down twenty of them for the surprise, the terror at feeling herself under a strong hand (and cruel too, if need be). Then, if her resistance continue, add, say eight or nine degrees, for what his fierce impatience hardly spares her, the rude shock, the sharp pain which paralyses her. And last, her emotion (for the poor woman is not made of stone). If to this suspended agony, there succeed a sensation not painful, it is to her like a reprieve to the criminal on the scaffold. This is the wretched thirtieth part of will which is not will, of pretended consent. And is the culprit less guilty? No, he is more so; this very fact, far from extenuating his guilt, adds horror to it. He has defiled the soul.52

Michelet makes it plain that he is referring to female orgasm in rape – not as something unusual, but as if it was a common occurrence. From Roman times to the late eighteenth century, medical doctrine in Europe had regarded the female orgasm as crucial in woman’s ability to conceive. Hence, if rape victims became pregnant, it was assumed that they had ‘consented’ to sex, as an orgasm was presumed to have taken place.53 This led to the concept that women could be forced to pleasure – and if there was pleasure, then (from the existing legal perspective) there was no rape. By the 1820s, such ideas were changing, at least in some scientific and legal circles.54 However, Michelet demonstrates that the earlier notions still held ground among society, remarking that if a woman was unfortunate enough to become pregnant after rape, then ‘so much the more harshly will they say that she consented. This is an old error, the fallacy of which is now known. Nature has nothing to do with consent.’55 Yet although Michelet dismisses the link between pregnancy and orgasm, he nonetheless specifically confirmed the notion that rape could lead to female orgasm. For an Italian example of the way such ideas could be used to validate or even valorise rape, note Alfredo Oriani’s comments in 1886: The female knows that masculine love is aggression, violence, sometimes even bloodshed, but aggression tempts her, violence stimulates her, bloodshed in its origins of scratches and bites often becomes to her a sensual pleasure. Within the woman broods the female. No woman will spurn a man who tries to rape her in an impetus of love; she might hate him, but her pride will find in that provoked violence the most beautiful of compliments. 56

Oriani concludes that ‘In their relationships with us, women must therefore maintain the natural differences: thus at home the husband will be in command, and in Parliament, man.’57 His political framing demonstrates how perceptions of women’s relationship to sexual acts, enforced or otherwise, were deployed in broader arguments against women’s suffrage and legal rights. To return to Stiffelio, the issue for both the opera’s characters and its puzzled audience may have therefore been not so much whether Lina was forced to have sex – it was whether her body, against her will and her emotions, had physically responded to it. Certainly, there was enough ambiguity in the opera for commentators such

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as Basevi to consider the latter as a strong possibility. Lina’s pointed declaration to Raffaele that her ‘heart’ had never loved him (in contrast to her body?) is one factor; her acute guilt is another. Psychologically, she is the most consistently tortured of Verdi’s heroines, stumbling from one state of anguish to another. The opera magnifies her sense of self-­reproach, most notably in a scena and double aria, ‘Oh cielo! … dove son io!’ (which has no source in the play) at the beginning of Act ii, set in the cemetery where the gravestones themselves sculpt in fearful form her ‘delitto’ (‘crime’). The inclusion of a showy aria for the prima donna was fully in keeping with operatic conventions, but the choice of Verdi and Piave to centre it on this self-­accusation of criminality means that Lina is implicated much more than in either novel or play as somehow responsible for the rape. The later actions of Stiffelio and Stankar reinforce this perspective – Lina must be ‘forgiven’, rather than understood and supported as the innocent victim of Raffaele’s violence – and it is framed by a constant play on the imagery of death as an appropriate penalty for her ‘crime’. In the shrouded cemetery, her mother’s tomb acts as both reproach and refuge: a site where Lina contrasts her stained life with her mother’s purity and prays for guidance and intercession for divine forgiveness. When Stiffelio shortly afterwards discovers (as he supposes) the relationship between Lina and Raffaele, she declares to herself: ‘E la vita che mi resta / Morte lenta a me sarà!’ (‘And the rest of my life / Will be slow death to me!’) (Act ii, scene vi). Later, in their scene of confrontation (Act iii, scene vi), Lina responds to Stiffelio’s intention to divorce her with ‘Schiacciatemi … uccidetemi … /Morrò per vostro amor!’ (‘Beat me … kill me … / I will die for your love!’) – a willingness to submit to violence that would be removed in Verdi’s revised version, Aroldo, six years later. This emphasis on Lina’s self-­reproach in Stiffelio thus raised doubts about what exactly motivated such remorse. Beyond its disturbing implication that women could thus ‘enjoy’ rape, 58 Stiffelio’s oblique reference to female orgasm was also a reminder of older ideas about women’s capacity for sexual pleasure – something that had been increasingly dismissed in the context of the desexualisation of the female body in the nineteenth century and the emergence of the ‘angel of the hearth’ (angelo del focolare).59 For some women, raised in ignorance about their bodies, circumscribed by ideas of passivity and then subjected to arranged marriages, the physical passion aroused by an adulterous liaison could furnish a form of sexual education. One example is provided by the relationship between Enrichetta di Lorenzo and Carlo Pisacane, where rebellion against social convention was equally tied with political revolt. Di Lorenzo had been parcelled off in marriage at the age of eighteen to a much older man, Dionisio Lazzari. Nine years later, in February 1847, she eloped with Carlo Pisacane (a childhood friend), abandoning her husband and three children in Naples. Pursued by the police, the lovers took pistols with them on their flight because, as di Lorenzo declared, they were prepared to die together rather than lose each other.

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Di Lorenzo’s letters to her family reveal that her new relationship also gave her a new perspective about her sexual life. On 18 May 1847, she wrote to her mother from Paris: You could not believe the shame and disdain that, when thinking about the past, I now harbour for myself and for all women who hold in their arms a man without feeling that which I feel for Charles; deceiving the sentiments of nature is prostituting oneself … it would be right that my dear sisters knew this before taking a husband. 60

In framing her previous married life as ‘prostitution’, di Lorenzo challenged the perception that would label her in her changed circumstances as a ‘fallen woman’. Rather, she implied, the reverse was true: the moral high ground of sexual purity was to be found not in wifely duty but in a concomitant union of hearts and bodies. And what were these ‘sentiments of nature’ she felt for Pisacane? We can guess something of what she had discovered in her physical life from another letter of three years later, referring to her former husband: In physical matters, then, I can swear before God that for nine years I believed that woman was born for the pleasure of man, and that she must only feel indifference, or disgust – which seems incredible, but unfortunately it is a fact. Dionisio has nothing beautiful in his physique, nor any culture; his much-­praised courtesy might please a woman who is persuaded that she must be the slave of a man, but as soon as this woman knows that she has equal rights with man, raises her status, and develops her moral faculties, Dionisio’s courtesy is transformed into imbecility.61

With Pisacane, then, it seems that di Lorenzo had discovered her own physical pleasure – as opposed to the apathy and abhorrence that marked her sexual encounters with her husband. There is a hint of this kind of territory in Verdi’s next essay in female adultery, Un ballo in maschera (1859), where a wife finds ‘true’ love in the arms of another man. This time, we witness the blossoming of the relationship between the lovers. Where both Lida and Lina ‘resisted’, Amelia succumbs. And yet again, the shades of death intrude. A scaffold, with all the implications of the grisly burden it normally carried, plays a symbolic role in the scene in Act ii where Amelia’s love for Riccardo should be buried but is instead revealed in all its desperate glory. Amelia both desires the end of desire – and fears the emptiness that will take its place. Her moving, deeply felt aria, ‘Ma dell’arido stelo divulsa’, ends when she, like so many other Verdian heroines, resorts to prayer (‘Deh! mi reggi, m’aita, o Signor’). Her supplication is answered in unexpected fashion: Riccardo, the object of her desire, emerges from the shadows. Verdi’s most ardent duet to date sublimates sex between the lovers.62 Riccardo (a rather more sympathetic character than his predecessors Raffaele and Arrigo) declares his love to Amelia; she begs him only to leave, reminding him that she is another man’s wife. Riccardo swears (with true dramatic

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irony) that he would give ‘la mia vita, l’universo’ if she will only say she loves him. The moment is pregnant. The orchestra hushes; Amelia hesitates; and finally, reluctantly, the magical words arrive, propelled by the fact that the cellos speak first for her and she simply abandons herself to their melody: ‘Ebben … sì … t’amo’. The importance of her succinct but deeply felt admission was described by Verdi himself in response to the Neapolitan censor, who wanted to change Amelia’s words to the inexplicable ‘A che lo chiedi?’: For pity’s sake! If the words ‘I love you’ don’t escape from Amelia, the whole piece remains without life, without passion, without warmth, without that enthusiasm and abandon that are necessary in scenes of this kind: if these words are taken away, the lines that follow become meaningless, and the duet no longer has any reason for being.63

This admission, ‘t’amo’, is thus the crux of the scene. In an instant, the lovers’ passion thrills into being, absorbing (at least for Riccardo) all consciousness of guilt: ‘oh sia distrutto il rimorso … estinto tutto sia fuorché l’amor!’ (‘oh, let remorse be destroyed … let all be extinguished beyond love!’). As their reciprocated desire expands into infinity, so the mundane world recedes. Triplet harp arpeggios precipitate the motion of the ensuing cabaletta, giving a celestial, ecstatic quality to their union. And when Riccardo once again asks Amelia if she loves him, this time her response is full-­throated, climactic: ‘Sì … t’amo!’ She needs no prompting from the cellos – or indeed the orchestra, which this time expresses the theme in tutti. Somehow, one feels, Amelia has found something in this relationship that she did not find in her marriage. Their blood catches fire again in the resumption of the cabaletta, yet the lovers fall even as they burn. The unexpected arrival of Renato (Amelia’s husband) marks their collision with reality, and the consequences of their passion. Masked by her veil, Amelia is passed from one man to another, and must now endure being escorted home by Renato as Riccardo’s unidentified mistress. Humiliation replaces desire, reaching its nadir when, in order to defend her husband from the violent menaces of the conspir­ ators who set upon them, Amelia lets her veil fall – and exposes both herself and Renato to ridicule. In the ensuing confrontation between husband and wife in the opening scenes of Act iii, Amelia inverts Lina’s position as emotionally innocent but sexually guilty. She confesses openly her love for Riccardo, but claims she is still ‘pure’. It is perhaps an even more perilous admission. Stiffelio had only threatened to kick Lina; the rage-­filled Renato has something more permanent in mind. Death, as we have seen, has been associated with Amelia’s relationship with Riccardo right from the beginning. Even at the height of their paroxysms in their duet, the anapestic rhythms of death undercut Riccardo’s impassioned phrase: ‘Oh qual soave brivido l’acceso petto irrora!’ (‘Oh, how sweet a thrill pervades my heart!’), while Amelia, torn between duty and love, projects a melancholy solution to her dilemma: ‘o nella morte almeno addormentarmi qui?’

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(‘or at least to sleep here in death?’). Such imagery suggests not simply the depiction of the penalties the lovers court but that, once again, their union is possible only beyond the grave. Renato is willing to hasten that journey, threatening Amelia with death in a manner ominously akin to Othello (his phrase ‘Hai finito? tardi omai …’ foreshadows Otello’s ‘È tardi!’). Only one thing saves Amelia from Desdemona’s fate: she has a son. She agrees to submit to death on one condition – that she be allowed to see her child (‘Morrò, ma prima in grazia’). Renato softens before such a plea; it is on Riccardo, he decides, that his wrath – and his dagger – should fall. Motherhood protects Amelia; it imperils Élisabeth in Verdi’s Don Carlos. Many of the themes around adultery in the preceding three examples coalesce in this opera. Once again, there is an emphasis on the nostalgia for the past, the despair of the present and the imagery of that ‘ultimo sonno’ of death. As in La battaglia di Legnano, adultery in Don Carlos is somewhat secondary to the wider political narrative of the opera. As a study in marriage, however, the opera offers the darkest possible scenario for its young heroine. It deals with an extreme case: an arranged marriage to a much older man who emerges as both cruel and adulterous. Yet worse (and more obscurely), the bride had already fallen in love with the man she was initially supposed to marry – the son of her eventual husband. If the latter part of the tale was perhaps less common outside fiction, there were plenty of models for the first. One such real marriage had even recently played a vital and very public role in Italy’s unification process. A crucial aspect of Cavour’s arrangement with Napoléon III for French support in the 1859 uprising was securing a royal marriage between Vittorio Emanuele II’s sixteen­year-­old daughter Maria Clotilde di Savoia and Napoléon’s dissolute cousin, Prince Jérôme Bonaparte, more than twenty years her senior.64 In a letter dated 24 July 1858, Cavour set out to persuade the reluctant king of the justness of this union by stressing the consequences of earlier arranged marriages between the four daughters of Vittorio Emanuele I and more established houses of royal lineage. The first, Maria Beatrice, had wed her maternal uncle, Francesco IV of Modena, associating the royal name with that of ‘a universally detested prince’;65 Maria Teresa, as the bride of Carlo II, Duke of Parma, ‘was and is as unhappy as one can be’; 66 Maria Anna had made a glittering match with Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria, but he had proved to be ‘impotent and imbecile’, forced to ignominiously abdicate his throne;67 while Maria Cristina’s forbearance in the face of the ‘gross treatment’ she received from her husband Ferdinando II delle Due Sicilie had led to her reputation as ‘a saint and martyr’ on her early death. 68 After this depressing summary, Cavour proceeded to argue conversely that his plans for the young princess Clotilde were both necessary and, moreover, would have a very different outcome: in short, as a father the king could consent tranquilly to a marriage advised by ‘the supreme interest of the state, the future of your family, of Piedmont, and of all Italy’.69 Vittorio Emanuele II gave way, and Cavour’s lengthy statement was sent to the young princess as the next step toward arranging the marriage.

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A letter written on 17 August by the husband (marchese Bernardo di Villamarina) of one of Clotilde’s ladies-­in-­waiting informed Cavour of the princess’s reaction to his plan: I know from my wife [Carolina] that the princess carefully read your letter, and in reading it two large tears sprang from her eyes. Judge their meaning for yourself, since it was impossible for Carolina to guess it, the princess having said only the following words: ‘I will write at once to Papa’. Note well that the letter will probably be sent tomorrow morning, and will reach the king the day after.70

Villamarina admitted that the princess was ‘taciturn, concentrated and extremely reflective’, that she spoke to no one ‘and only prays continuously with much fervour’, and that the marriage was unappealing to her because of Jérôme’s dubious moral character as well as on the more snobbish grounds that a princess of long royal lineage was being asked to marry a ‘Parvenu’.71 None the less, Villamarina revealed that his wife let slip that the princess ‘in order to please the king and to benefit the country, would be generous enough to sacrifice her convictions and her future for them’. 72 And Clotilde did finally concede, despite the concerns of friends such as Carolina Villamarina (her husband adds an anxious postscript to his letter to Cavour: ‘It is not true that my wife threw herself at the feet of the king weeping and imploring pity for his daughter, the princess. She limited herself to speaking seriously of the disadvantages of the projected marriage, disapproving of it owing to her anxieties for the future of the princess’). 73 The marriage thus took place a few months later.74 Yet Cavour’s confident predictions about Jérôme’s conversion from bad behaviour and Clotilde’s future happiness could not have been more wrong. The French prince’s debauched lifestyle continued and the couple separated permanently in 1870.75 The political benefits of the sacrifice of Clotilde, like that of Maria Luigia some fifty years previously, demonstrated the cynical mechanism of the code of ‘honour’: even the most socially elevated women could be bought and sold, provided some useful function was served – in fact, the more elevated the position, the greater the prize. 76 Marriage in such terms, as Enrichetta di Lorenzo said, was indeed little more than prostitution. This necessity of making ‘un buon partito’ (‘a good match’) extended in one fashion or another throughout the social classes: a means by which social status, material benefits or simply family security could be acquired or maintained. Élisabeth’s fate in Don Carlos for a broader supposed ‘good’, although on a grand scale, was something that would not have seemed unfamiliar to many spectators. Verdi’s Don Carlos captures the agony of the illicit couple and their passion – and the utter hopelessness of a life together. This emotionally heightened portrayal differs signally from Schiller’s original play of 1787, where Élisabeth demonstrates a largely stoical acceptance of her position as queen. In Verdi and Camille Du Locle’s adaptation, however, she loosens the rein on her feelings.77 The addition of an opening scene

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at Fontainebleau (cut from the 1884 version but restored again in 1886), where Élisabeth and Carlos meet as strangers (she confiding her fear of the unknown and her anxiety about her betrothed’s affection for her) and promptly fall in love, establishes the ‘rightness’ of their relationship, and so counters the sting of a quasi-­incestuous affair. Élisabeth’s open unhappiness in her subsequent marriage to Carlos’ father (‘Hélas! aux jours passés / J’étais joyeuse aussi!’) contrasts with the more reserved countenance adopted by her dramatic predecessor. In her first encounter in the opera with Carlos after her marriage (Act ii), Élisabeth struggles to retain emotional control of both herself and him. Her efforts to live up to her ideas of sacrifice and duty give her a certain strength, unlike Carlos, who is so unmanned by his feelings that he faints. His unconsciousness – and hers on two later occasions – suggests their active seeking for the death that is their only chance for respite. In Élisabeth’s Act v aria (‘Toi qui sus le néant’), again an addition to the opera, the full measure of her despair bleeds into the music with a spreading stain. There is no guilt here for her feelings for another man; only the pulsating, barely tolerable wound of severed dreams: ‘Adieu, adieu, rêve doré, illusion, chimère!’ (‘Farewell, farewell, golden dreams, illusions, chimeras!’). Parker describes this aria as the moment in which Élisabeth musically appropriates ‘a vocabulary once owned by the voices of authority’;78 but the aria is notable also in the broader context of opera’s representations of unhappy wives, in daring to express with such ‘authority’ the suffering often imposed by the implacable marital prison. As Lina revealed in Stiffelio, to be ‘heard’ was, above all, the first important step to women achieving even the slightest acknowledgement of their own reality. In this instance, Élisabeth’s anguish is perhaps ‘heard’ by the shade of Charles V, at whose tomb she is praying. Her ultimate exchanges with Carlos – ‘Adieu, ma mère!’ – ‘Adieu, mon fils!’ – have particular poignancy, as the couple accept the finality of their irretrievable situation as ‘mother’ and ‘son’, and agree to part for ever. Schiller’s play then ends with the arrival of the king, who consigns both son and wife as heretics to the clutches of the Grand Inquisitor; Élisabeth collapses and is pronounced dead; Carlos is led away to torment. In contrast, Verdi and Du Locle fashion a subtly different outcome. Before Carlos can be seized, the ghost of Charles V (or the real man?) emerges from his tomb and draws his grandson into his care, where Carlos will find the ‘peace’ that he desires, presumably in death; Elisabeth, who had earlier sung that all she sought now was ‘la paix dans la morte’ (‘peace in death’), also collapses and finds that ultimate, longed-­for oblivion. Among all Verdi’s adulterous lovers, only this pair find an ambiguous delayed lieto fine together in the world beyond. None of Verdi’s other erring wives escape their families: all remain in the domestic home, reunited with their husbands (although we cannot guess how happy those later relationships will be). But what was the fate of real women who experienced unhappy marriages? Laura Guidi comments that there was a gap between the cultural, largely

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negative depictions of the adulteress and lived experience. There were of course undeniable tragedies. Mariannina Coffa eventually separated from her husband, but was disowned by her family and died at the age of only thirty-­seven – denied by her relatives to the last the medical treatment that might have aided her. Enrichetta di Lorenzo had a more chequered experience. In Paris in 1847, where she became part of the exiled liberal set including Guglielmo Pepe, Mazzini and Louis Blanc, she found acceptance in her new life with Pisacane: ‘everyone knows me and instead of condemning me they admire me’.79 Was this just bravado? Certainly, other letters confirm that she received active encouragement for her stance from Pepe at least. And although it is clear that her family strongly disapproved of the relationship, they did not entirely abandon her. Her younger brother Achille (as head of the family) was relatively understanding and supportive; her mother, though more critical (as we will see), nevertheless helped Enrichetta to remain in contact with her children. After thirteen long years, Enrichetta even managed to resume her life in her home community of Naples in 1860, accompan­ ied by her surviving daughter by Pisacane – although by now Pisacane was dead and moreover regarded as a martyr to the Risorgimento, circumstances that might well have induced a more tolerant attitude toward his former mistress. One example of those women who found ways to renegotiate their lives after a broken marriage was Verdi’s close friend Clara Maffei. Her legal separation from her husband Andrea Maffei (witnessed by Verdi himself ) in 1846 was ostensibly on the grounds of his adultery; it also coincided, however, with the onset of Clara’s own intimate relationship with Carlo Tenca. Verdi, trusted by both Clara and Maffei, mediated the settlement between them, writing to Clara: ‘In a few moments I will present the papers to Maffei, and I will do it in such a way that they will be accepted. I will come to you as soon as possible. Take courage, and be of good spirit insofar as these circumstances allow. Count on me as a sincere friend.’80 In the weeks following the separation, he wrote again to her: ‘Don’t think now about the future: be selfish, because I absolve you and any just man will absolve you, and have care only for yourself. Do not complain if others have not understood you. What does it matter?’81 Clara and Tenca did not live openly together, although her salon was undoubtedly, if discreetly, managed in partnership with him. She also retained contact with Maffei, ultimately developing an affectionate relationship with him that continued throughout their lives. Clara would later recall the period of her separation as a deliberate attempt to secure autonomy: ‘I wanted at least to acquire complete independence over my actions and my life, and to be able to say to myself: “I belong to myself, and only I want to be the judge of what I do.” And I conquered, at least, the slavery of conventional things. I acquired such liberty at a heavy cost.’82 It is intriguing to reflect how much – if at all – this dignified closure of a marriage entered into Verdi’s response to his adulterous heroines; how much his ‘absolution’ of Clara Maffei extended similarly to them.

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One consequence of marriage was motherhood; here, too, ideas were changing. Motherhood  – particularly of sons  – became especially valorised during the Risorgimento, not least because Italy herself was often presented as a ‘mother’ in patriotic discourses, but also because (according to Banti) mothers more than fathers exerted key influences in the development of activists.83 Marina D’Amelia traces the formation of the identity of the ‘madre italiana’ as dating from this period, with her qualities of fierce maternal possession and paternal exclusion, tutelage, lavish praise, overprotectiveness and intrusion in her childrens’ emotional lives. 84 The power women acquired through motherhood, however, could also be put to other usages. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci entitled her ground-­breaking study Della educazione intellettuale: libri quattro indirizzati alle madri italiane (1849) in order to demonstrate that the purpose of educating women was not to destroy the family (as was often feared) but to create better mothers – and yet education itself became an important tool in broader efforts to expand women’s possibilities. In Verdi’s operas, marriage and motherhood often go hand in hand; nonetheless, in most cases the role of mother per se is rather obliquely drawn. As we have seen, the maternal figure has some significance in the narrative of I Lombardi alla prima crociata, but neither Viclinda (mother of Giselda) nor Sofia (mother of Giselda’s lover, Oronte) is given much space for articulation. They do not have a separate, autonomous existence from the actions of their children – much less so, in the case of Viclinda, who dies early in the narrative, than in the source material for the opera. In Tommaso Grossi’s poem, Viclinda is merely distant, not dead; in fact, she rejoins the action at the end of the poem in order to play a crucial role in the forgiveness of Pagano. 85 Her demise in the opera, however, was far from unusual. While fathers are promin­ ent in much early nineteenth-­century Italian opera, mothers are often absent – even when they had a vital part in the source material (as, for example, in Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor). There are, of course, some notable exceptions: Semiramide, Norma, Lucrezia Borgia, Il bravo and La Fille du régiment all accord space to a maternal character, in either a primary or secondary role. The comparative invisibility of the mother in many other operas is nevertheless significant. Martha Feldman traces maternal absence in earlier opera seria as a function of the emphasis on the sovereignty of the king.86 In the more bourgeois context of the nineteenth century, the economic factors of operatic production dictated that characters not deemed essential to the compressed plots of operatic libretti were excised on the grounds of limiting expense. Why, however, when the seconda donna was one of the cheapest members of the cast, did librettists remove the figure of the mother rather than a more expensive male character? 87 The period’s dramatic and social conventions were partly responsible. The authority of the father was enhanced by being absolute; in the absence of a mother, there

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was no third party to mediate a smooth course between the wrath of a father and the disobedience of a daughter. Disputes between father and daughter therefore acquired greater dramatic potency because the differences in age, experience, power and gender were so marked. The excision of mothers was also necessary for the proper functioning of drama as Aristotelian conflict in the tight structure demanded by opera. In theatrical terms, the ‘feminine ideal’ in its purest form was largely ineffective, because it produced passive heroines. Female protagonists needed to find themselves in situations of moral or physical danger – something that was almost impossible if they were protected by vigilant maternal chaperonage. Mother substitutes in the guise of servants or companions are often thus shown to be careless of the heroine’s virtue and duty: in Rigoletto, for example, an unscrupulous duenna both provides the libertine Duke with access to Gilda, and supports Gilda’s lies to her father. Finally, the dead or absent mother was presented as the ideal to which her daughter, however erring, must ultimately aspire. In Verdi’s operas, Luigi Baldacci comments, ‘The mother is preferably in heaven.’88 As we have seen in I Lombardi, Stiffelio and Simon Boccanegra, the mother sanctified in death is accessed through prayer: she is the heroine’s confidante, the locus for her outpouring of emotion and a personal intermediary with – or sometimes even a substitute for – the Madonna. A further reason for the absence of mothers in opera is that few prima donnas (the most influential figures in opera houses during the early decades of the nineteenth century) wanted to play characters considered elderly or unattractive – not least because they feared the effects on their reputation, status and earning power. Composers found the reluctance of some singers to undertake character roles frustrating. When Marianna Barbieri-­Nini, who had created Verdian heroines of a mature cast such as Lucrezia Contarini (I due Foscari) and Lady Macbeth, asked the composer (via Piave) to adjust the ingénue role of Leonora in Il trovatore for her, he refused: If I’m allowed to give my opinion, why does Barbieri want to play that role if it doesn’t suit her? And even if she wants to do Trovatore there is another part, that of the Gypsy. Away with le convenienze, nor say that it’s a secondary role: no truly: it is a principal role, the principal role, more beautiful, more dramatic, more original than the other. If I was a prima donna (a fine state of affairs!) I would always take the role of the Gypsy in Trovatore.89

Not everyone regarded Azucena in such terms. The most misleading tableau in Focosi’s illustration of Verdi’s operas is that of Il trovatore. It shows only two characters clearly: Manrico with his lute and Leonora just behind him, with a third figure – the conte di Luna – barely visible in the background. Azucena is nowhere to be seen. Verdi might scarcely have recognised this reduction as a faithful rendering of his work, given its omission of the character he considered to be the most important: Azucena, the zingara. In his correspondence with Salvadore Cammarano in 1851, Verdi described Azucena’s character as ‘strange and new’, whose ‘two great passions’ were ‘Amor figliale,

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e amor materno’.90 Verdi had originally intended the opera to be entitled La gitana, and although this was eventually changed to Il trovatore (a direct translation of the title of García Gutiérrez’s source play, El trovador, but also reminiscent of Berchet’s renowned allegorical poem of the Risorgimento),91 the opera remained peculiarly pertinent to the female experience. The paradox of Il trovatore was that it was both the most popular Verdian opera of the period, and yet also garnered the most critical disdain for a plot commonly regarded as ludicrous and incomprehensible. From a later, twentieth-­century perspective, Mila attempted a balance, stating that although Il trovatore was ‘the most absurd and the most exaggerated of operas’, its merit lay in Verdi’s masterly musical setting of the text, its rhythmic energy and swift-­moving action.92 Despite such criticisms of the plot, it is worth noting that only seventeen years before the opera’s première at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, Gutiérrez’s drama had made a blazing debut at Madrid. Within two weeks the printed text of El trovador had sold out, and subsequent provincial tours took the work into hayloft theatres in small Spanish towns that had never seen theatre before. The ‘revolutionary’ aspect of the play, as David Thatcher Gies notes, was its privileging of ‘vengeance’ against the backcloth of civil war: ‘The protagonists are crushed, even their love is not enough to enable them to triumph over political, ecclesiastical, social and biological reality.’93 The libretto written for Verdi by Cammarano and Baldare from this bleak, nihilistic tale thus perhaps deserves more serious consideration. The depiction of filial and maternal love in Il trovatore is the reverse image of those idealised relationships in I Lombardi and Stiffelio. Instead of a daughter’s prayer as the metaphysical connection between mother and child, there is the legacy of a mother’s command. Two hideous crimes lie at the core of the opera: one committed against a woman, the other committed by a woman. In the first, a gypsy is burnt alive at the stake. Why? Because she had been found at night next to the crib of the newborn son of the conte di Luna, claiming that she wished to cast his horoscope. Later the child sickened and did not stop weeping; the gypsy, accused of cursing him, is hunted, captured and led to the stake to die in indescribable agony. In the second crime, the gypsy’s daughter (Azucena), traumatised by the horrible death of her mother, steals the baby and carries him to the place where her mother died. And there, while the fire still burns and hearing in a delirious stupor those final words of her mother – ‘Mi vendica!’ (‘Avenge me!’) – she throws the baby into the flames. The count’s followers, after a desperate search, find only the ashes of the fire and a child’s skeleton. Both victims of these crimes are innocent, and their deaths spawn an inexorable vendetta. The visual, linguistic and at times musical symbolism of this narrative is fire; and aptly so, because revenge, like flames, consumes all in its path – rationality, hope, wisdom. It consumes even consciousness. The metaphor that pervades the existence of Azucena is sleep, or rather, nightmare. In the emotional maelstrom caused by her mother’s death, she committed a terrible error: the baby she flung into the flames was

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not the count’s child, but her own son. Lost in her double grief as mother and daughter, Azucena devotes herself to the care of the count’s son, rearing him as if he were her own child. None the less, she remains pursued by the events of the past, by the flames that in her imagination continue to burn. Her contemplation of the past, her ‘hearing’ of her mother’s voice from beyond the grave, is the obverse of Giselda’s and Lina’s communion with their mothers: it is a litany without hope. If without hope, Azucena’s vision of her mother is not without purpose. Il trovatore is surprising in the way it interrogates the notion of ‘truth’ by presenting two versions of the same story: one narrated by a man; the other by a woman. At the beginning of Act i, we hear the count’s side of the story, as told by Ferrando: the family’s alarm at the sinister figure found bending over the crib; their fear at the child’s sudden, inexplicable illness; their horror on his subsequent disappearance and apparent death. The scene ends, not surprisingly, with the chorus singing of Azucena: ‘Ah! sia maledetta la strega, infernal!’ (‘Ah! cursed be the infernal witch!’). Some early productions of the opera clearly took this definition literally. The costume designer Filippo Del Buono based his hag-­like figurino of Azucena (complete with hooked nose and protruding chin) for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples in 1853 on the template of the witch for his earlier production of Macbeth at the same theatre in 1849 – itself reminiscent of Focosi’s illustration published by the Gazzetta musicale di Milano after the opera’s première in 1847 (see Figures 5.1–3).94 In Act ii, however, Ferrando’s account of gypsy crime and punishment is (in modern parlance) ‘problematised’. In a powerful musical narrative, Azucena relates a very different version of those events of past years. The ‘strega’ burnt at the stake was not some malign monster, but a loving mother – her mother; not a phantom of evil, dehumanised by fear and prejudice, but an ordinary woman made of flesh and blood. Her only crime was thus ethnic and cultural difference, her ‘Otherness’ outside the community. By giving Azucena the space to tell her own story, the opera subtly juxtaposes the official version promulgated by the conte di Luna and his followers with a report of the real consequences of persecution and oppression. The reductive aspects of characterisation suggested by that opening chorus in Act i or Del Buono’s costume design could also be countered on occasion by the singers who undertook the role. In a rare image of an early interpreter of Azucena, Placida Corvetti at Imola in 1856 (see Figure 5.4), we can see that there is as much distance between her still youthful and dreamy representation and Del Buono’s ‘strega’ as there is between Ferrando’s account of Azucena and her own. Yet it was the character of Azucena and her act of infanticide that aroused the most ridicule. In his lengthy analysis of the opera for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano on 25 September 1853, Alberto Mazzucato described the ‘semi-­impossible character’ of Azucena, who represents ‘an obnoxious and repugnant power’: It is true that Azucena has her mother’s death to avenge; but is this really enough to excuse her ferocious and craven vendetta, fulfilled by burning an innocent boy? Moreover, we

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­ Figure 5.1  Filippo Del Buono’s figurino for Azucena, Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, 1853 (Biblioteca dal Conservatorio di Musica S. Pietro a Majella di Napoli) should note that although the character (whatever it may be) of this gypsy is imprinted by a strong and unusual dramatic colour, not all the particulars of her conduct have been treated logically. There are not a few inconsequences to note. Why doesn’t Azucena, when she realises that she has burnt her own son instead of the count’s, also burn this one? Her thirst for vengeance should even be doubly intense after the death not only of her mother, but also of her son. It might be said that she keeps him alive as an instrument for a later revenge. But if she keeps him only for this, why does she then love him with a mother’s affection? And is it possible that so brutal a soul could feel affection for this young man, who is the incessant witness of so many scenes of disaster? Or does it mean that her love is feigned? But this isn’t apparent from the libretto: because it results in the contrary. 95

To understand the context of Mazzucato’s criticisms, we need to look more closely at the social background of the epoch.

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­ Figure 5.2  Filippo Del Buono, Macbeth, Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, 1849 (Biblioteca dal Conservatorio di Musica S. Pietro a Majella di Napoli)

In Verdi’s most detailed depiction of ‘amor materno’ to date, marriage is strangely absent. Azucena makes no reference to either a father for her child, or, indeed, a husband. And her care of her (supposed) son outside wedlock suggests an emerging pattern in Verdi’s famous trilogy of the early 1850s. Rigoletto shows us the ‘fall’ of maidenhood, with Gilda’s loss of innocence; La traviata depicts the courtesan Gilda might have become, had she not protected the Duke’s life at the expense of her own; Azucena in the intermediate opera, Il trovatore, might be seen as a future projection of the fate of such women, struggling to survive outside the protection of marriage. Greco contrasts the life of the young prostitutes of the cities with their eventual destiny when they finally returned to their rural communities: ‘the elderly, poor prostitute of the countryside, often ill and the source of disease, strove to be inconspicuous and unobserved, hoping with time to become a part, albeit the least part, of the local society, waiting until people became “habituated” to her presence’.96 Azucena, shunned and vilified by the gentry and peasants (although not by her own community), bears some resemblance to this figure.

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­ Figure 5.3 Roberto Focosi, Macbeth, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 22 December 1847 (Casa della Musica, Parma)

If opera barely sketched in the sexual relationships of women such as Gilda, Violetta and Lina, the consequences of seduction and rape were hidden with even greater force. Such prohibition reflected social reality. Italy’s valorisation of motherhood during the period needs to be viewed in concert with the large-­scale abandonment of illegitimate infants, the highest such level in Europe. This practice was enforced by a complex of government and religious authorities, with the aim of ensuring that unwed mothers were separated from their children in order to conceal their loss of honour from the community and thus avoid setting an example of depravity to other women.97 The system for dealing with illegitimacy until later in the century was characterised by the ruota – the wheel. This device, implanted in the wall of the foundling hospitals, was where a mother could deposit her newborn baby anonymously: the wheel was then turned, and the baby arrived safely within the hospital, to be later sent (where possible)

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­ Figure 5.4  Placida Corvetti as Azucena, Teatro Comunale, Imola, 1856; lithograph by Annibale Marini (Collezione Ragni, Archivi di Teatro Napoli)

to foster parents. Where women did not comply voluntarily with the abandonment of their illegitimate offspring, the children could be forcibly removed. There are recorded cases of children as old as six being removed from their unmarried parents, to the grief and anguish of both mothers and fathers.98 Given the extraordinarily high rates of mortality within the foundling hospitals, mothers moreover knew that the abandonment of their child could lead to its death. Arguments about the effectiveness of the ruota provoked much outcry. Supporters of the practice claimed it assisted in combating abortion and particularly infanticide – a crime that was relatively commonplace and evident in all social classes. 99 Moreover, it was considered that only the opportunity to abandon the child enabled the mother ‘to save her honor and to return to her community to lead a normal, moral life. Should she be prevented from this, her honor would be forever compromised and she would have

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little choice but to take up a life of promiscuity, if not prostitution.’ 100 Unwed pregnant women were subject to surveillance by various officials, including priests, midwives and police. If some women succeeded in managing their pregnancies discreetly within the community, others were physically confined within maternity hospitals or case di correzioni, and then, although separated from their own child, forced to act as wet­nurses to abandoned babies in the foundling hospitals. The pain occasioned by these acts of separation is revealed in one letter to a foundling home in Bologna in 1857. It concerned a baby, clearly taken by force rather than deposited, born to an anonymous middle-­class man and his respectable young mistress. The letter claimed that the father ‘was not yet in a position to marry’, but that he undertook to provide for mother and son if the infant was returned: It would be of infinite grief to the parents, who are persons well-­born and bred, if their little boy should grow up in the poverty and filth of the countryside, among the sheep and the pigs. Indeed, the mother is so afflicted by the loss of the fruit of her belly that she cries inconsolably … If it was an illicit and immoral act for a woman who was not married to bring a child into the world, it is not immoral, nay, it is a duty of nature, for the woman to nurture and raise her child. It is certainly a philanthropic work that the Ospizio does, taking in children abandoned by heartless parents, but to use force to rob a mother of the dearest object of her heart, is not charity, but cruelty and tyranny.101

The response of the foundling home to this plea has not survived. Enrichetta di Lorenzo found herself in this perilous situation when she became pregnant with Pisacane’s child shortly after leaving her husband. Her family advised her to abandon the child after its birth. She reacted with horror: I am stunned and appalled by what is required from me: you condemned me for having left my children who have a name, a fortune, some people to take care of them … and then you propose to me, or rather you demand, that I abandon my dear love-­child to whom I am about to give birth, who will have neither name nor fortune, and who therefore has more right to my love and care? … I will never do it!102

(Even so, Enrichetta intended to have the birth registered as to an unknown mother, in order to protect the rights of her legitimate family.)103 A subsequent letter from her mother (Nicoletta di Lorenzo Muti) to Enrichetta’s brother Achille shows the extent of the prejudice that existed: It is a great disgrace. She is right to want to nurture her child; but it is necessary that she makes this sacrifice for the honour of the family. Not only does she want to be free after suffering so many infamies, but she also doesn’t want to have any regard for the family. She demands what we cannot do, what society does not allow us. She has agitated us too much – she might now give way, even make, if you like, this act of heroism of abandoning the child in order to recover her honour … I do not reply to her letter, so much is the displeasure and the horror that I have felt.104

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Despite her disapproval, Nicoletta tried to help her daughter in various ways, by visiting her grandchildren and pleading with the authorities to permit Enrichetta’s return. Her refusal to countenance the admission of Enrichetta’s love-­child into the family was therefore not born out of a lack of feeling for her daughter, but rather out of knowledge and fear of social condemnation that might consume the entire family. Among the women who thronged the opera house audiences, therefore, there would inevitably have been some who were directly acquainted with such matters, and many who had indirect knowledge. Such experiences of illegitimacy were only alluded to tangentially on the operatic stage itself. A rare exception was Federico Ricci’s La prigione d’Edimburgo (1838), based on Walter Scott’s The Heart of the Midlothian. Curiously, Rita Gabussi, who created the role of the gipsy Madge Wildfire in that opera, was the singer Verdi also had in mind at one point for Azucena in Il trovatore: another opera that contains the vision of a single woman with a child and the act of infanticide. It is perhaps too fanciful to suggest that some female spectators might have drawn parallels between the agony Azucena describes in realising she has killed her son in a ring of fire (an act in part resulting from social prejudices), and that experienced by women forced to deposit their illegitimate babies in a wooden wheel that often meant the infants’ almost certain death. But in broader terms, the burden of secrecy, grief and guilt around the fate of her infant son that Azucena carried through the years may have had genuine resonance for others.105 One such woman sat in the corner of the room as Verdi wrote Il trovatore, and indeed described the work as ‘our’ opera.106 Giuseppina Strepponi gave birth to three (probably four) infants before her relationship with Verdi, by two or more men.107 The first, Camillino (born 1838), was raised by foster-­parents; the second, Sinforosa (born 1839), was left in the ruota of the Ospedale degli Innocenti at Florence, and was eventually cared for by other foster-­parents;108 a still birth (either miscarriage or abortion) is believed to have occurred in 1840; Adelina (born 1841) was also abandoned and died aged eleven months. While Strepponi’s letters demonstrate that she continued to support her son financially and made occasional visits to him, her contact (if any) with Sinforosa is undocumented, and in the case of Adelina was non­existent.109 Strepponi’s thoughts and feelings about these events in her life are as much hidden from our view as Verdi’s thoughts and feelings are about his probable mistress, Teresa Stolz. We know that Strepponi sometimes admitted to experiencing great sadness (without explaining why), that she appears to have suffered in later life from gynaecological problems (perhaps a result of childbirth complications), and that on one occasion in 1853 she wrote to Verdi: We will not have any children (since God perhaps punishes me for my sins, in making it so that I do not enjoy any legitimate joy before dying!). And yet not having children with me, I hope you will not give me the pain of having them with another woman.110

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This letter implies that she had wanted but not been able to conceive a child by Verdi. The couple’s adoption of the eight-­year-­old daughter (Filomena Maria) of Verdi’s cousin in 1868 suggests Strepponi’s need for a maternal outlet; certainly, she appears to have missed Filomena’s presence when she later went to boarding-­school. However, the supposed letters to Don Montebruno in which Strepponi expressed great sorrow on not having had children have been exposed by Walker as forgeries penned by Lorenzo Alpino.111 And we should not, in any case, assume sentiment where none might have existed. Strepponi’s letter in 1864 to Caterina De Sanctis, whose newborn son had recently died and who was herself still very ill, demonstrates a certain briskness towards matters of childbirth and, indeed, child death. Describing herself as ‘the rural lady doctor’ (‘Io medichessa del Contado’), Strepponi prescribed the best remedy for De Sanctis’ loss as ‘good humour’: Begin therefore with no longer weeping for the little angel who has returned to God’s bosom. He is better off than us and without fear of the future. Moreover, if you didn’t have other children I would sympathise, but as you already have enough and possess a factory in full activity for the multiplication of the De Sanctis family, I cannot sympathise with you at all.112

Such an attitude to child bereavement might strike modern ears as uncomfortably abrasive. Strepponi’s remarks, however, were not made in a modern context. Italy’s long familiarity with high rates of infant mortality and women’s multiple pregnancies undoubtedly played their part in her comments.113 Around one in every four Italian babies aged under twelve months died during the second half of the nineteenth ­century114 – a figure that gains further perspective if we consider that the mortality rate in 1990 was less than one child out of every hundred.115 It is perhaps difficult for us to comprehend objectively the coping mechanisms that were required to enable people simply to survive such circumstances. So too with regard to Strepponi’s management of her illegitimate births. Her propensity to abandon her children to the care of others has occasioned some criticism,116 but as we can see, she had little choice. Retaining them herself without a husband was almost certainly not an option the authorities would have permitted her at the time. And risking confinement as a wet-­nurse would have had disastrous consequences on her ability to earn a livelihood, not just for herself, but for her mother and siblings who were dependent on her income. What can be verified, however, is that Il trovatore was an opera in which Strepponi took particular interest during the composition process – and to which she even laid partial claim of ownership. In that respect, the unusual profile of Azucena is intriguing, with her twin identities as both mother and daughter offering a cross-­generational perspective on female experience. And, importantly, Azucena exhibits her own political agenda. In Verdi’s operas, women dare on behalf of men, and sometimes on behalf of their own desires; but with the exception of Cunizza in Verdi’s very first opera, Oberto,

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and the quartet of women in his very last, Falstaff, Azucena is the only one of Verdi’s female protagonists whose actions are motivated by the fate of another woman. In this, there is an odd – presumably unconscious – suggestion not only of the Risorgimento mothers who raised and then sacrificed their sons for the cause, but also of emerging proto-­feminist ideas of women working for and on behalf of other women, in the various support groups that had emerged after the political disasters of 1848–9. 117 Most pertinently, Verdi’s music endowed Azucena with an intensity of expression that caught the imagination and sympathy even of those critics, like Mazzucato, who found the character otherwise ‘semi-­impossible’: [N]o one more than us admires and feels in all their magnificence the beauties of Azucena’s Racconto, or is shaken by the sinister harmonies accompanying the horrible details of that dreadful story. As it happens, there is one instance where the passion is moving: it is difficult to repress a tear on hearing the notes superimposed on that touching line:    Invan tentò la misera fermasi, e benedirmi! These notes, so full of desolation, are accompanied by impassioned melodic fragments in the orchestra that seem like the sobbing voice of the wretched old woman, who, in horrid torment, murmurs a blessing and an extreme addio to her daughter. Neither, to those acquainted with art, is it possible to let pass unnoticed the lugubrious, almost ironic orchestration, obtained with such economical means, under the other line:     Che, fra bestemmie oscene, pungendola coi ferri, nor still less the return of the cantilena of the gloomy canzone confided to solo violins, nor the desperate delirium, nor the terrible cry Mi vendica!, nor the yet more terrible return to reason, when with tormented insistence the poor gypsy repeats and repeats that she had burnt her own son:          Il figlio mio,     Mio figlio avea bruciato! Nor have the extraordinary beauties of that scene ended: because every bar, every chord is a gem. And, speaking still of this sublime piece, who does not feel his hair stand on end at those last deep tones of Azucena … the tones of a woman drenched in a deathly perspiration, tones coloured by a sadness so dark, so impressively wild!118

Music has transformed the ‘repugnant’ Azucena into ‘the poor gipsy’, whose terrible dilemma of filial duty and maternal love is experienced by the spectator in the soundscape of her anguish. In composing this scene, Verdi himself, Mazzucato opined, must have ‘felt such a flood of emotion greater than the sum of all those excited by the rest of his work’.119 Infanticide is no longer a risible theatrical infelicity or the product of stereotypical wickedness, but instead acquires the status of genuine tragedy torn from lacerating internal conflict. We might conclude this consideration of marriage and motherhood by returning to Enrichetta di Lorenzo, who, in another letter to her mother Nicoletta (written around the middle of 1850), demonstrates how elusive the ideals of mother–daughter

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relationships and female solidarity against dominant social discourses were in practice. In this instance, we see a daughter’s sense of grievance about the maternal strictures that had led to her previous unhappiness. While acknowledging that she had not exactly been forced to marry Dionisio Lazzari, Enrichetta argued that her mother had urged the marriage as a ‘buon partito’ in the full knowledge that her daughter was too young and inexperienced to appreciate the ‘sacrifice’ such a union would entail. And for what reason? Because you wanted to follow the examples of many other Mothers, who judge for themselves the advantages of the match, while it is the daughter who must live with the husband, and not the mother, the daughter who must tie herself for ever, the daughter who must give up the right to dispose of her goods, and reason therefore suggests to us that it must be the daughter and not the mother who alone must judge and decide … On this point your conscience must reprove you. You will say that I’ve been happy for nine years, and instead I will tell you that I have been a silly inexperienced girl for nine years, my intellectual faculties were not developed when I married, nor could they be developed in the proximity of such a man … If you had then only reflected that thanks to your care in educating me and having me instructed, my moral faculties must develop one day and then Dionisio, indifferent to me as he was, must surely become detestable. This is not all – there does not exist a woman in the world who has not fallen in love during her life, therefore she who does not love her husband must sooner or later love another. In your heart had you ever supposed I could love Dionisio? Surely not; therefore that which has happened was very natural. All these reproofs your conscience must make, but let us pass to another point. You tell me that questioning things is a heresy, that one must always do the same as everyone else, and with this approach you are wrong. Out of every five marriages there are three unhappy ones, and where the husband and the wife are divided, in dispute, or at least in trouble, tell me if among these there is one single Mother who in such circumstances has embraced the side of the husband, unnaturally abandoning her daughter. You alone have had this courage, whereas given that with your approval I had disposed of my soul, body and belongings, you should at least have been my guardian angel, and my most effective protector. Instead, shockingly, you have tried to cheat me: the letter written to Achille in Marseille gives me enough reason not to trust at all in your words.120

Enrichetta’s reference to her mother’s mantra that argument was heresy illustrates the suffocating pressure of social conventions. She might have hoped her political activities would help sweep away such prejudices, but the new Italy that her lover Pisacane would die for in 1858 offered only meagre aid to those who sought change. There was some progress, mostly in the south. Following Unification, the Naples courts treated women separated from their husbands less harshly: the former practice of confining them to convents or subjecting them to the strict surveillance of their family (as di Lorenzo’s husband and mother had desired) in order to avoid a repetition of their transgressive behaviour was largely relinquished, as was the vocabulary that apportioned blame and punishment. Instead, a slow recognition of mutual rights to happiness began. 121 The

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Codice civile Pisanelli in 1865 ensured, nonetheless, that women remained (in Maura Palazzi’s words) under ‘a rigid marital authority that impeded any autonomy’; 122 while in 1880 Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Arcanum (1880) on Christian marriage reasserted the wife’s subjection to her husband.123 Even women less hidebound by convention than Nicoletta di Lorenzo were reluctant to challenge this concept of assigned gender roles in marriage. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci had argued passionately on behalf of ­women’s intellectual development throughout her life, and yet her letter to her granddaughter on the eve of her wedding in 1881 repeated the rigid ideas about obedience to one’s husband: ‘Do not be dazzled by certain false doctrines or liberty promised to us women, which then make us slaves of passion – Keep firm that although through the nobility of our souls and minds we are in a different way equal to men, we must however live subject to our husbands in order to preserve order and peace in the family.’ 124 But the point was: if women were denied liberty and self-­governance, to whose ‘passions’ did they become ‘slaves’? When Desdemona abandoned herself to Otello’s rapturous embrace six years later on the stage of La Scala, the Milanese audience knew the answer all too well – and how the story would end.

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­Death

In 1855, the Corriere delle dame published an article entitled ‘The Idea of Love’: ‘Love disposes to every Leonora, Il trovatore, Part i, scene ii sacrifice; whoever knows how to love knows how to die.’1 Knowing how to love – and how to die – were fundamental requirements of nineteenth-­century operatic heroines. Both qualities had been part of the fabric of the very first operas some 200 years earlier, with their reworkings of one of the oldest myths of love and loss: Orpheus and Eurydice. But while Love had triumphed on the operatic stage in the following centuries, Death did not attain the same prominence until the 1820s. Its emergence owed much to the desire to escape the manufactured lieto fine and bring a new seriousness to opera; it also coincided with the rise of the prima donna as the focus of both narrative and spectacle. The ensuing tragic fate of operatic heroines such as Luisa Miller and Violetta has been perceived by the French scholar Catherine Clément as a deliberate strategy of repression: she describes opera as ‘a great masculine scheme surrounding a spectacle thought up to adore, and also to kill, the feminine character’.2 However, the small sample of works considered by Clément gives a misleading impression of the operatic experience for the Ottocento spectator. Verdi, for example, was seemingly evenhanded in his approach towards the destiny of his major female characters: around half die; the other half live. Of those who die, we might say – in line with Leonora’s impassioned declaration from Il trovatore above – that they mostly died from love. Victor Hugo summarised this trend in Les Misérables: ‘Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin.’3 While the disturbing image of a young woman dying, admired by writers as diverse as Rousseau, Goethe and Edgar Allan Poe, seems peculiarly present in the culture of the period, it also had its roots in fact. To the nineteenth-­century Italian audience, the heavy operatic death toll might have appeared relatively unremarkable, given that the average life expectancy for Italian women in 1881 was only thirty-­four years.4 And it was indeed love that killed most frequently – or rather, the consequences of the physical act of love: childbirth. Maternal mortality was one factor, but it was rather the exhausting effect of multiple pregnancies that made women in their thirties more prone than men to succumb to various diseases.5 Italy’s record was particularly poor in this regard: its rates of mortality for both men and women were much higher than elsewhere in Europe. 6 While the disparity between genders disappeared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century ‘S’io non vivrò per esso, per esso io morirò’

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in France and England, it was not until the 1950s that similar advances were made in Italy.7 In such a context, Ottocento opera’s dwelling on the demise of its youthful heroines reads less like a deliberate massacre, and more as a means of coping with social trauma: a way of articulating grief and its attendant emotions.8 Verdi himself had direct experience of mourning a woman’s death, losing his young wife and, earlier, their two infant children to illness in a cycle of deaths from 1838 to 1840.9 In a letter to Clara Maffei following the first performance of Il trovatore in 1853, he wrote: ‘They say that this opera is too sad and that there are too many deaths: but after all, isn’t death all there is in life? What else is there?’10 Given such a viewpoint, perhaps it is surprising that not more of his heroines die. Yet no glib assumptions about some special link between women and death can be made with reference to Verdi’s operas. Twelve of his heroines die – but so too do fifteen heroes. The male bias is even more marked when it comes to the body count of secondary characters, in part an obvious reflection of the higher numbers of male characters generally. There are, however, differences in the cause of death between the genders. Suicide is almost precisely even: six women (if we include Gilda), and five men (if we include Alvaro in the original version of La forza del destino). Five women are murdered (again including Gilda), four of these by their partners; only two men are murdered, one (Attila) by the woman he loves. Only one women dies for politically motivated reasons in battle or execution (Giovanna d’Arco; although the fate of both Azucena in Il trovatore and Hélène in Les Vêpres siciliennes remains uncertain), as opposed to seven men. In short, more women die in the domestic setting than men; more men die in the social setting than women; men kill one another more frequently than they kill women; some women also kill men (but not other women); men and women both kill themselves for love, in almost equal numbers. One might argue that in Verdi’s operas love is the most common cause of death for both men and women – love of a partner, a friend, a relative or patria; or, in the case of the Macbeths, love of self and its associated ambitions. Feelings are what complicate these lives. W. H. Auden famously described opera as ‘an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves’.11 The strong feelings of Verdi’s characters either within the sphere of their own communities and kinship or extending beyond social, familial or racial barriers are what lead them into conflict with others. This privileging of feeling and revelation of the interior world was Romanticism’s aesthetic marker, creating a different relationship with the audience. While in earlier operas, moments of intensity had arisen from extraordinary vocal athletics, now they stemmed from emotional pyrotechnics. Death, as one of the greatest crises in human life, was the locus for dazzling displays of  feeling.

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In both real and cultural terms, the experience of death differed from our own for many people in the nineteenth century. The perception of death, the act of dying and the mourning of the departed were all suffused by a particular mixture of social rituals, religious values and philosophical perspectives. Death itself was often a mystery in medical terms; poor hygiene, crude surgical techniques and limited efficacious drugs meant that death could result from the smallest infections or complaints. In this respect, as Philippe Ariès points out, death rarely came as a surprise to victim or family, because it was commonly forecast as the likely outcome of even minor illlnesses. 12 The expect­ ations of and preparations for mortality also facilitated another aspect of death: its public nature. Death was a form of spectacle, the focus of a gathering of family, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. We can see this in Verdi’s own demise, in a hotel in Milan, where he lingered from a stroke on 19 January 1901 until his death on 27 January. At his bedside were Teresa Stolz, his adopted daughter Maria Carrara, Giulio Ricordi, Arrigo Boito and his brother Camillo, the lawyer Campanari, priests and doctors, while the hotel corridors were crowded with opera fans and admirers. 13 The centre of such gatherings was the dying man or woman. His or her authority over the act of dying stemmed, according to Ariès, from the late Middle Ages, when man ‘insisted on participating in his own death, because he saw in his death the moment when his individuality received its ultimate form. He was master over his life only insofar as he was master over his death. His death was his, and his alone.’14 Death having been achieved, the rituals of mourning (the ‘supreme form of grief ’) took place: lengthy and impassioned. 15 The cultural representation of death was shaped to reflect such ideas – and, at times, to challenge them. With regard to the former, the writings of Johann Jacob Engel (Ideen zu einer Mimik, 1785)  provided a set of principles that governed European theatrical practice for almost a century:16 I would give one rule, which, I believe, has been frequently adduced before; – that the agonies and approaches of death ought not to be represented with all the horrors which attend these dreadful moments in nature. The judicious player will soften down these horrors. His head should have more the appearance of a man sinking to a sound sleep, than of a person convulsed with strong agonies; the voice should be broken and altered, but not so as to give the effect of a disgusting rattling: in a word, an actor ought to acquire a manner of his own in representing the last sigh of expiring mortality. He should give such an idea of death as every man would wish to feel at that crisis; though, perhaps, no one ever will have the good fortune to find that wish accomplished. Contemplate (if you can find patience for the task) the abominable grimaces and unnatural distortions in which some players indulge themselves under similar circumstances, and you will acknowledge the justice of this rule.17

Engel’s desire was for the actor to transcend the physical realities of dying – the indignities of spasm, loss of bodily control, pain-­filled gasps – with which the spectator was

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almost certainly familiar, and create instead a gestural realisation of what death might represent in spiritual terms. The idealising of death in this fashion was undoubtedly recognised by the audience as a wish-­f ulfilled fantasy. But where – we might surmise – there were so many individual experiences of mortality, the reduction of the act of death to a single essence (one of transition to life everlasting) allowed a common emotional participation. T he p u blic death : G iova n n a d ’ A rco

In Verdi’s operas, the death that best accords with Engel’s strictures belongs to the warrior heroine of Giovanna d’Arco (1845). Hers is an ecstatic expiration, surrounded not only by her loved ones (Carlo and her father Giacomo) but also an entire chorus of popolo e guerrieri plus the additional support of offstage angioli (contralti) and demoni (bassi). This combination of earthly, divine and supernatural forces not only produces the most public demise in Verdi’s operas, but also explicitly constructs death as a conjunction of two worlds, both seen and unseen. From the outset of the scene, Giovanna is suspended between these domains. When brought in from the battlefield, victorious but fallen, she seems already dead. But then: ‘Giovanna raises herself up, and moves as if invested by supernatural force.’ Thus already, in some sense, part of the world beyond, her right to celestial assistance is further established in the opening phrases of the scene. Giovanna’s words to her father, ‘Oh! non son’io un’empia incantratice’ (‘Oh! I am not a wicked sorceress’), bring Giacomo’s immediate and reassuring response: ‘Un’angelo tu sei!’ (‘You are an angel!’). A common epithet in opera (applied to both men and women), ‘angelo’ here acquires a literal meaning. This depiction of death belongs neither to the nineteenth century nor Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (to which Solera was much beholden, despite his denials), and least of all to the historical facts of the real Jeanne d’Arc’s demise at the stake in 1431. However, in their re-­imagining of Giovanna’s death, Verdi and Solera produced a form of historical authenticity by supplying their protagonist with a death scene reflective of the late medieval ars moriendi, in which the dying person, surrounded by family and friends, perceives ‘a supernatural spectacle visible to him alone’: ‘On one side of the bed appeared a heavenly host including the members of the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, saints and angels, and prominently the dying person’s guardian angel. On the other side Satan and his demon minions clamored for attention.’18 Caught between these two factions, the dying person’s only recourse was to pray for the intervention of the Madonna with God. In Verdi and Solera’s opera, some adjustments are made to this scenario for theatrical effect. Once Giovanna has the flag in her hands, she immediately has a vision of the Madonna descending to her: ‘S’apre il ciel / Discende Maria’ (‘Heaven opens, / Maria descends’). This explicit reference was changed by the censors before the first performance to the more vague ‘S’apre il ciel / Discende la Pia’.19 The Virgin Mary

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smiles at her, and beckons her forward. There is an intervention of grief by Carlo and Giacomo; then Giovanna sees the Madonna open up a path for her to ascend to heaven, and she prepares to depart. The voices of Carlo and Giacomo are joined by those of the onstage crowd – and only now do the supernatural forces also enter the fray. While the angels beg Giovanna to return to heaven, the demons gnash their teeth because heaven has triumphed again. In short, the structure of the scene is something of a reversal of the pattern in ars moriendi, where the confrontation of the supernatural factions is usually followed, rather than preceded, by the Madonna. Verdi and Solera pursue a more theatrically conventional line by building the scene to a grand conclusion of assembled voices. The conflict between the psychological states of the living and the dying is given musical reflection in harmonic terms (the contrasting use of minor and major keys), rhythm (the sobbing triplets of the mourners as against Giovanna’s measured arpeggios and fioriture) and instrumentation (full orchestra with the prominent plaint of an oboe for the mourners; the use of a solo clarinet and shimmering strings for Giovanna). Only when she bids farewell to her earthly life (‘Addio, terra’) does the accompaniment for Giovanna also adopt the triplet rhythm, but this time in E♭ major; the strength of her conviction is such that when the mourners resume their singing they too follow her lead into this more optimistic harmonic framework. Called to heaven by the beseeching angels, Giovanna moves joyfully forward on her spiritual path, transforming the sad lament of her mourners into radiant consonance. At the end, ‘Giovanna falls; starlight spreads suddenly from heaven. The soldiers lower their banners; all prostrate themselves before the glorious corpse.’ We should note this mass kneeling before Giovanna’s body. It would be another seventy-­five years before Jeanne d’Arc, burnt as a witch, would be formally canonised by the Church: operatically, she finds her beatification here. Although the opera as a whole had a somewhat equivocal reception from the critics, the death scene was much admired.20 Girolamo Romani in Figaro described it as one of the two remarkable ‘situazioni d’effetto’ in the opera: ‘the mortally wounded Giovanna gives up her soul, convinced that she is flying to heaven, amid the laments of her father and Carlo, amid the hosannas of the angels and the wrath of the demons.’ 21 Romani commended the ingenuity of Verdi, ‘who through the novelty of form makes it the most beautiful piece of his new Opera’.22 And yet the critic took issue with the controversial scene in Act i where Giovanna and Carlo are both on stage at the same time, but only Giovanna hears the offstage opposing voices of the celestial and infernal spirits. Romani opined that while in a written narrative it is possible to understand when ‘one internal voice speaks to the soul’ of a character, in a drama where this voice is expressed by a chorus the effect is marred by ‘the obstacle of implausibility’. 23 The fact that Romani appeared comfortable with the audible manifestations of the angels and demons at the end of the opera suggests that the familiar features of ars moriendi outweighed any such considerations about verisimilitude.

­Deat T he delayed ‘ happy e n di n g ’ : Lu isa ­M iller

The death of Luisa Miller some four years later reflected more contemporaneous ideas of mortality. In some ways, Luisa combines the fates of two heroines who directly preceded her: Medora in Il corsaro (1848), who commits suicide; and Amalia in I masnadieri (1847), who is murdered by her lover. Having been forced to deny her love for Rodolfo (in order to save her father’s life) then learning of his impending marriage to another woman, Luisa proposes a suicide pact. In an aria sung to her stricken father, she voices a vision of death common to many nineteenth-­century opera libretti, although here phrased rather more eloquently than most: La tomba è un letto sparso di fiori, In cui del giusto la spoglia dorme; Sol pei colpevoli, tremanti cori Veste la morte orride forme; Ma per due candide alme fedeli La sua presenza non ha terror … È dessa un angelo che schiude i cieli, Ove in eterno sorride amor. (The tomb is a bed strewn with flowers, / In which the just sleep; / Only for guilty, trembling hearts / Is death clothed with horrid forms; / But for two candid faithful souls, / Its presence holds no terrors … / It is rather an angel who opens the heavens / where love smiles in eternity.)

This was the ‘delayed happy ending’ that appeared in so many dramas and operas of the period: eternal union in a heaven that cared nothing for society’s strictures and taboos, and sought only to bless the truly loving. It was a concept shared by many, both off and on stage. Writing to Julius Rietz in 1859, the mezzo-­soprano Pauline Viardot declared: ‘I have the firm conviction that the soul is immortal, and that all loves shall one day be united – the great loves, whatever be their nature, provided that they have made themselves worthy of it.’24 To such sentiments, opera gave sounds. For most of the century, death in music was an exquisite transmutation of the soul rather than the expiring of the body. The lyrical closures of the musical language of death often enhanced the sense that (as Leonora in Donizetti’s La favorita says)25 life had been completed, not broken. How that transition might be effected in theatrical mise-­en-­scène was also important, and it was one that often contained some reflection of real-­life practices. Recording his daughter’s death in the family bible, Antonio Barezzi (Verdi’s father-­in-­law) wrote in 1840: Through a terrible disease, perhaps unknown to the doctors, there died in my arms at Milan, at noon on the day of Corpus Domini, my beloved daughter Margherita in the flower of her years and at the culmination of her good fortune, because married to the

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women excellent youth Giuseppe Verdi, Maestro di Musica. I implore eternal peace for her pure soul, while weeping bitterly over this painful loss.26

To die in the arms of a loved one, as Margherita died in her father’s embrace, was similarly the central aim of most operatic heroes and heroines. For this, Aida dares the tomb of Radamès: ‘E qui lontana da ogni umano sguardo / Nelle tue braccia desiai morire’ (‘And here far from every human gaze / I desired to die in your arms’). Verdi’s earlier heroine Luisa Miller also seeks the physical proximity of both her father and her lover in her moment of crisis. Yet her ‘delayed happy ending’ is not realised in the manner she had earlier envisaged. Her father, horrified at her submission to the persuasive rhetoric of love’s sublimation in death, turns her away from her intended path of self-­harm. There is no forgiveness for suicide, he argues; when Luisa responds, ‘È colpa amore?’ (‘Is love wrong?’), he counters with the description of another compelling love, that of a father for his child. Paternal grief thus reconciles her again to life. But Rodolfo has no such anchor in his emotional world, and his despair at Luisa’s apparent betrayal is infinite. Poisoning first himself and then Luisa, he enforces their union in death. Salvadore Cammarano’s stage directions tell us that when Miller realises what Rodolfo has done, ‘Struck by that anguish that has no words, he launches himself towards his daughter, who wraps her arms around his neck’; later, as Luisa’s sight and senses begin to fail, she searches anxiously for Rodolfo’s hand (‘La man, Rodolfo, mi sento mancarmi’). Wracked by remorse once he realises Luisa’s innocence, Rodolfo must bear the pain of watching her die; it seems, initially, that he keeps a certain physical distance from her. Luisa’s voice falters in brief broken phrases, until she comes to her fourth and most urgent repetition of ‘La man, Rodolfo’. Although it is not marked in the stage directions, it is surely here that Rodolfo finally complies, because Luisa’s voice suddenly gathers in strength and soars into more extended phrases: ‘Ah, vieni meco … deh! non lasciarmi / Insieme accogliere ne deve il ciel’ (‘Ah, come with me … do not leave me / Heaven must welcome us together’). She repeats these last words ‘ne deve il ciel’ three times with increasing insistence before her collapse into death. It remains to Rodolfo only to revenge himself on his enemy Wurm and curse his scheming father, and then he too collapses beside Luisa (‘cade morto accanto a Luisa’): their bodies entwined in death, their souls in eternal love.27

T he private death : G ilda a n d R igol e t t o

If Giovanna d’Arco was endowed with the most public and glorious female death in Verdi’s operas, the most private and demeaning was that of Gilda in Rigoletto. Gilda’s martyrdom, the offering of her body for the piercing of Sparafucile’s knife, is a distorted reprise of the Duke’s earlier penetration of her maidenhood. This second wounding again lies in part at the door of Rigoletto himself. While his cynical manipulation of the

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Duke’s debauchery and his obsessive sequestration of his daughter left her exposed to rape, now his desire for revenge exposes her to death. Reviews of the early performances of Rigoletto were disparaging of its finale. The sack in which Sparafucile hides Gilda’s body had initially provoked questions from the censors in Venice, irritating Verdi, who could not understand what concerned them. Were they bothered about the ‘effect’, he wondered? If so, that was his business, and he undertook to deal with it.28 Yet while its effect became evident over time, to the audience of the day the scene was somewhat disturbing and degrading. In contrast to the dignified death usually prescribed for an operatic heroine, here the angelo is merely bundled into a sack and thrown out on to the street like rubbish. The music too is bereft of some of the usual architecture of the death scene. There is still the major/minor key tension between the living and the dying; and both characters repeat the conventional sentiments – Gilda assures Rigoletto that she will pray for him in heaven, next to her angelic mother; he begs her not to die. Like Giovanna, Gilda is accompanied by shimmering strings; this time a flute instead of a clarinet provides those celestial arpeggios. But instead of the music moving purposefully towards the moment of crisis, as we heard in Giovanna d’Arco, it fades and flutters with Gilda herself  – the accompaniment thinning down in her final phrases to the strings alone. In fact, it seems almost as if the music is Gilda, because when it stops, she falters and dies – and unusually, she dies in mid-­word.29 Silence, not music, thus marks her passing. The cadence of her death must be completed by an anguished Rigoletto. This final scene, so delicate and moving, met with little acclamation from the critics – even from those who might be regarded as generally supportive of Verdi. Basevi declared bluntly: ‘The final duetto makes very little effect. However, it must not be forgotten that music has nothing to lend to a situation so disgusting.’30 Even Marco Marcelliano Marcello, whose praise for the storm scene was expansive, was disappointed: ‘the final scene, however well treated, does not produce the effect one would wish; the spirit remains too lacerated to be able to feel other impressions.’31 In short, Verdi depicted Gilda’s death with tenderness, but – at least within the conventions of the day – he avoided glamorising it. This was not the traditional ‘defining moment’ of a heroine, but that of a woman whose sacrifice has brought nothing but a painful, ignominious death on a dark street. In comparison with the extravagant spectacle sometimes afforded other operatic deaths (particularly as the century progressed), Verdi’s means of despatching his heroines were relatively modest. He did not use modes of inflicting death as a visual feast: no Brünnhilde rides into the flames, no Tosca leaps from the parapet. For the most part, we watch women die, but we do not savour their killing. Up until the scene of the auto-da-fé in Don Carlos (1867), the most horrific deaths – male or female – in Verdi’s operas were not shown, but told. In Il trovatore, Azucena narrates the fate of her mother, burnt alive at the stake, then the infanticide of her own son, burnt in her mother’s ashes. This dependence on description rather than action directly contravened Verdi’s dictums about finding the means to

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propel the drama ­forward. But the action here is one of evocation: it is Azucena’s act of memory, absorbing her whole being, which powerfully relives – re-­presents – the death of her mother. This constant retelling of wrongs, real or perceived, is a crucial factor in cycles of vendetta; and it has some significance too in the political context of the opera’s first performances. In the harsher, more repressive climate of the early 1850s, the recounting of the events of the 1848 uprising was suppressed;32 instead, other stories had to be told as means of dealing with the past. (One example is the description in L’Italia musicale of the work and fate of the Polish writer, Adam Mickiewicz.)33 It is not difficult to see and hear in Il trovatore’s lamenting, vengeful narratives the emotional colours, if not the historical facts, of its period.34 D eath by disease : V ioletta a n d L a  t raviata

Most operatic heroines died a sudden, violent death through murder, execution or (more rarely in the early decades of the Ottocento) suicide. Such deaths were comparatively unusual occurrences in real life. But Verdi’s La traviata introduced a new element on to the operatic stage: disease. The disease in question – tuberculosis (il mal sottile) – was both then and now often associated with sexual practices outside bourgeois norms, suggesting it was relatively confined to a particular section of society.35 In fact, thousands of people from all walks of life died of this disease across nineteenth-­century Europe. Ignorance of the infective characteristic of tuberculosis meant that entire families could be ravaged: the death in 1836 of the scion of a French aristocratic family, Albert de la Ferronnays, was soon followed by that of his two younger sisters and finally his wife. In England during the period 1848–72, tuberculosis accounted for 40 per cent of the deaths of women aged from twenty-­five to forty-­four years.36 Industrialisation brought added perils. In Italy, workers in the textile and tobacco industries were at particular risk. The new factories, cramming women together in unhealthy conditions, enforcing long hours (in Lucca, the cigar-­makers during the torrid summers worked from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., with a single break of one and a half hours in the middle of the day) and paying barely subsistence wages were breeding grounds for the spread of disease.37 The higher incidence of tuberculosis in urban areas meant that Violetta’s plight was therefore something relatively familiar to the opera-­house audiences in Europe’s cities. Violetta’s death was thus in many respects the most ‘natural’ female episode of mortality in Verdi’s operas, corresponding more closely with the experiences of the audience – a death in bed, with daily life still happening outside, surrounded by family, servants and doctors. And the opera, as Verdi’s original title of Amore e morte (with shades of Leopardi’s poem of the same name) demonstrates, is effectively an essay in death. We might know that other operatic protagonists are doomed from their first moment on stage, but nowhere is that sense so inexorable as in La traviata. The

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opening bars of the prelude (later used at the beginning of Act iii to usher in the sight of Violetta on her sickbed) herald the heroine’s demise in the ever-­shortening phrases of the violins, suggestive of the breathlessness that will consume her. Her illness is swiftly apparent in the first scene, not simply through her moment of collapse and the tell-­tale cough, but also through the wild exhilaration of her cabaletta and restless demeanour – all markers of the disease.38 But it is in Act iii that the dying commences in earnest. In a sense, it began at the end of Act ii, where Violetta’s life in society comes to an end, in a manner reminiscent of earlier, more conventional operatic deaths: a collapse on stage before a crowded gathering, the murmurs of sympathy. The final act in effect thus functions as a ‘behind-­the-­scenes’ of this public moment – a revelation of private life. The aspect of private revelation is further enhanced by Violetta’s aria, ‘Addio del passato’, sung alone on stage as she waits, seemingly in vain, for Alfredo’s arrival. Unlike those pronouncements of death as a ‘welcome guest’ (to quote the heroine of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas) made by so many earlier operatic heroines, Violetta unusually displays a longing for life. Her aria is full of the sobbing rhythms generally reserved for the spectators of death (as in Giovanna d’Arco or Il corsaro), not for the dying themselves. Although she has supposedly made her peace with God, telling the doctor that she saw a priest only the previous evening and that ‘religione è un sollievo ai sofferenti’ (‘religion is a comfort to the suffering’), Violetta’s lament contains no consoling images of the life beyond. Instead, she mourns the life she is leaving; her future, she imagines, holds only a solitary funeral without tears or flowers, an unmarked grave without a cross. Even her plaint to God (‘Della traviata sorridi al desio, a lei, deh perdona, tu accoglila, o Dio!’) is completed by the phrase ‘Ah! Tutto, tutto finì, or tutto, tutto finì’. 39 This is a much bleaker vision than that of many of her Verdian sisters. Fully aware of her calamitous fate, Violetta tastes the bitter poignancy of a life severed in youth with so many unrealised ambitions before her. ‘Ah! Gran Dio, morir sì giovane, io che ho penato tanto!’ (‘Ah! Great God, to die so young, I who have suffered so much!’), she exclaims to the penitent Alfredo when he finally reaches her. Violetta’s resistance to death begins to change on the arrival of Alfredo’s father, Germont – and above all with his apology. Now, with more of an audience (‘Grenvil, vedete? fra le braccia io spiro di quanti cari ho al mondo’), and with all the authority due to her as the dying person, she takes control of her last moments. Here the ritual of a nineteenth-­century death begins in earnest. The orchestra marks the solemnity of the moment as it beats out a tutti the anapaestic ‘musical figure of death’, as an inexorable rhythm to Violetta’s final exchanges with the living.40 She makes her ‘will’, bequeathing her portrait to Alfredo and with it, most importantly, his future happiness with a new lover and wife. And only now does Violetta also revert to the language of the operatically dying: ‘Dille che dono ell’è / Di chi nel ciel fra gli angeli/Prega per lei, per te’ (‘Tell her that the gift is / From one who, in heaven among the angels, / Prays for her, for you’). Her composure contrasts with the laments of Alfredo (‘No, non morrai’) and

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Germont (‘Cara, sublime vittima d’un disperato amore, perdonami lo strazio recato al tuo bel cor’ [‘Dear, sublime victim of a desperate love, forgive me for the torment caused to your beautiful heart’]). Their voices unite in their first and last passionate aural embrace: in the final cadence, Violetta and Germont share the same notes an octave apart, Alfredo held between them, all division at an end. We might assume from the pattern of earlier operas that Violetta’s death is now imminent. In Dumas’ dramatic adaptation of his novel, Marguerite simply falls asleep at this point, never to wake again. Verdi and Piave add another twist. The strings recall the theme of that first heady moment of love (‘Di quell’amor’), and Violetta suddenly feels better and about to recover – but it is an illusion. Death steals upon her unawares, in the guise of the life she has loved: ‘Oh gioia!’ Violetta dies, transcendent. Free of pain and luminous with optimism, her passing recalls entirely Engel’s advice to provide the audience with ‘an idea of death as every man would wish to feel at that crisis; though, perhaps, no one ever will have the good fortune to find that wish accomplished’. Few, we might surmise, experienced the final moments of tuberculosis as the manner of Violetta.41 The brother of Eugénie de Guérin was fortunate: according to her letters in July 1839, he ‘passed away without any struggle, quite easily, as if falling asleep, just after he had received the Holy Viaticum’. 42 Other deaths were hard-­won events. Pauline de la Ferronnays Craven’s account of the death of her sister Olga, also dying of tuberculosis, in her diary entry of 10 February 1843 reveals how religious faith could configure the pain of death as similar to that of the birth process – an act that required extreme physical work and produced a new ‘life’: [Olga’s] last act was to kiss her little Crucifix which was always in her hand, and which she had repeatedly pressed to her lips during that short agony. Ah! my God, let that scene always remain present to us! Notwithstanding the fearful alteration in her features, there was a beaming expression in her face. She was gasping for breath, but as one might be at the moment of winning a race, breathless and weary, yet joyful and triumphant, knowing that very soon the toil will be over, and the crown be won.43

Without such faith, witnesses to death from consumption found things rather harder. In 1903, a young English clerk, Ruth Slate (1884–1953), recorded the death of her fiancé, Ewart Johnson, in her diary: ‘Together we had to move him almost every minute, and nothing seemed to ease him. He could only speak with great difficulty, and sometimes the words seemed to be shouted out in his efforts. It was agony to watch him.’ 44 If Slate found some measure of comfort in the ‘beautiful smile’ that marked Ewart’s face after death and his aura of ‘resting in peace’, such sentiments were lacking when six years later, her younger sister Daisy also succumbed to the disease: Right till the last she suffered and all our agonised prayers were in vain. Shall I say I felt near to hating God? It all seemed so wicked, so cruel and so unnecessary. The sight of it at last nearly maddened us.45

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Pain and agony are evident too in Dumas’ account of Marguerite’s death-­throes in the original novel: ‘No martyr ever suffered such torment, to judge by the screams she uttered.’46 As we have seen, Dumas softened the realism of Marguerite’s death (most probably owing to censorship) in the stage-­adaptation; the opera goes yet further in its negation of physical trauma. Yet Verdi sets Violetta’s last words with a subtle manipulation of convention. The rising chromatic scale, beginning parlando on ‘Cessarono gli spasimi del dolore’ (‘The spasms of pain have ceased’) and spanning an octave and a half, serves multiple functions. If on one level it serves convincingly to demonstrate Violetta’s almost disbelieving return to life (surprise followed by increasing excitement) and her feverish delirium, on another it clearly signals to the spectator that all is not well, because this musical device was commonly deployed in opera as a ritual symbol of ‘a sublime terror, a sense of rising oppression’.47 Thus while the earlier rhythmic pattern that repetitively marked the score throughout Violetta’s sacrificial act of bequest is absent from her last bars, the sense of foreboding is not lost but merely communicated through different means. On another plane, the scale suggests a distillation of Violetta’s spiritual progress during the opera from the earthy confines of her material life to the higher sphere of selfless love. If this analogy seems stretched, we might recall the complaints of Basevi that the downward line of Alfredo’s cantilena expressed a wayward sensuality.48 In this context, Violetta’s path upwards in her final bars pursued the opposite trajectory, indicated by Dumas’ phrase in his novel about Marguerite’s life ‘winging its way back to God’ even though she herself would ‘snatch’ back its flight. 49 As one of the first operas identified as appealing specifically to a female audience, 50 it is notable that when women wrote about La traviata, it was often less with regard to its celebration of the figure of the courtesan, but more in terms of its emotional effect. Olimpia Savio Rossi was deeply moved by Adelina Patti in the role in Turin in 1879, admiring the variety of her sculptural gestures that ‘always depict the internal action of a sentiment’, while in the final scene ‘she dies as one really dies; she is no longer a person, but a corpse’.51 Blanche Roosevelt claimed that it was odd that in this opera about a ‘courtesan’s passion’, Verdi ‘by some inexplicable chord of sympathy has sounded a note of pure sentiment’ – far more so than in his other operas about ‘purer’ passions.52 In 1878 the young Russian artist Marie Bashkirtseff, already in the early stages of the as yet undiagnosed tuberculosis that would kill her six years later, watched a performance in Paris with a sense of presentiment: ‘in the last act I had not exactly the wish to die, but the idea that I should suffer and die just at the moment when all was about to end happily.’53 Some singers who performed the role were similarly moved by Violetta’s plight. As mentioned briefly in Chapter 4, the soprano Virginia Boccabadati wrote an account to Giulio Cesare Ferrarini of her performances as Violetta at Rovigo in 1854: I come now to give you news of the Traviata that went on stage yesterday evening, and which has pleased immensely from beginning to end. You cannot imagine how much

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women philosophy, how much delicacy is in this captivating music; there are some phrases that exalt you to tears, some moments in which one feels possessed of the most profound sadness – in the first act one experiences an insane cheerfulness, while in the third act the contrast between the situation of a woman near to death and the cheerful shouts of the masqueraders is so strange that I have genuinely wept on stage […] I did all that I could, being in poor voice and extremely weak. The audience showed itself to be very content … but I was not pleased with myself, and returned home profoundly saddened […] However, I’m happy to have pulled off the effect of the last act, even though I was ill. And that famous phrase, oh dio morir sì giovane io che penato ho tanto! – did not pass in silence; I would have been mortified if  so.54

A review of Boccabadati two years later in the same role in Turin described her performance in the third act as ‘sublimely true; too true, we would say, so much was the passion with which she interpreted the death of Violetta’.55 Not all audiences responded in similar fashion. At Rome in 1854 (this time with Rosa Penco in the title role), the subject of the opera was declared ‘anti-­musical and more suited to the hospital than the theatre’.56 A month later at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, the first two acts were enjoyed, but the third passed in ominous silence and at the fall of the curtain there were ‘signs of disapproval’.57 Verdi reciprocated in an outburst about the conservatism of the audience, writing to De Sanctis: ‘Why in your San Carlo can’t one represent equally a Queen or a peasant, a virtuous woman or a whore? Why not a doctor who takes a pulse, or some masked balls etc. etc? It is “not fitting”!! Why? If one can die from poison or by the sword, why can’t one die of consumption or the plague!! Doesn’t all this happen in ordinary life?’58 Yet, of course, it was exactly La traviata’s connection to ‘ordinary life’ that both repelled some of its earlier spectators but spoke poignantly to others. If Giovanna d’Arco gladly set out to meet the angels calling her, and Luisa Miller faced death in the secure conviction of a ‘delayed happy ending’ at the side of her lover, Violetta’s clinging to life produces one of the most pathetic demises of all Verdi’s heroines. The opera’s eventual popularity derived less from the idealised aspects of the narrative, with its courtesan-­turned-­angel and her devoted but erring lover, and more from hitherto unacknowledged glimpses of ‘reality’ on the operatic stage: that there is not always a happy ending, delayed or otherwise; that some people are dying while others only a few feet away are in the midst of careless revels; that death for most of us comes by disease; and that we might often prefer to live rather than die. Violetta, in her reluctance to relinquish first her independence for passion and then life for the tomb, brought a new dimension to the operatic heroine’s consciousness of love and death. Lovers ’ deaths : L a for z a d e l d e s t i n o  a n d ­A ida

Did Verdi feel that in Violetta’s death he had produced something that could not be bettered? Leonora’s suicide in Il trovatore, the opera that preceded La traviata by just a few

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weeks, had been composed on rather more conventional lines. After Violetta’s demise Verdi subsequently avoided any female death scenes in his next three operas. The last we see of Hélène in Les Vêpres siciliennes as the curtain falls is as she tries to protect her lover from the arriving Sicilians; the pathos of a death scene in Simon Boccanegra belongs to the eponymous hero, not his daughter; and in Un ballo in maschera, Amelia survives the threats of her husband although her lover Riccardo dies under his knife. Verdi’s following three operas – La forza del destino, Don Carlos and Aida – were a different matter. By 1874, the London critic of The Athenaeum began a review of the Messa da requiem by pointing to Verdi’s ‘sombre’ operatic style and his choice of ‘tragic stories’: ‘He has apparently revelled in making his leading singers thoroughly unhappy; he kills his prime donne without remorse; some of them die a natural death on the stage, while others are killed or executed under more or less horrible circumstances. He is, perhaps, the composer who acts most on the nerves.’59 La forza del destino was particularly responsible for this impression, with its cycle of deaths and ‘almost laughable atrocities’. 60 The ending of the original version of 1862 included a duel – in which Leonora’s brother (Don Carlo) is fatally wounded by her lover Alvaro; a murder – as Leonora embraces the dying Don Carlo (‘ti stringo al mio core’), he stabs her and proclaims his vengeance, to which Leonora responds with saintly forgiveness (‘Ti perdono, fratello’) and then expires herself; and a suicide – Alvaro, maddened with despair, leaps into the void, cursing the world, as the assembled friars sing a ‘Miserere’. The nihilistic effect of this scene, redolent of the excesses of Renaissance revenge tragedies, was considered largely to blame for the opera’s negative profile with both critics and audiences. In 1869, Verdi developed another version for La Scala. Both the duel and the wounding of Leonora now took place offstage; a trio of consolation and acceptance (between Leonora, Alvaro and the Padre Guardiano) serves to usher Leonora into heaven, and also reconcile Alvaro to a life of penitence. As Parker has demonstrated, there were both losses and gains in this remaking.61 For the audience of the day – especially the more conservative critics – the more peaceful ending to the opera served to alleviate some of the darkness of the plot. Cominazzi in La fama, although deriding the choice to save Alvaro, the guilty source of all the plot’s misfortunes, above any of the other characters, nonetheless praised the trio for its ‘stupendous effects that shake you to the soul’, and in short regarded it as ‘the best, most imaginative and most beautiful part’ of the opera.62 In the revised version of La forza del destino, Leonora and Alvaro both desire death, but are divided at the last. In Aida, the lovers die united: a double suicide, chosen separately but by both because life without the other was unthinkable. This time, however, Verdi sought a very different death for his protagonists. To his librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, he wrote in 1870: At the end I would like to eliminate the usual agony and avoid the words io manco; ti precedo; attendimi! morta! vivo ancor!, etc., etc. I would like something sweet, ethereal, a very brief

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Verdi, Opera, ­Women duet, a farewell to life. Aida should sink into Radamès’s arms. Meanwhile, Amneris, kneeling on the stone above the subterranean chamber, should sing a Requiescant in pacem, etc.63

Serenity thus marks the final pages of the score. There is a brief moment of anguished twisting against fate, as Radamès scrabbles against the stone to find an exit when he realises that Aida has joined him in his tomb. And then Aida leads Radamès into the tender if unusual music of ‘O terra addio’, with its adventurous wide leaps (commented on by at least one critic in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano), and twelve repetitions as it is passed back and forth between Aida, Radamès and the orchestra, interspersed with the ominous intoning of the priests. For Budden, this sequence is ‘one of the most magical endings to any opera’.64 The lovers wreathe themselves in this melody, like a protective shield, a filigree covering, sung in the last bars in perfect unison. This final scene of the opera was regarded as the most original and climactic passage of the work (‘colossal’ is how one reviewer described it in Il pungolo). Although the entombing of Radamès and Aida was part of Auguste Mariette’s original outline for the opera, it was Verdi who suggested the use of a split stage and the entry of Amneris. 65 The decision to include Amneris at this juncture almost certainly owed something to Verdi’s long-­standing ideas about female guilt. The particular visual conception of this tableau of death and mourning among ancient Egypt’s pyramids, however, chimes intriguingly with the funerary sculpture that adorned northern Italy’s cemeteries. This expensive form of artwork had flourished in Italy over the nineteenth century, although in other European countries the tradition had largely vanished after the French Revolution, apart for a few exceptional individuals.66 In northern Italy, however, the growing and aspirational middle classes invested their wealth in the lavish marble monuments that confirmed not only their status and values, but their very existence. In the words of Fred Licht, funerary sculpture ‘became the most direct visual expression of middle-­class taste’, or the ‘true folk-­art of the dominant bourgeoisie’.67 The sculptor Giovanni Dupré (a friend of Verdi’s and who had made a sculpture of the composer’s hand) claimed that he sometimes made these monuments and statues while the subject was still living, with the advantage that they could see in advance the place where they would sleep ‘l’ultimo sonno’.68 In Aida, we see not only the tomb, with its expiring inhabitants, but also the grieving mourner above. Depictions of mourners – especially widows – had become a growing trend in funerary sculpture, inspired by Vincenzo Vela’s Desolazione, exhibited in Milan in 1850. This grieving female figure, commissioned by the Ciani brothers to sit on the tomb of their parents, was considered to have political significance in the wake of the failed insurrection; it even aroused poetic responses, such as Andrea Maffei’s ‘La ­desolata’. While this statue was an allegory or pleureuse, Vela’s later monument for the tomb of Count Giacinto Provana di Collegno at Turin in 1857 depicted a real mourner in medallion bas-­relief: his widow, Countess Margherita Trotti Bentivoglia.69

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By the 1870s, Sandra Berresford writes, ‘the widow had become the focal point of the monument and was destined, on occasion, to eclipse the husband altogether’. 70 So too in Verdi’s opera: the addition of Amneris’ bowed figure, whose voice continues when those of Radamès and Aida are stilled, works to ensure the spectator’s final impression is of her continuing, penitent (we presume) life. Yet it is also a way of demonstrating that the lives of those she mourns will also continue in some fashion. Karl Guthke describes death as a ‘historiographer’, citing Cicero: ‘The Life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.’71 Amneris becomes the visible depository of the traces of the departed souls, the means by which life is preserved through recollection. O tello

Desdemona was the last woman Verdi would kill through music. The sentiment expressed in those lines from the Corriere delle dame cited earlier – ‘Love disposes to every sacrifice; whoever knows how to love knows how to die’ – similarly pervades Otello.72 Boito gave the ‘Willow Song’ new lines, deliberating presaging Desdemona’s death: ‘Egli era nato per la sua gloria; io per amarlo e morire’ (‘He was born for glory; I, to love him and die’). As we have seen, song was the means used to depict Desdemona’s idealised nature and lift her above the domain of ‘real’ life. And yet, especially as the opera progresses, this tranquillity seems less a ‘given’ of her character, and more something she battles to retain. The suspended, poised phrases of the ‘Willow Song’ – ‘Salce, salce’, and ‘Cantiamo’ – seem, in the later light of her sudden, inelegant begging for just another instant of life, an attempt to remain transfixed in that idealised realm – to delay to the last the fall into mortality. Spiritually, the opera prepares her for death, not only through that telling phrase in the ‘Willow Song’, but also through the other addition made to Shakespeare’s text: the inclusion of the ‘Ave Maria’ and its haunting words: ‘prega sempre e nell’ora della morte nostra’ (‘pray for us now and in the hour of our death’). And yet, like Violetta, Desdemona is none the less reluctant to die. In Rossini’s version of the play in 1816, the character virtually dares Otello to kill her: Uccidimi, se vuoi, perfido, ingrato! Non arrestare il colpo … Vibralo a questo core, Sfoga il tuo reo furore, Intrepida morrò. (Kill me, if you want, perfidious man, ingrate! / Do not stay the blow …. / Strike at this heart, / Vent your wicked fury, / Fearless I will die.)

Rossini’s Desdemona almost prefigures Carmen in her willingness to defy a man armed with a knife; nor are there any final words of forgiveness in her dying moments. Verdi

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and Boito, however, follow Shakespeare more closely, where Desdemona tries desperate negotiation to stall Otello’s assault: just a few minutes more, a prayer … The action of her death, unlike the idealised character of Desdemona herself, is comparatively ‘real’. It is the most prolonged murder of any character in Verdi’s operas. Given that by then the plot was relatively well known (through both Rossini’s opera and an increasing number of stage performances of the play), there could be no surprise in Otello’s fatal assault on his wife; the tension was therefore built by playing on the audience’s anticipation about when and how it will happen. Nothing in the score illustrates better Boito’s remarks to Verdi in 1880 about the power of music to change mood – he had argued that ‘eight bars are enough’ to transform the dramatic ambience.73 At the end of the ‘Ave Maria’, Verdi demonstrates that it takes only a single note. As Desdemona drifts into sleep, the violins play a high pedal note of a♭′′′ for six bars, as the second violins and violas mark a downward chromatic path (resolving in a triad of A♭ major). But as this ethereal note dies away, the double-­basses begin at the extreme opposite of the scale with an ominous E natural – and Otello enters. Over the next forty bars, until Desdemona awakes, Verdi gives precise directions for the co-­ordination of music and movement, building both aural and visual suspense. Blanche Roosevelt found the scene all too effective: It was impossible not to feel impressed, not to feel a tightening at the heart, and a sickening sensation creep from the heart to the throat. I can still see him prowling in Desdemona’s chamber, can still hear the threatening murmuring orchestra, feel his footsteps near her couch, and hear the terrific crash of the brasses as I realised that the moment of death had arrived.74

The death itself is deliberately brutal. First, there are the hurried exchanges where Desdemona tries to dispel Otello’s implacable rage and then begs for her life: at one point in the compositional process, Verdi insisted that the phrase ‘Non uccidermi!’ (‘do not kill me!’) be retained (‘It is lacerating!’, he wrote to Boito). 75 Then, as the production book of the first performance reveals: ‘OTELLO grabs DESDEMONA by the arms, and throws her violently on to the bed, at which point he grabs her by the throat with his two hands. DESDEMONA, trying once more to free herself, lets out a sharp, heart-­rending cry, then remains motionless, with OTELLO still strangling her.’76 The triplets that Verdi had used so often before as sobs become here the vicious spasms of Otello’s death­dealing hands in thirteen bars of a diminished-­seventh chord on F♯ minor. As Hepokoski has demonstrated, the development of this death scene took place in the context of two other well-­known interpretations of the play, by the actors Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi. Both began performing the role of Othello in 1856 (and continued to do so into the 1880s), but their approaches to the murder of Desdemona differed. In an echo of Rossini’s opera, Salvini favoured the positioning of the act of murder offstage, with the audience left to hear only the agonizing noises

­Deat Example 6.1  Otello, Act IV

­ of Desdemona’s demise (her ‘shrieks and groans, mingled with his hoarse and maniac cries, tells with terrible effect the frightful scene that is enacting there. It is almost too horrible to endure’, wrote one traumatised critic in 1873). 77 In contrast, Rossi provided a hideous assault on stage, strangling Desdemona ‘with refined slowness’ (even, it seems, for as long as five minutes) in full view of the spectators.78 Boito and Verdi were familiar with both interpretations,79 and their mise-­en-­scène offers a subtle variation. Otello again strangles rather than suffocates his wife – but in the context of the opera, this also functions as a direct attack on that very part of Desdemona that Verdi designated as expressive of her goodness, her voice. This cruel fracturing of Desdemona’s song is nonetheless temporary, but her final broken phrases

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­ Example 6.3  Otello, Act IV

­ to Emilia avoid the optimistic closures of previous heroines. Her thread of a voice wanders chromatically, concluding with her ‘Addio’ on a minor third, followed by just the brief resolution of an E major chord in the strings. Even Desdemona, it seems, knows that her death is a tragedy. So, ultimately, does Otello. But first he must confront a woman who uses the weapons that might also have protected Desdemona, had she only availed herself of them – anger and ridicule. Emilia’s part is much reduced in the opera, compared to the play (something criticised by Victor Maurel, who first sang Otello).80 Even so, it is Emilia’s fury and persistence – and her refusal to be cowed by either Otello or her husband – that ensures the truth of Iago’s treachery is revealed. Camille Bellaigue thought her

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recitative with Otello was ‘prodigious’: ‘Unaccompanied, with naked voices, upon a furiously hammered note, the words strike against each other like swords.’ 81 And unlike the play, where Iago stabs Emilia malevolently in his flight and she dies repeating the words from the ‘Willow Song’, Emilia survives – in the production book she forms part of the final tableau, following Otello’s death. With the full revelation of Iago’s trickery, Otello first dares Lodovico to take his sword, and recalls his past glory (‘Niun mi tema’). Eventually he lets the sword fall, and the plaint of an oboe draws Otello’s gaze to Desdemona. The oboe pauses on a semitone sigh of D to C♯, and it is the echo of this sigh that forms Otello’s next phrases, ‘Come sei pallida! e stanca, e muta’ (‘How pale you are! and tired, and silent’): Otello is not simply seeing Desdemona but recalling the phrase in which she revealed the extent of her sacrifice, when in her dying words ‘Nessuno, io stessa’ she protected him from the consequences of her own murder at his hands (see Example 6.1). A few bars later, the motif emerges again, transposed up a tone in Otello’s cries of ‘Desdemona! Desdemona!’ leading to his sobbing ‘Ah! … morta! Morta! Morta!’ In a letter about the German edition of the score in 1888, Verdi described this phrase as ‘heartrending and true’, and complained that the translator had made of it something that was neither: ‘“Dolce morta cara”, or something similar. Here there must be neither a poetic nor a musical phrase; even I myself had the good sense to make only sounds that have almost no tonality! ... Otello must thus always say “morta morta morta”.’82 Then Otello stabs himself, and his own dying begins in earnest. In these final bars, Otello is transformed from murderer to mourner. Roosevelt, earlier shocked by Otello’s prowling brutality, was moved: ‘In all the range of operatic music I know of nothing so tender, so pathetic, so thoroughly heartrending as this act’; it was ‘the most soulful, powerful, and touching of all [Verdi’s] previous works’. 83 And why? Roosevelt sought for meanings beyond the stage action. To her, the emotional effect of the music could only be explained as something that Verdi himself ‘felt’: ­‘what he had of soul he put here, what he had in remembrance of a sad past, of ruined hopes, of early disillusions, he has put here.’84 In a strange dislocation from domestic violence to marital harmony, she perceived the music even as Verdi’s own act of grieving for the loss of his first wife and their children. The beauty of death in this opera thus belongs not to the innocent victim, but the perpetrator of the crime. Otello dies in the remembered lyricism of Desdemona’s kisses, as the music ebbs into infinity.

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­Laughter

To go out – and laugh! Alice’s opening greeting to Meg is but the least of phrases in Falstaff, little more Alice, Falstaff, Act i, scene ii than a functional exchange to modern eyes. Yet it held within it a promise of physical freedom and shared company that was still something relatively new in the experience of many Italian women in 1893. Only eight years previously, the Giornale della donna had declared:

‘Escivo appunto Per ridere con te’

To go out alone! But it is a scandal only to say it. And yet I do not know how to find greater absurdity than this, and I applaud liberal England, Germany and all countries where it is understood that when all girls go out alone, they are for this single fact respected. 1

The cultural model of the ‘vigilance of the virgins’ (‘vigilanza delle vergini’) ensured this sequestration of women in the domestic environs, especially in the south. To venture out from the security of the home, as De Giorgio points out, was considered as ‘the first step towards the precipice of dishonour’.2 Up until the middle of the century, single women were generally prevented from going out alone until they were aged forty; later, this limit was lowered to the age of thirty.3 In contrast, married women of any age ostensibly had greater freedom, although even here it was considered preferable for women to remain within the home. Michele Lessona (a writer apparently much admired by Verdi), made a spirited argument for the improvement of women’s lot in his aptly titled Volere è potere in 1869, commenting that: ‘The Italian man, for the most part, keeps woman closed in the home, and does not willingly see her go out alone.’ 4 What were these enclosed lives like? Only when she was in her sixties did one spinster, Paolina Leopardi (sister of the poet Giacomo), fully emerge from the domestic cloister of the family palazzo at Recanati, near Ancona. During her long period of solitude, Leopardi’s particular pleasure was infrequent visits to the opera house; most of what we know of her life in fact emerges in the letters she wrote to the soprano Marianna Brighenti and her sister Nina across a period of over thirty years. Brighenti’s itinerant life as an artist, encompassing not only the Italian opera-­house circuit but visits abroad, was of especial fascination to someone whose horizons were so restricted – and whose favourite novel was de Staël’s Corinne. Despite their long and often passionate (at least, on Leopardi’s side) correspondence, the two women did not actually meet in person until the late 1850s. Through her letters, Leopardi frequently describes her isolation. On 15 June 1830, for example, she writes to Marianna Brighenti of the tedium of her life: ‘I envy you, if for 198

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nothing other than because you have an aim in life; it is certainly very honourable and devoted. And if you knew what an idle life I lead, it would frighten you: I only sleep, and desire to sleep always more, even for ever!’5 There had been little change in this ­situation when twenty-­five years later, on 1 April 1855, Leopardi responded to Marianna’s suggestion that she and her mother make a visit to the Brighenti sisters: You really made me laugh with the suggestion you made to my Mother (who also greets you warmly) of us coming to Bologna. Oh if you but knew her! If you knew her! And then, don’t you know that she leaves the house only once or twice a year to go to a nearby church and nowhere else? Don’t you know that in all her long life she has never cared to leave Recanati, and has never wanted to see anything? Imagine therefore if the will to stir herself might come to her now! As for me, can I leave my Mother alone at her age? Believe that this life is beyond words boring and heavy to me, but it seems that there is no remedy, and it’s always better to bury one’s own grief and painful remembrances.6

Brighenti’s life of movement, variety and independence could only be sampled at second hand by Leopardi – it was a type of dream, like so many other dreams that seemed to dominate the youth of Italian women, until finally worn into a pale mirage by the passing of the years. Laughter, for Leopardi, was thus a private activity, to be recorded in ink and consigned to the post, where it could only be savoured by her correspondent at many days’ and many miles’ distance. For the women in Falstaff, however, laughter is public, spontaneous and shared. If Desdemona was the most extreme of Verdi’s self-­sacrificing heroines, the Falstaff quartet – Alice, Meg, Nannetta and Mistress Quickly – are his most energetic and self­assertive. Their predominant expression is not a lament, but laughter. Women sometimes laughed in Verdi’s earlier operas, but their laughter was rarely kindly.7 In Act ii of I Lombardi alla prima crociata, the captured Giselda is surrounded by a chorus of slaves in the harem, who describe her con ironia as ‘La bella straniera’ (‘the beautiful stranger’). Their mockery sounds in the trilling flutes that open the chorus and underscore the long-­held unison c˝ on the penultimate syllable of the word ‘straniera’;8 in the prancing use of staccato as the slaves encircle Giselda in their dance; and in the semiquavers in the orchestra that maintain a running commentary of derision against the quaver-­pattern rhythm in the vocal line. Where female opera choruses had traditionally expressed solidarity or sympathy with the opera’s heroine, here there is only hostility and aggression as they taunt the ‘foolish’ and ‘haughty’ Giselda with the image of the death of her family. The malice of the harem slaves foreshadows that of the witches in Macbeth four years later.9 Verdi’s use of the bearded witches to begin the opera reflects the evocative setting of Shakespeare’s text, although he dispenses with the famous dialogue of the original scene i (‘When shall we three meet again?’), and starts instead from the play’s anarchic scene iii, with the witches’ account of their mischief and malevolence.

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Presenting a striking image of female unruliness, the effect of the scene in the operatic adaptation was doubly unusual given that an opening female chorus was a relatively rare occurrence in serious opera of this period: as mentioned earlier, male choruses were the more usual framing of the start of an opera, and had indeed figured in most of Verdi’s works to date.10 Even where Verdi had used a mixed chorus, the emphasis was usually on the male singers.11 In Macbeth, the rising of the curtain on the strident laughter of the witches (regarded by Verdi as a single character ‘of the highest import­ ance’)12 demonstrates that we are in a topsy-­turvy realm, where the traditional gender categories have been overturned and where havoc rules. The weird sisters appear out of a storm, from fast-­moving ascending and descending groups of semiquavers that represent flashes of lightning but which also suggest that even the weather itself was cackling. Meterological disturbance accordingly echoes – or is even created by – the witches’ disruption of morality. For Verdi’s female characters, a sense of humour is usually an assertion of autonomy. His laughing women are not – or so it seems – intent on pleasing men, but rather on pleasing themselves. Maddalena (Rigoletto) and Preziosilla (La forza del destino), both women who sell their bodies, laugh; so too does Violetta – at least, until she ceases to be a courtesan. Domesticity brings her only tears. Lady Macbeth’s disparagement of Macbeth after he has murdered Duncan and her jeers of ‘Follie!’ (so central to the meaning of the scene, Verdi argued)13 slice through her husband’s manhood like a surgeon’s knife. Lovers, though, rarely laugh; they are invariably too anguished. Laughter is one distinctive feature of Falstaff; its plurality of female characters is another. As we have seen, Verdi had long wanted ‘two prima donnas’, but apart from his first opera, Oberto, he did not manage to achieve this again in a substantive sense until the mature part of his career. There were disadvantages to his eventual success. The presence of two major female characters arguably encouraged the binary opposition of madonna/magdalena so favoured by the epoch. Operas where there was only one central female role often necessitated more complex characterisation – thus Gilda, Violetta, Amelia – where the combination of different tropes of womanhood at least suggested a mixture more akin to ‘real’ women. Against this, we might note that in Aida both women shift in the course of the opera from their pre-­defined stereotypes. Aida’s angelic goodness is stained by her act of duplicity (albeit enforced by her father) when she persuades Radamès to reveal the battle plans of the ongoing campaign; Amneris finally attains some consciousness of the consequences of her jealousy, and ends the opera in prayer. And of course, some operas with only one female role do indeed maintain an essentialised characterisation, as the extremes of Lady Macbeth and Desdemona both demonstrate. In Falstaff, however, we have not just two women, but four;14 and the opera revels in the sense of women as a group, aiding and abetting one another, in a manner rarely glimpsed before in Verdi’s operas. Nor was it something that many spectators would

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necessarily have encountered much in their own lives. Nineteenth-­century Italian society did not encourage such friendships between women. As late as 1908, Dora Melegari argued that unlike in northern European countries, where women aided and consoled each other, friendships between Italian women were ‘rare, very rare’. She ascribed its cause in part to women’s low opinion of their capacity for reciprocity, which impeded ‘every sentiment of solidarity and true intimacy’ and thus denied women ‘a powerful moral support’.15 Certainly, women had long been told that they were incapable of forming such relationships. In his Doveri delle donne (1870), Mastriani had quoted Montaigne’s belief that female vanity and sense of rivalry precluded true friendships between women.16 And yet many factors impeded female friendship, not least domestic isolation, family duties and social disapproval. Leopardi’s epistolary relationship with the Brighenti sisters, despite beginning when she had already reached the age of twenty-­eight years, had to be kept secret from her parents for many years: their letters were exchanged via the aid of a sympathetic priest. Especially forbidden were relationships between single and married women (which meant that schoolhood friendships were automatically severed when one girl married early and others did not), in case the prized innocence of girls should be sullied by intimate revelations from sexually active women.17 Some commentators predicted even more directly erotic consequences from close female friendships. Mantegazza, writing in the year of the première of Falstaff, described friendship as ‘a serene, tranquil sentiment’ which could not satisfy the ‘strong and dramatic emotions’ of women; thus friendships between young women were prey to ‘hurricanes of jealousy or effusions that one would really call love. And unfortunately from friendship one slides on this path into tribadism, a more common thing that you might believe, particularly in the upper classes.’18 Of course, some friendships between women were indeed owing to same-­sex relationships, but the implication (or the fear?) here is that close ties between women might exclude males completely, or at the very least (in that oft-­used phrase) disturb the ‘peace of the family’. Verdi, however, clearly thought of the Falstaff quartet as a close-­working unit, with Alice as ‘the most important part after Falstaff ’. During the casting process, he sought for a singer who would be ‘full of the devil’, because Alice was ‘the one who leads the whole pack’.19 This more energetic vision of women in the score owed much to Verdi’s revisioning of an ‘old’ genre: opera buffa. The purpose of late eighteenth-­ and early nineteenth-­century opera seria was to ennoble the mind through elevated, idealised narratives; in contrast, Italian theorists regarded comedy’s function as revealing human foibles through caricature and imitation. Rooted more in the ‘real’ world of everyday life, comic opera had explored the vagaries of human relationships, between men and women, master (or mistress) and servant, parent and child. Gender relations in these operas thus drew more on quotidian behaviour. Women especially were often portrayed in more active terms, savouring their revolts against convention. 20 We need think only of Rosina (Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1816), who summarises the narrow lot of the

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dutiful signorina with her ‘Io sono docile, son rispettosa’ (‘I am docile, I am obliging’), sung in a span of no more than nine notes in a demure Andante; but whose cascading double-­octave span on the following words, ‘Ma se mi toccano dov’è il mio debole / sarò una vipera’ (‘But if I am crossed in love / I will be a viper’), reveals that her supposed compliance was really just an act. The heroines of Donizetti’s later masterpieces of the genre, L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale – perhaps its last true exemplars – are simi­larly resourceful and determined; and if at times they opt for submission it is more (or so we feel) from the pleasure of playing with that strand of femininity than deep­rooted conviction. Verdi undoubtedly had his own reasons for this reversion to opera buffa – not least, his usual desire to differ from everyone else, at a time when the genre had largely fallen from favour.21 Yet his previous operas had often picked up on the moods of the time – the bellicosity of the 1840s, the grieving of the 1850s, the anti-­clerical attitudes of the 1860s. The appearance of his feisty female characters in 1893 was a timely coincidence with another significant social change. L a donna nuova

The final decades of the nineteenth century introduced a different image of womanhood from the madonna/magdalena figures that had dominated the epoch. ‘La donna nuova’ (the ‘New Woman’) brought the century to a close, and set out a model for the future. Her impact was greater elsewhere in Europe and the Western world, but neither did she go unnoticed in Italy.22 By 1898, Scipio Sighele could summarise her in the following terms: ‘The new woman, tired of what she calls her slavery, has understood that in order to impose her own will she must become a political force – to win, that is, the right to elect representatives of the people and to be elected herself.’ 23 Who were these ‘new women’ and what was their aim? Words such as femminismo and femminista are complex terms in Italian history, and were rarely used before the turn of the twentieth century.24 Nor is there a precise analogy with the parades of banner-­waving, marching suffragettes that thronged London and New York. As both body and kinesis, the Italian women’s movement might be best imagined as a swirling, circling mass, at which women arrived from different directions; some to linger on the periphery, others to plunge into the centre, yet others to pass through briefly and leave by separate routes in pursuit of other goals and destinations. Italian women were drawn into their various degrees of participation by a number of factors: the issue of political autonomy and legal rights; the social condition of women in the home and the workplace; women’s access to education and professions such as law and medicine; the treatment of women by religious authorities and other theological considerations; and, most widespread of all, the concept of personal freedoms with regard to marriage and sexuality. There was no agreed consensus on all these elements,

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nor did one emerge in later periods. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, ­‘feminism is a “problematics”, a complex, heterogenous set of interrelated questions and concerns – with no single answer.’25 The movement that emerged in late nineteenth-­century Italy was in many ways formed – loosely – by identifying which questions should be asked. Women’s political position was an obvious starting point. The 1840s had been a period of growth in the development of women’s movements throughout Europe (particularly France and Britain) and the USA, when ideas about women’s suffrage began to surface alongside related issues such as the abolition of slavery. At a similar time, the involvement of women in the patriotic cause marked the beginning of Italian feminism. A number of women (such as Enrichetta Caracciolo, Cristina di Belgiojoso, Laura Solera Mantegazza, Maria Montalban Comello, among many others) actively committed to the nationalist cause later became similarly involved in the advancement of women.26 Cavour’s monarchical and conservative party, however, would prove to be less supportive of female emancipation than socialist republicans such as Garibaldi. The first important tracts on the topic emerged following Unification. Salvatore Morelli, patriot and politician, wrote his argument for female emancipation and education, La donna e la scienza, o la soluzione del problema sociale in 1858, although it was not published until 1860.27 A more pointed attack came four years later from the most promin­ent activist of the period, Anna Maria Mozzoni, in her La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali: The State denies woman education, while it makes her a tax-­payer. The code denies her capacity before her rights, while it affirms her responsibility before contraventions and punishment. The State rejects woman from political life, while it makes her participate in it through her sacrifices. The law subordinates women in marriage and denies her legitimate maternity, while it ladens her alone with domestic burdens and abandons to her all the consequences of illegitimate maternity. More, it closes every way to her intelligence and bars her from the path of every profession, refusing to acknowledge in her the right of work and activity. 28

Mozzoni’s call for women to protest against their condition and ask for parity with men under the law went largely unheeded by the new legislature. Resolutely denying women the vote (article 26), the Codice civile of 1865 restored certain aspects of the earlier Codice civile napoleonico and abandoned others. Some women, particularly those from the southern areas, found they had more freedoms; others, mainly from the Austrian-­governed territories, had rather less. Among the latter, the issue of reinforced marital authority created the most irritation, not least because of the paradoxical attitudes toward women in the new legislation. While married women were now subject to greater control, single women and widows had more liberty than previously – in part to fuel the gradual industrialisation process in the cities with cheap labour. 29

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The efforts made by Mozzoni and others to improve conditions for women were sorely needed. Female education prior to Unification was minimal at best. Illiteracy was high among both genders: the overall figure in 1861 is generally given as just below 75 per cent, although disagreement remains as to what levels of illiteracy this refers to. Among women, however, the figure was 81 per cent; of the remaining 19 per cent described as literate, well over a quarter could only read, not write. 30 This figure was not uniform throughout Italy. In the rural areas of the south, for example, only around 3 per cent of women possessed a rudimentary level of education; in Sardinia the figure was as low as 1.57 per cent in the countryside, but rose to 15 per cent in the towns. 31 The drive to produce a literate population was one of the goals of post-­Unification Italy; in terms of women, it was achieved at a faster rate of improvement than that of men. By the year of Verdi’s death in 1901, 54 per cent of women were literate. Education was also a key strategy for the leaders of the women’s movement. In 1869, Lessona complained that Italian husbands inclined to support female literacy only did so because they wanted their wives to be able to write shopping lists – not so that the women could indulge in the reading of novels, political material or scientific studies. 32 He contrasted the position of Italian women unfavourably with that of women in other countries, finding examples from Britain of women’s literary prowess and from Switzerland of women’s employment outside the home. From all this, he concluded: ‘It is not reading, it is not work, it is not the exercise of the intellect that ruins women, but inertia, idleness, the vanity of the mind. The cultured and hard-­working woman has the highest concept of her own dignity, of the importance of her work, of her duties towards her children.’33 As we saw with Franceschi Ferrucci, however, rights to education were not always considered synonymous with rights to political representation. Although toward the end of Verdi’s lifetime there were some improvements in women’s access to higher education and certain professions like medicine and law (but not the judiciary), actual suffrage remained a chimera.34 The political right, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, was opposed to female suffrage on the grounds that it contravened ‘natural’ law and jeopardised the sanctity of the home and family; the political left regarded feminism as the product of a small group of bourgeois women, whose emancipation would do little to advance the socialist cause and the plight of the working classes, and whose supposed political conservatism would merely provide greater support for their rightwing rivals. (In short, it was a similar pattern to that found in most European countries on the ‘Woman Question’.) And just as the Risorgimento in the 1840s and 1850s was plagued by divisions within the activist community, so too was the Italian women’s movement riven with dissent about its aims and purposes. The opportunities for change afforded by the founding of the new state of Italy slipped away; the First World War brought different urgencies and priorities; and in the post-­war period the arrival of Mussolini (once in favour of women’s suffrage in his earlier revolutionary syndicalist phase prior to the First World War) put a decisive

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end to hopes for female emancipation and indeed quashed much of the progress that had been made thus far.35 Not until the conclusion of the Second World War did Italian women achieve full political rights and representation. But all that was yet to come. The end of the nineteenth century promised a new, vibrant epoch, with the emergence of ‘La donna nuova’ signalling at least a growing public awareness that the old ways were no longer enough. Yet her supposed ‘newness’ was in some respects a mythical construct; many women had long disturbed the neat boundaries of madonna and magdalena.36 Verdi had in effect passed his entire professional career among the prototypes of donne nuove. In the operatic marketplace, women’s inroads into male-­dominated occupations in the 1880s and 1890s built on previous incursions. One example was Giovannina Lucca (1814–94), the wife of the music publisher Francesco Lucca, who had published three of Verdi’s operas (Attila, I masnadieri and Il corsaro) and shared or acquired the rights to others. Giovannina had always taken an active part in her husband’s business, corresponding with Verdi from the mid 1840s. 37 On Lucca’s death in 1872 she assumed full control, eventually selling out to Ricordi in 1888. Loathed by Verdi, she was generally considered a formidable character – hence Wagner’s quip that ‘Nature originally intended to make a man, until it realised in Italy the men were not much use, and quickly corrected itself ’ – but other composers such as Catalani found her to be astute and generous.38 The influx of women into other forms of publishing also created an environment where women began writing criticism and reviews, exemplified by one of Italy’s most powerful and successful woman journalists, Matilde Serao.39 And early instances of Italian female opera impresarios, such as Carlotta Michelesi Marini’s management of seasons at Mantua, Lodi and Cremona in 1836–40, or Adelaide Nagel’s Compagnia del Lirica Italiana, which toured Brazil in 1885–7, would eventually find their apogee in Emma Carelli, the soprano who from 1911 to 1926 was Italy’s first woman impresario of a major opera house as ‘direttrice’ of the Teatro Costanzi in Rome.40 (Intriguingly, Carelli had been commended in 1899 in La perseveranza for the rebellious spirit she brought to Verdi’s Desdemona, in contrast to the ‘passivity to which the tragedy consigns [the role]’, at La Scala alongside Tamagno.41) The most important women in Verdi’s own life throughout his long career  – Giuseppina Strepponi, Clara Maffei and Teresa Stolz – belonged, like Giovannina Lucca, to earlier generations. But they too might also be described as prototypes of the donna nuova, proving the point that the ‘newness’ of this figure was more a question of image than substance. Strepponi, Maffei and Stolz were all women not only of exceptional gifts but also of exceptional determination, who pursued their own paths through judicious negotiation (rather than submissive compliance) with social conventions. Of them all, Strepponi had the longest relationship with the composer. She sang in Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, in 1839;42 created Abigaille in his first international success, Nabucco; by 1847 she was living (part-­time) with Verdi, moving permanently into his

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home in 1849; their marriage in 1858 lasted until her death in 1897. Her singing career had all but subsided at the outset of their cohabitation, although she continued to teach for a while. From her arrival in his home, however, the management of Verdi’s career became a family business. She undertook Verdi’s correspondence, translating letters and other material from and into other languages, and possibly even ‘collaborating’ to some unknown exent on certain operas. If no love letters from Verdi to Strepponi survive (or have yet been made public), perhaps a more telling note, written to Giuseppina Appiani during the couple’s early, heady days in Paris in March 1848, indicates something of his pleasure in their relationship: ‘I cannot hide from the fact that I am having a very good time … and I laugh, and I laugh, and I laugh.’43 Laughter was nevertheless only part of Verdi’s personality, as Strepponi discovered. While during their first years together, she described him as her ‘Redeemer’, her view after twenty years of their relationship was more ambiguous. On 1 July 1867, driven to distraction by Verdi’s black moods and domineering behaviour toward both her and the rest of the household, Strepponi confided grimly to her diary: ‘To occupy oneself exclusively with one man may be admirable in theory; in practice it’s a mistake.’44 A few months later, after another tempestuous day, she recalled how on her marriage to Verdi she had wanted ‘to become a new woman, worthily to respond to the honour I received in becoming his wife, and to the benefits I receive continually from this man, who, to be perfect, lacks only a little more sweetness and charm in daily relations with one who has no other happiness than that of an amicable word!’; now, it seemed to her, all her efforts at ensuring domestic harmony were unappreciated, and she would have done better to have simply ‘recommenced a life of extravagance and amusements’ instead.45 And living at Sant’Agata obviously was a very lonely existence at times. Strepponi particularly disliked the winters there, when the snow covered the plain and the leafless trees seemed like ‘desolate skeletons’: ‘I feel an infinite sadness, a desire to flee the country, and feel that I live among the living and not among the spectres and silence of a vast cemetery.’ 46 To Emanuele Muzio, she wrote on another occasion: ‘I live almost in a world of silence.’47 And yet this isolation seems to have been largely her own choice. A letter to Clara Maffei in 1871 about a forthcoming visit to Milan is fairly typical of her self-­confessed taste for solitude; Strepponi states that she will not attend any dinners or other social engagements, she will make not a ‘single new acquaintance – none’, and she will instead pass her time walking alone through the city, window-­shopping, or reading and writing in her room.48 Clara Maffei and Verdi had also met in the early 1840s in Milan. Born of patrician stock, Maffei was the leader of one of the most important salons in northern Italy, a confirmed and active patriot, the wife of the poet Andrea Maffei (until their separation), and then the companion of Carlo Tenca. Her relationship with Verdi, lasting more than forty years, again only ended with her death. Like Strepponi, she was instrumental in aiding his career, introducing the young composer to Milanese society and indeed to key figures among the liberal community. On her death in 1886, a grieving

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Verdi wrote: ‘what a heart! And what nobility of character! And what loftiness of sentiment!’49 Barbiera claimed that according to Maffei, ‘The art of receiving (she used to say) is the art of sacrificing oneself.’50 And yet this apparent apologist for self-­sacrifice was also a woman who took the unusual step of separating from her husband in her determination to acquire independence and, as she put, belong to herself. 51 The youngest of the three women, Teresa Stolz, also led an unconventional life within the strictures of her time. As a successful singer, she enjoyed both independence and a career. Verdi summed things up approvingly in a letter to Clara Maffei of 2 May 1879 when he commented on Stolz’s ‘brilliant life’: ‘She does very well: she has a fortune, she is free, still of a good age, popular, and esteemed. Nothing could be better.’ 52 Her acquaintance with Verdi began in the late 1860s, fuelled by her performance as an acclaimed Leonora in the revised La forza del destino at Milan. She swiftly became one of Verdi’s most admired sopranos; her voice can still be heard in the title role of Aida (although she did not create the role in Cairo, she sang in the first Italian performance of the opera shortly afterwards at Milan), and also the soprano role of the Messa da requiem. By the mid 1870s, the bond between singer and composer provoked scurrilous gossip in the press and a passionate outpouring of jealousy by Strepponi.53 How much of this suspicion was grounded? That remains unclear. All we can be sure of is that a deep reciprocal emotion existed between Verdi and Stolz, lasting until their parting at Verdi’s deathbed in 1901. Despite their age difference, Stolz survived him by barely eighteen months. None of these women therefore fitted the epoch’s idealised vision of womanhood, although all demonstrate its pressures. Their existences, initially separate parts of Verdi’s life, gradually intertwined. In the 1860s, Strepponi and Clara Maffei finally met, discovered shared enthusiams (not least for Manzoni) and interests, and formed a cordial and affectionate bond. Even Stolz became an accepted part (albeit with a certain reservation on the part of Strepponi) of the Verdis’ inner social circle, making frequent visits to Busseto and remaining in regular correspondence with the couple. The longevity of these relationships suggest Verdi’s obvious need for and enjoyment in female company – not just as erotic encounters (something that clearly never happened with Maffei, in any case) but as an integral, enduring and much-­cherished part of the fabric of his life. And the surviving letters between them reveal that their relationships did not fully correspond to conventional notions of male dominance and female submission: rather, exchanges were made on relatively equal terms. Verdi wrote in much the same vein to Maffei as he did to his male friends such as Arrivabene, discussing politics and art; Strepponi’s correspondence with her husband similarly demonstrates that she was more than capable of responding tartly to Verdi’s perceived faults or lapses, and ­defining the boundaries of their marriage. In short, Verdi’s closest personal experiences with women reveal his knowledge and appreciation of women outside the usual templates of gender constructs – perhaps

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this made him at least more open to the feisty female characters that populated Shakespeare’s various depictions of Falstaff. Falstaff

Despite its title and its male-­dominated opening scene, Falstaff transmutes into a woman’s world, populated by traces of many of Verdi’s earlier female characters. Young love and the rebellious daughter are represented by Nannetta; the adulterous wife and the warrior-­woman by Alice Ford; the seer and gipsy by Mistress Quickly. Even the witches are present, in Bardolfo’s disguise in the final act. And there are the common themes – love, parenthood, betrayal, conspiracy, vendetta, disguise – that fuelled Verdi’s other operas. Yet finding themselves the target of Falstaff ’s scheming, Alice and Meg respond in rather different fashion from many of Verdi’s previous heroines. Fuelled by the energy and mobility of the score, they exhibit a commonality of experience, sharing their information, and mirroring one another’s comments, actions and music in their narration of the contents of Falstaff ’s letters. The image of male grandiosity presented by Falstaff in his most romantic flourish, ‘come una stella sull’immensità’, supported by the fortissimo surge of the strings in passionate thrust, is at once punctured by the women’s laughter. And that laughter is shortly followed by universal condemnation – ‘Mostro!’(‘Monster!’) – repeated by each woman in turn. Nor do they stop at expressing their amusement and disapproval of the lusty, ageing Falstaff; rather, they determine on active chastisement. These are women no longer content merely to voice dissent, but who are demanding actual change – and who are prepared to take matters into their own hands. The interlude of romantic love, enacted by Nannetta and Fenton, similarly seems redolent of a different, freer attitude to sensuality. If some Verdian heroines’ response to sexual thoughts was previously connected with a kind of fevered neurosis (as in I masnadieri), or even a passive attitude towards men (as in Rigoletto), here women and men participate with equal pleasure. Nannetta and Fenton’s kisses are openly enjoyed and shared; kissing is a game, a competition, in which mock aggression (on both sides) is rewarded by sensual submission. In their answering phrases, ‘Bocca baciata non perde ventura’ and ‘Anzi rinnova come fa la luna’, young love finds here its sweetest, most transcendent articulation in Verdi’s operas. Indeed, at the beginning of the Act ii Largo concertato, the music pauses to allow the actuality of the kiss its own sonority, which first halts and then propels the action. Emanuele Senici sees this moment as an ­example of the crisis he argues underpins the opera about the limits of what music could express.54 It might also be viewed, however, as a celebration or at least an acknowledgement of love’s physicality that could not have been staged in so many of Verdi’s

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earlier works. Verdi himself directed the singers during the rehearsals; according to an item inserted by Ricordi in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano on 14 May 1893, he took especial care over the kisses to ensure their naturalness, even demonstrating exactly what he wanted.55 The article is accompanied by Adolf Hohenstein’s illustration of the two singers (Adelina Stehle and Edoardo Garbin), posed in delicate caress (Figure 7.1) Belonging to both the ‘old’ world of their inception and the ‘new’ world of their remaking, the quartet of women in Falstaff share a relationship to ideas of gender in operatic traditions similar to that of Verdi’s music and Boito’s drama in their questioning and yet redevelopment of operatic convention (‘Janus-­faced’, as Parker describes it).56 The women confront all the perils that have plagued their counterparts in one guise or another in Verdi’s earlier operas, and in their mutual and energetic co-­operation finally achieve what they seek: the ridicule of the seducer, the trumping of the jealous husband, the manipulation of the overbearing father, the union with the lover. ‘Vittoria!’ the women deservedly cry together, in their last expression before the opera moves into its fugue finale. And yet had victory really been achieved? Despite the critical acclaim (in part now ascribed to expressions of italianità) despite the hopes of Strepponi (who described the opera as ‘the advent of a new genre, rather, of a new art of music and poetry’)57 the public response was uncertain and puzzled. Even with a reduction in the ticket price, attendance dropped at the subsequent performances at La Scala. 58 In this context, Ricordi’s use of the anecdote – and even more, Hohenstein’s illustration – of the staging of the kisses between Nannetta and Fenton in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano suggest that sex was being deployed as a means of enticing the audience to the opera. After all, a few days before the première of Falstaff, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut had made its appearance at the Teatro Regio in Turin59 – an opera that, with its morally and physically frail heroine’s echoes of Violetta, was already finding much greater popularity with the audience of the day than Verdi’s adventurous quartet of ‘new’ women. Nor was Puccini the only competition. In 1893, after numerous rejections by publishers, the first full-­length book written by an Italian woman on opera appeared. Jolanda (Maria Majocchi Plattis) produced the kind of volume that would have made invaluable material for these pages, with her detailed discussion of female characters and narratives. 60 Yet Jolanda’s topic was not the operas of Verdi, but those of another composer who was increasingly beginning to fascinate Italian audiences: Wagner. Time – and fashion – were passing Verdi by. A year later, in a letter written to Emma Zilli (the creator of Alice), he summarised the production of Falstaff as a ‘splendid, passionate epoch, in which one breathed only art!’, and mourned that while she had so much of her career before her, for him ‘all has ended!’.61 In fact, they had almost exactly the same number of years left to live: Zilli died of yellow fever on tour a couple of weeks before Verdi in January 1901.

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­ Figure 7.1  Adolf Hohenstein, Falstaff, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 14 May 1893, xlviii/20, 334 (CIRPeM, Parma)

Verdi’s own career closed just as horizons for women seemed to be opening. The sterile days of Mussolini’s regime lay ahead, unseen, in the (not so) distant future. For now, opportunity beckoned. Verdi himself was ambivalent about some of these changes. In a conversation with Italo Pizzi in 1884, he had reportedly declared: Since our universities have been invaded by so many female students, who then graduate in literature, in philosophy, in mathematics – something that does not please me at all – it would be good if instead they studied medicine in order to care for women. Woman, as is

­Laughte natural, confides more in another woman than in the doctor, to whom she struggles to say everything. Therefore, the degree of doctor in medicine is the only one that I approve in a woman.62

Reported conversations are dubious material; and in any case Verdi’s provocative remarks were often a product of either his dry humour or a spasm of irritability. Yet if his observation was genuine, Verdi’s willingness to sanction female access to higher education (if only in order to care for other women) was a distinctly progressive attitude within late nineteenth-­century Italian society,63 and suggests that he at least recognised women had their own reality – one not served best by an entirely male infrastructure of authority and knowledge. Something of that perspective is evident in Verdi’s operas. Desiring music’s engagement with a broader range of human experience, Verdi made space on the operatic stage for women whose stories had hitherto been confined to other cultural mediums. While his portrayal of women revealed the prejudices of his epoch, he nonetheless often challenged the limits of those confines, investing the delineation of his characters with seriousness and compassion. As a composer, he gave musical contour to an extraordinary breadth of imagined emotion: Odabella’s resolution, Lady Macbeth’s madness, Gilda’s naïvety, Azucena’s curses, Violetta’s effervescence, Amelia’s passion, Leonora’s desperation, Eboli’s rage, Élisabeth’s bitter resignation, Amneris’ languor, Desdemona’s hapless faith, Alice’s laughter. Taken as a whole, his operas provided a multi-­faceted image of ‘woman’ that more closely responded to the lived experience of his spectators than that of any other previous Italian composer. What Roosevelt liked most about Verdi, she wrote, was that he was ‘intensely human’: ‘his fire, his tenderness, his pathos, passion, or patriotism, are the most perfect expression of our abnormal selves.’64 And in the invented ‘truth’ of their impassioned crises and dilemmas, Verdi’s operas raised very real questions about one of the most fundamental matters concerning Ottocento society – woman’s relationship to state, to family, to herself.

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Prolo gue 1 Letter to Opprandino Arrivabene, 21 July 1874, in Annibale Alberti, Verdi intimo. Carteggio di Giuseppe Verdi con il conte Opprandino Arrivabene (1862–1886) (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1931), 177. 2 Letter to Francesco Maria Piave, 3 November 1860, in Alessandro Luzio (ed.), Carteggi verdiani, 4 vols. (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1935–1947), vol. ii, 353–4. 3 Blanche Roosevelt Tucker Macchetta, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’: Being A Short Life of Verdi, with letters written about Milan and the new opera of Othello: represented for the first time on the stage of La Scala theatre, February 5, 1887 (London: Ward and Downey, 1887). 4 Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3  vols. (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd, 1973, 1978, 1981), vol. i, 32. 5 See, for example, Andreas Giger, ‘Social Control and the Censorship of Giuseppe Verdi’s Operas (1844–1859)’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 11 (1999), 3: 233–65; and John A. Davis, ‘Italy’, in The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-­Century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 190–228. 6 Gilles De Van, Verdi’s Theater: Creating Drama through Music, trans. Gilda Roberts (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 98. 7 Ibid., 185. 8 Heather Hadlock, ‘“The firmness of a female hand” in The Corsair and Il corsaro’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 14 (2002), 1–2: 47–50. See also Gilles De Van, who argues that although both men and women are compelled to acts of self-­sacrifice in Verdi’s operas, their situations are very different: male subordination is ‘mainly external’, but the subordination of the heroine ‘must penetrate to the very core of her being’ as she lacks a similar sphere for self­determination. De Van, Verdi’s Theater, 186–7. 9 Geremia Vitali, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 19 March 1843, ii/2, 49–50. 10 Letter from Verdi to Cesare De Sanctis, 16 May 1853: ‘After the powerful effect of Victor Hugo’s dramas everyone has searched for effect without recognising, in my opinion, that it always resides in Hugo’s one goal: that of creating powerful, passionate and above all original characters. Observe those characters such as Silva, Maria Tudor, Borgia, Marion, Triboulet and Francesco etc., etc. Great characters produce great situations, and effect is born naturally’, in Luzio (ed.), Carteggi verdiani, vol. i, 19. 11 Letter to Ferretti, 5 November 1845, in Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio (eds.), I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (1913; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1987), 439. For a consideration of the meaning of this term in relation to Macbeth, see Harold Powers, ‘Making Macbeth Musicabile’, in Macbeth, English National Opera Guide 41 (London: Calder, 1990), 13–36. 12 Letter to Cammarano, 14 February 1849, in Carlo Matteo Mossa (ed.), Carteggio Verdi– Cammarano 1843–1852 (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2001), 89.

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Notes to pages 5–9 13 ‘I desire subjects that are new, grand, beautiful, varied, passionate – and passionate in the extreme – with new forms, etc., etc.’ Letter to De Sanctis, 1 January 1853, in Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan: Ricordi, 1959), vol. ii, 188–9. 14 Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 139. 15 On Verdi’s vocal writing, see Rodolfo Celletti, ‘La vocalità romantica’, in Storia dell’opera, ed. Guglielmo Barblan and Alberto Basso, 3 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1977), vol. iii, 105–262; and ‘Caratteri della vocalità di Verdi’, in Atti del IIIo Congresso internazionale studi verdiani, 12–17 giugno 1972. Il teatro e la musica di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Mario Medici and Marcello Pavarani (Parma: Istituto di Studi Verdiani, 1974), 81–8. Also Marcello Conati, ‘Il cantante in scena … fuoco, anima, nerbo ed entusiasmo …’, in La realizzazione scenica dello spettacolo verdiano. Atti del congresso internazionale di studi, Parma, 28–30 settembre 1994, ed. Pierluigi Petrobelli and Fabrizio Della Seta (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1996), 265–72. 16 For example, Giuseppe Rovani argued that while Verdi in his early operas demonstrated a ‘distinct individuality’, this should not be confused with ‘originality’: Verdi’s style was of a ‘composite’ nature, and his only real innovation was ‘a swift and determined pace’ to the dramatic action. Giuseppe Rovani, Storia delle lettere e delle arti in Italia, 4 vols. (Milan: Francesco Sanvito, 1858), vol. iv, 495–506. 17 For an overview of women’s political history in nineteenth-­century Italy, see Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, Appunti sulle origini del movimento femminile tra ’800 e ’900: due lezioni e lettere sulla lotta delle donne in Italia e in Europa (Rome: Salemi, 1986). 18 ‘I diritti della donna: Convenzione americana’, Corriere delle dame, 14 January 1851, xlviii/2, 15–16. 19 Focosi provided various illustrations for vocal scores of Verdi’s works, including Luisa Miller and Rigoletto, as well as costume designs for Macbeth and a rather good portrait of Verdi himself. 20 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 70. 21 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. i, 33–4. 22 See, for example, the claim made by Geoffrey and Ryan Edwards that in Verdi’s operas the baritone gained a hitherto unknown ‘dramatic ascendance’, giving expression to a complex range of psychological and emotional nuances: ‘the Verdi baritone is the voice of humanity itself ’. Geoffrey Edwards and Ryan Edwards, The Verdi Baritone: Studies in the Development of Dramatic Character (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3–4. See also Celletti, ‘Caratteri della vocalità di Verdi’, 80–8. 23 David R. B. Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 78. 24 Tracy C. Davis, ‘Questions for a Feminist Methodology in Theatre History’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1989), 59–81; here, 75. 25 Similar discussions about the heroine preface other earlier operas, as in Bellini’s Norma (1831) and both Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and Lucrezia Borgia (1833). 26 Denis Diderot, Oeuvres de Théâtre de M. Diderot avec un discours sur la poésie dramatique, 2 vols., (Paris: Duchesne and Delalain, 1771), vol. i, 239.

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Notes to pages 9–12 27 Giacinto Battaglia, Mosaico. Saggi diversi di critica drammatica (Milan: Guglielmini, 1845), 248–9. 28 On the position of the prima donna in this period, see Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 29 Britten commented on Verdi’s approach to operatic construction: ‘At the beginning of his life he accepted the convention of the times in the sharp definition of the numbers, and he balanced these numbers brilliantly. Fundamentally, he never changed this attitude, but later on the numbers melt into each other with a really astonishing subtlety.’ Benjamin Britten, ‘A Verdi Symposium’, in Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford University Press, 2003), 102–3. 30 Many references to performance in Verdi’s correspondence and in the operas themselves (at least from 1847 on) confirm that his ideas about mise-­en-­scène were often as precisely formulated as his requirements for pronunciation and accent. Following the première of Otello in 1887, Verdi confided to Giuseppe Giacosa how much he had enjoyed the work of ‘communicating clearly my thoughts to the actors, of making them move on stage in the way I wanted, the scenic tricks that the dramatic situation was suggesting to me’. Conversation reported by Giuseppe Giacosa; Marcello Conati, Verdi: interviste e incontri (Turin: EDT, 2000), 170. See also James Hepokoski, ‘The Interpretation of Falstaff: Verdi’s Guidelines’, in Giuseppe Verdi: ‘Falstaff ’ (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 110–128. 31 Letter to Clara Maffei, 20 October 1876, in Cesari and Luzio (eds.), I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 624. 32 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 271. 33 Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (University of Toronto Press, 1999), 26. 34 John Willett, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964). Joy Haslam Calico claims that opera was in fact ‘one of the most formative influences on Brecht’s entire career.’ Joy Haslam Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 2. 35 For a consideration of theories of audience reception, see Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1997). 36 Bruce McConachie, ‘Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians’, Theatre Journal, 53 (2001), 4: 569–94; here, 569. 37 Joan Scott, ‘Experience’ [1993], in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 57–71. 38 Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 65. 39 Bruce McConachie and Faith Elizabeth Hart, ‘Introduction’, in Bruce McConachie and Faith Elizabeth Hart (eds.), Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 20. 40 McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 65, 95, 99–101. 41 Ibid., 97. On emotional contagion and music performance, see Klaus R. Scherer and Marcel R. Zentner, ‘Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules’, in Music and Emotion: Theory

Notes to pages 12–16

42 43

44 45 46

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48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (Oxford University Press, 2001), 361–92; here, 369–71. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford University Press, 2005). Luc Ciompi and Jaak Panksepp, ‘Energetic Effects of Emotions on Cognitions: Complementary Psychobiological and Psychosocial Findings’, in Consciousness and Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice and Selective Perception, ed. Ralph D. Ellis and Natika Newton (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005), 23–56; here, 31. Ibid., 43. McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 113. On the surveillance of theatre audiences and suppression of applause, see Roger Parker, ‘Verdi alla Scala 1832–1901’, in Verdi e la Scala, ed. Francesco Degrada (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001), 22–3. Letter to Lady Clark, 28 October 1819, in Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1863), vol. i, 114–15. She went on to Modena, a ‘sad set out’: ‘the whole of this earthly paradise broken up into little states, neglected, poor, melancholy, presents but one great ruin … I never saw such contrasts as the comfortless aspect and misery of the people, and the enchantment and plenty of the scenery.’ The archives of the Teatro Regio provide various instances of Maria Luigia’s interventions, either directly or through her chamberlain: for example, the report for 3 May 1846 reveals that the evening’s performance of Verdi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata began with the third and fourth acts of the opera, interspersed by two ballets (ASTR RAPP. SER. 18/ i: ‘Rapporti 1846’). Her private correspondence also provides useful information on her views of various singers and performances in Parma and elsewhere. See Correspondance de Marie Louise, 1799– 1847. Lettres intimes et inédites à la comtesse de Colloredo et à Mlle de Poutet depuis 1810 comtesse de Crenneville (Vienna: Charles Gerold, 1887). Alessandro Stocchi, Diario del Teatro Ducale di Parma dell’Anno 1841, compilato del portiere al Palco Scenico (Parma: Giuseppe Rossetti, 1842), 4. Ibid., 82 Ibid. Ibid., 83. Ibid. Ibid., 84. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 84–5. Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 53. Peter Stamatov, ‘Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi’s Operas in the 1840s’, American Sociological Review, 67 ( June 2002), 3: 345–66; here, 347.

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Notes to pages 16–23 63 See, for example, Figaro, 22 February 1845, xiii/16, 61–2. 64 In her youth, Alexandrine was a maid-in-waiting to the Empress of Russia (according to Chateaubriand, who knew the family). 65 Pauline de la Ferronnays Craven, A Sister’s Story, trans. Emily Bowes (1868; 5th edn, London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1882), 12. 66 Ibid., 25. 67 Ibid., 28. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 33. 70 Ibid., 39. 71 Ibid., 177–8. 72 On domestic music-­making in Italy, see Roberto Leydi, ‘Diffusione e volgarizzazione’, in Storia dell’opera italiano, vol. vi, Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Turin: EDT/Musica, 1988), 301–92. 73 Paola Cirani, Maria Luigia e la musica (Mantua: Edizioni Postumia, Publi Paolini, 1999). 74 Henry Fothergill Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2  vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), vol. i, 75. 75 Giornale di scienze, letteratura ed arti per la Sicilia, September 1832, no.  117; parte seconda, 312–20. 76 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 77 Carolyn M. Byerly and Karen Ross, ‘Women as Audience’, in Women and Media: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2006), 56–74; here, 59. 78 Ibid., 59. 79 Ibid., 60–2. 80 The theoretical ground for an interweaving of these separate fields is extensive, encompassing (for example) Ricoeur’s statement that the full ‘meaning’ of text takes place at the ‘intersection of the world projected by the text and the life-­world of the reader’; Caryl Darryl Malmgren’s notion that ‘fictional space’ is the encounter between the ‘imaginal expense created by fictional discourse’ and the reader’s experience of reality; and Stephen Greenblatt’s injunction about the need to explore ‘both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text’. All such notions acknowledge the grounding of the artwork in social territory and recognise the collision between imaginary and experienced environs that occurs in the spectator’s or reader’s response. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3  vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1990), vol. ii, 160; Carl Darryl Malmgren, Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel (Lewisburgh, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1985), 28; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-­fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5–6. 81 Leo Treitler, ‘History and Music’, in History and …: Histories within the Human Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 288. 82 William Davies King, ‘When Theater Becomes History: Final Curtains on the Victorian Stage’, Victorian Studies, 36 (1992), 1: 53–61; here, 58–9.

Notes to pages 23–26 83 Silvia Mantini, ‘Women’s History in Italy: Cultural Itineraries and New Proposals in Current Historiographical Trends’, trans. James Schwarten, Journal of Women’s History, 12 (2000), 2: 170–98; here, 188. 84 Carolyn Porter, ‘History and Literature: “After the New Historicism”’, New Literary History, 21 (1990), 2: 253–72; here, 269.

1  War 1 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. i, 93. 2 Margaret Tomalin, The Fortunes of the Warrior Heroine in Italian Literature: An Index of Emancipation (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1982). 3 Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) depicts the crusader Tancredi’s lengthy contest with a masked Saracen warrior who, defeated and at the moment of death, is poignantly revealed as his beloved Clorinda. 4 Daniel E. Freeman, ‘La guerriera amante: Representations of Amazons and Warrior Queens in Venetian Baroque Opera’, Musical Quarterly, 80 (1996), 3: 431–60. 5 Three victims are female rivals; the others are variously a husband (Lucia di Lammermoor), a son and all his companions (Lucrezia Borgia) and an ex-­lover (Roberto Devereux). Three deaths are by knife (Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, Lucia di Lammermoor and Maria de Rudenz), two are executions (Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda) and the remainder are poisonings (Lucrezia Borgia). 6 Letter from Donizetti to Michele Accursi, Paris, late January 1842, in Studi donizettiani, 1 (1962), 1: 79–80. The only appearance the real Maid of Orleans made in Donizetti’s operas was in Gemma di Vergy, 1834, where she is discussed in glowing terms of her victories over the English. Gemma’s own attempt to resolve her problems through violence (by holding a knife to her rival Ida’s throat) reaches a different conclusion; she is unarmed by her Arab slave, Tamas, who later murders her faithless husband. 7 ‘La donna considerata filosoficamente e moralmente’, Figaro, 2 May 1835, iii/33, 138–9. 8 Simonetta Ortaggi Cammarosano, ‘Labouring Women in Northern and Central Italy in the Nineteenth Century’, in Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento: Essays in Honour of Denis Mack Smith, ed. John A. Davis and Paul Ginsborg (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 156–83. 9 Heather Hadlock, ‘The Career of Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up’, in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton University Press, 2000), 67–92; and Naomi André, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-­Century Opera (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). 10 Rutherford, Prima Donna, 243. 11 Marcello Conati, La bottega della musica: Verdi e La Fenice (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1983), 56, 62–3. 12 Letter from Antonio de Val to Brenna on 24 August 1843, ibid., 70. Verdi’s way out of this impasse was to insist on a tenor for the role of Ernani, and suggest instead Vietti for the role of Carlo. Brenna’s rebuttal was swift: while Vietti could easily perform the role of a young man of twenty since her physique had a ‘masculine robustness’ as well as the necessary ‘vibration of the soul’ that characterised Ernani, to cast her as Carlo would be to make a

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13

14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

‘parody’ of the role, given that she could not convey successfully his age, dignity and elevated situation. Brenna to Verdi, 26 October 1843; ibid., 98. Raccolta per ordine cronologico di tutti gli atti, decreti, nomine ecc. del Governo provv. della Repubblica veneta: non che scritti, avvisi, desiderj ecc. di cittadini privati, che si riferiscono all’epoca presente (Venice: Andreola, 1848), vol. v, 337. Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, Il Risorgimento e l’unificazione dell’Italia, trans. Maria Luisa Bassi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 181. Alberto Mario Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2000), 67. Accounts of women patriots include Giulia Cavallari Cantalamessa’s La donna nel Risorgimento nazionale (Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1892), Renata Pescanti Botti’s Donne nel Risorgimento italiano (Milan: Ceschina, 1966), Antonio Spinosa, Italiane. Il lato segreto del Risorgimento (Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori, 1994) and Adriano Bassi, Le eroine del Risorgimento: amore e politica al femminile (Montichiari: Zanetti, 1996). More recently, Nadia Maria Filippini’s ‘Donne sulla scena politica: dalle Municipalità del 1797 al Risorgimento’, in Donne sulla scena pubblica: società e politica in Veneto tra Sette e Ottocento, ed. Nadia Maria Filippini (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2006), 81–137, offers a valuable model for future studies. Il pirata, 29 August 1845, xi/18, 74–5. First published in L’Italiano, Paris, on 31 October, 1836; reprinted in Gustavo Modena, Scritti e discorsi di Gustavo Modena (1831–1860), ed. Terenzio Grandi (Rome: Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano, 1957), 244–54. Mazzini defined the aims of Giovine Italia as ‘Education and Insurrection’, which needed to work together: ‘Education, by writing, example, and word, must always preach the necessity of insurrection, and when it succeeds must provide a principle of national education.’ Mazzini, cited in Stuart J. Woolf, The Italian Risorgimento (London: Longman, 1969), 49. Ugo Foscolo, Scritti letterari e politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. Giovanni Gambarin (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1972), 717. Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 104. Bianca Montale, Parma nel Risorgimento. Istituzioni e società (1814–1859) (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993), 17. Modena, Scritti e discorsi, 251. Giuseppe Mazzini, Filosofia della musica (1836; repr. Milan: Fratelli Bocca, 1943). From an article in 1837 written for John Stuart Mill’s London and Westminster Review. Cited in Roland Sarti, Mazzini: La politica come religione civile (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 2005), 122. Mazzini, Filosofia della musica, 159–62. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 56–108. For example, Verdi’s letter to Piave 21 April 1848, written from a ‘free Milan’: ‘You can imagine whether I wanted to stay in Paris, after hearing about the revolution in Milan. I left there immediately after hearing the news; but I only got to see these stupendous barricades [and not the fighting]. Honour to these heroes! Honour to all of Italy, which is now truly great! The hour of her liberation is here; be sure of that. The people want it: and when the people want it, there is no absolute power that can resist. Those who want to impose themselves on us by sheer force can do what they want, they can conspire as much as they like, but they will

Notes to pages 28–29

28

29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36

37

38

not succeed in cheating the people out of their rights. Yes, yes, a few years more, perhaps a few months, and Italy will be free, united and republican. What else should she be? You talk to me about music!! What has got into you? Do you think that I want to bother myself now with notes, with sounds? There cannot be any music welcome to Italian ears in 1848 except the music of cannon! I would not write a note for all the money in the world: I would feel an immense remorse, using music-­paper, which is so good for making shells … If you could see me now, you would not recognize me. I no longer have that long face that scared you! I am drunk with joy! Imagine that there are no more Germans here!! You know what kind of feelings I had for them!’ In Mary Jane Phillips-­Matz, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1993), 230–1. Solera’s father Antonio was a political prisoner of the Austrians from 1820 for many years in the notorious Spielberg fortress; Piave fought at Venice in the 1848 uprising; Maffei associated with the liberals who attended his wife Clara’s salon in Milan. John Rosselli, The Life of Verdi (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 123. See Il trovatore, 5 August 1857, iv/2. The piece was entitled Le grandi epoche della casa di Savoia; it included poetry by Antonio Gazzoletti and music by Luigi Luzzi. Lorenzo Bianconi, ‘Risposta a Giuliano Procacci’, in Verdi 2001. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, New York, New Haven 24 gennaio–1o febbraio 2001, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Marco Marica, 2  vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2003), vol. i, 205–16. Gustavo Modena, ‘Stamberie di Democrito’, originally published in Turin’s Gazzetta del Popolo, 4 January and 7 January 1856; here taken from Modena, Scritti e discorsi, 265–72. Cesare Cantù, Storia degli italiani, 6 vols. (Turin: L’Unione, 1856), vol. vi, 641–2. Curiously, Cantù later in 1893 confessed to having written a libretto for Verdi. ‘The subject of my libretto was common: the first part outlined the destruction of Milan; the second the Congress of Pontida and the Lega Lombarda; the third, the victory of Legnano up until the peace of Costanza.’ But Verdi had ‘walked more rapidly than events’, which made Cantù‘s libretto ‘superfluous’. Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 476. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, Degli studi delle donne, 4  vols. (Turin: Pomba, 1853), vol. iv, 341–3. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, L’asino (1857; 6th edn, Milan: Guigono, 1863), 165–7. Massimo Mila, Verdi, ed. Piero Gelli (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), 98. Some scholars go even further. George Martin claims that Verdi ‘had come to represent for many Italians the idea of a unified and independent country … Without being actively political as an agitator, writer or orator, he articulated for many – including the very many who were illiterate or almost – the ideas of Italian freedom and unity.’ George Martin, ‘Verdi, Politics, and “Va, pensiero”: The Scholars Squabble’, Opera Quarterly, 21 (2005), 1: 109–32; here, 112. Roger Parker demonstrated how the supposed political influence of Verdi’s operas on the 1848 uprising was exaggerated and distorted in the post-­Unification refashioning of the Risorgimento, in ‘Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati’: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1997). See the notes made about audience behaviour in Carte segrete e atti ufficiali della polizia austriaca in Italia dal 4 giugno 1814 al 22 marzo 1848, 3 vols. (Capolago and Turin: Elvetica and

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39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49 50

Patria, 1852), vol. iii, 103–4, 129, 179 – in particular, on the spectators who vigorously called for a repeat of the chorus of the exiles in Verdi’s Macbeth at La Fenice on 30 December 1847. On the surveillance in Roman theatres, see Giger, ‘Social Control’, 260–5. Massimo d’Azeglio, I miei ricordi (Naples: Bideri, 1908), 301. David Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 394–5. Marco Meriggi, Il regno Lombardo-­Veneto, Storia d’Italia 18, ed. Giuseppe Galasso (Turin: UTET, 1987), 144. Luigia Bolza attended the Conservatorio in Milan from 1835 to 1842, studying with Mazzucato; she later sang professionally as Luigia Ponti from 1844, and performed in Mazzucato’s opera I due sergenti at Genoa in 1845. Mazzucato described her in glowing terms in his summary of the teaching of the Conservatorio in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 8 September 1850, viii/36, 152 (a list that included Solera’s wife, Teresa Rusmini); however, it is noticeable that despite Ponti’s supposed international successes, her name only rarely appeared in the music periodicals – and when it does, the reviews were often studiously polite and uninformative. Antonio Ghislanzoni, Libro serio (Milan: Lombarda, 1879), 11. Robert Le Tellier (ed.), The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Years of Celebrity, 1850–1856 (Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 369 and 412. In March 1856, Meyerbeer visited Pachta (by then paralysed in bed) in Milan, describing him as ‘My dear friend of forty years … whom I knew in Vienna in 1813.’ Pachta had some meetings in 1843 with the composer in Berlin. Wagner also had contacts with Pachta and his family in the 1830s. Angelo Catelani, Cataloghi della musica di composizione e proprietà di M Angelo Catelani, ed. Luigi Francesco Valdrighi (Modena: Soliani, 1893), 55. John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 27. Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’, 49–53. The political situation in Parma, for example, was complex. Maria Luigia’s daughter was married in 1832 to Luigi Sanvitale, son of her former chamberlain and scion of one of Parma’s most aristocratic families. But Luigi was a political liberal and the cousin of Jacopo Sanvitale, a known activist who was exiled for his part in the 1830/1 uprisings. Luigi Sanvitale was also then a sympathiser, but of pacificist persuasion. In 1848, he took part in the provisional government in Parma after the Austrians had left; during the Restoration, he too was subsequently exiled and permitted to return only after the death of Carlo Borbone III in 1854. Although politically keeping a low profile, Sanvitale remained in contact with the anti-­Austrian faction, and following the 1859 uprising was made Parma’s first mayor of the liberated city. Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 13–14; 22–32. Giovanni Frassi (ed.), Epistolario di Giuseppe Giusti, 2 vols. (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1859), vol. i, 39–40. On this apathy, see also Woolf, The Italian Risorgimento, 4–7. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 30–31. See also Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 125–6, 135.

Notes to pages 31–33 51 During the 1848 uprising only the rural working-­classes in Sicily and Tuscany participated to any large extent. Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 135. 52 See Paolo-­Emilio Ferrari, Spettacoli drammatico-­musicali e coreografici in Parma dall’anno 1628 all’anno 1883 (Parma 1884; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1969), 225: Ferrari described Maria Luigia as ‘an Angel of Benevolence’. 53 D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi, 311. 54 Meriggi, Il regno Lombardo-­Veneto, 140. 55 John A. Davis, ‘Italy 1796–1870: The Age of the Risorgimento’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford University Press, 1997), 177–209; here,  207–8. 56 Angela Russo, Nel desiderio delle tue care nuove: scritture private e relazioni di genere nell’Ottocento risorgimentale (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2006), 161. 57 Letter dated 15 November [1850?], in Gustavo Modena, Epistolario di Gustavo Modena (1827– 1861), ed. Terenzio Grandi (Rome: Vittoriano, 1955), 133. 58 The Times, 14 March 1848, 6. 59 Raccolta per ordine cronologico, vol. ii, 205–6. 60 On the forced opening of theatres, see for example Giuseppe Mazzini, L’Italia del popolo, 2  vols. (Lausanne: Società Editrice L’Unione, 1850), vol. ii, 216, who cites an instance at Como where the Austrians forced the municipal authorities to open the theatre at their own expense: ‘The townspeople pay and stay at home.’ 61 Bruno Brunelli, I teatri di Padova dalle origini alla fine del secolo XIX (Padua: Libreria Angelo Draghi, 1921), 480. 62 Giovanni Visconti Venosta, Ricordi di gioventù: cose vedute o sapute 1847–1860 (Milan: L.  F. Cogliati, 1906), 218. On the popularity of the Teatro Carcano with audiences in this period, see also the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 26 May 1850, viii/21, 87, and L’Italia musicale, 31 December 1851, iii/105, 417. 63 Flaùto wrote from Naples to Verdi on 15 May 1849, saying that Albertini would sing Amalia at San Carlo, having always had ‘immense success’ in the role and would do so again in Naples. In fact, the production (supervised by Cammarano) was severely criticised in the Omnibus, which described the opera as ‘this abhorrent and revolting monstrosity … The action and music were generally disapproved of. The audience went away grieving and scandalized.’ Mossa (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Cammarano, 111–12. 64 Luigi Francesco Valdrighi and Giorgio Ferrari-­Morena (eds.), Cronistoria dei teatri di Modena dal 1539 al 1871 del maestro Alessandro Gandini arrichita d’interessanti notizie e continuata sino al presente (Modena: Tipografia Sociale, 1873), 382–6. 65 Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification (London: Routledge, 1994), 72–5. 66 Bortolotti, Appunti sulle origini del movimento femminile, 11–16. 67 Rivista teatrale e giornale di moda, 1 December 1824, i/71, 443–4. 68 Cited in Pescanti Botti, Donne nel Risorgimento italiano, 327. On the earlier French model of ‘Marianne’, similarly used to incite rebellion, see Mary Ann Smart, ‘“Proud, Indomitable, Irascible”: Allegories of Nation in Attila and Les Vêpres siciliennes’, in Verdi’s Middle Period: Source Studies, Analysis and Performance Practice, ed. Martin Chusid (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 227–56; here, 227–31.

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Notes to pages 34–37 69 Pescanti Botti, Donne nel Risorgimento italiano, 32. 70 Jonathan Keates, The Siege of Venice (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005), 161–2. 71 See also Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, Della Repubblica in Italia. Considerazioni (Milan: Vallari, 1848), 19–20. 72 Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 191. Franceschi Ferrucci’s phrase has a similar ring to the fabled demand of a Spartan mother to her son as he left for war: to return either with his shield or on it. 73 Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 105–6. 74 Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 190. 75 Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 125–6. See also Visconti Venosta’s account of the founding in 1847 of an almanac, ‘Nipote del Vesta Verde’, which was designed to discuss the political fate of Italy in veiled terms and which met with ‘extraordinary success, a success which would not now be understood; for all read between the lines. It seemed like a command, a cry of war.’ Visconti Venosta, Ricordi di gioventù, 48. 76 Carlo Leoni, Dell’arte e del teatro di Padova: racconto aneddotico (Padua: F. Sacchetto, 1873), 150–1. 77 Cited in Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, 23. 78 Ghislanzoni, Libro serio, 81. 79 On Norma, see the political demonstrations made at La Scala in January 1859 (Visconti Venosta, Ricordi di gioventù, 465–7) and three months later at the Teatro Regio in Parma, in the presence of the Duchess Maria Luisa and her court attendants (Ferrari, Spettacoli drammatico-­musicali, 251). 80 Margaret Fuller, Un’americana a Roma 1847–1849, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1986), 68–9. Fuller’s account of the response in Rome is borne out by another review in the Corriere delle dame, 28 January 1848, xlviii/6, 48. Conversely, however, Rinaldi claims that financially the opera was not a success (owing to Mitrovich and Superchi), and almost led the impresario to bankruptcy. Mario Rinaldi, Due secoli di musica al Teatro Argentina, 3 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1978), vol. ii, 833. 81 Corriere delle dame, 13 February 1848, xlviii/9, 72. 82 Christopher Duggan, Creare la nazione. Vita di Crispi (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 2000), 55–8. 83 Valdrighi and Ferrari-­Morena (eds.), Cronistoria dei teatri di Modena, 364–5. See L’Italia musicale, 12 January 1848, i/28, 223, which notes that the production of Attila was suspended at the dress rehearsal. 84 Valdrighi and Ferrari-­Morena (eds.), Cronistoria dei teatri di Modena, 393. Gandini attributed the lack of success to the unsuitability of the cast (Teresa Brambilla, Settimio Malvezzi and Felice Varesi) and Malvezzi’s illness. 85 ‘Santo di gloria è in noi costante amor’, Attila. Dramma lirico in un prologo e tre atti da rappresentarsi nell’I.R. Teatro alla Scala nel Carnovale 1851–52 (Milan: Francesco Lucca, n.d.), 7. 86 See, for example, Francesco Hayez’s oil-­painting I vespri siciliani (1846), which supposedly influenced Verdi’s choice of topic some years later. 87 Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1958), ix.

Notes to pages 37–41 88 Michele Amari, La guerra del vespro siciliano, o un periodo delle istorie siciliane del secolo XIII, 2 vols. (Paris: Baudry, 1843), vol. i, 114–20. 89 Museo scientifico, letterario ed artistico, 1848, anno 10, 305. 90 See the letter from Catania’s police commissioner to his opposite number in Palermo, in January 1860, regarding a recent production of Giovanna de Guzman: apparently, the bass had moreover aroused excitement ‘for expressing himself with some words not included in the libretto’. In Ottavio Tiby, Il Real Teatro Carolino e l’Ottocento musicale palermitano (Florence: Olschki, 1957), 240. 91 Marco Beghelli, La retorica del rituale nel melodramma ottocentesco (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2003), 75–110. 92 Baldini saw resemblance with Lady Macbeth’s ‘Or tutti sorgete’; Gabriele Baldini, Abitare la battaglia: la storia di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Fedele d’Amico (Milan: Garzanti, 2001), 265. 93 In the corresponding phrases in Donizetti’s unfinished Il duca d’Alba, God’s response to the sailors’ plea differs slightly: ‘Dee l’uom ripor sua fè sol nella mia pietà? / Salvezza ognun dal ciel implora / ed in sua man, sì in mano ei l’ha!’ (‘Must man place his trust only in my pity? / Everyone implores salvation from heaven / and in his hand, yes, in his [own] hand he has it!’) However, Donizetti also uses pauses and sparse accompaniment to frame these words. 94 Tina Whitaker, Sicily and England: Political and Social Reminiscences, 1848–1870 (London: Constable, 1907), 358. 95 Teresa Berra Kramer was a Milanese patriot and wife of Carlo Kramer; active in the 1821 uprising, she lived in Milan from 1826 to 1851, where she hosted a republican salon and was a friend of  Mazzini. 96 Visconti Venosta, Ricordi di gioventù, 318–19. 97 Ibid., 218–19. 98 Revue des Deux Mondes, xxv, 1855, 217–18. 99 Riall, The Italian Risorgimento, 72. 100 Letter from Manin in Paris to Lorenzo Valerio, 29 May 1856, in Lettere di Daniele Manin a Giorgio Pallavicino, con note e documenti sulla quistione italiana (Turin: Unione Tipografico­Editrice, 1859), 136. 101 Michael Sawall, ‘“Viva V.E.R.D.I.”: Origine e ricezione di un simbolo nazionale nell’anno 1859’, in Verdi 2001, ed. Della Seta, Montemorra Marvin and Marica, vol. i, 123–31; here, 125. 102 Ferrucci exempted Rossini from her criticisms of opera, because ‘his rich imagination knew how to find harmonies and sounds corresponding to every kind of affect, always displaying them with variety and elegance’. Franceschi Ferrucci, Degli studi delle donne, vol. iv, 341–3. 103 L’Italia musicale, 7 July 1847, i/1, 1–2. 104 Ibid., 2. 105 Il trovatore, 25 July 1854, i/4, 13–14. 106 For example, the regulations for Giovine Italia proclaimed that adherents to the party were believers ‘in a law of progress and duty’, while Mazzini argued for the need to arouse the consciousness of the people, in order to ‘imprint in their breasts a consciousness of invincible progress and triumph’ and to reawaken faith: ‘the faith that restores lost dignity to the slave, and cries to him: “Go forth! go forth! God wills it!”’ Franco Della Peruta (ed.),

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Notes to pages 41–44 Scrittori politici dell’Ottocento, vol. i, Giuseppe Mazzini e i democratici (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969), 331, 355–6. 107 ‘Considerazioni retrospettive’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 18 April 1847, vi/16, 124–5. 108 Basevi originally studied medicine, but mainly worked as a critic, journalist and composer. He edited the Gazzetta musicale di Firenze before founding L’armonia; he later also edited Il boccherini. Ian Bent considers Basevi’s analytical approaches toward Verdi in Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, vol. ii, Hermeneutic Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 195–212. 109 Abramo Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (1859; repr. Bologna: Antiquae Musicae Italicae Studiosi, 1978), 143. 110 Ibid., 149. 111 Ibid., 154. 112 Ibid., 157. 113 L’Italia musicale, 7 July 1847, i/1, 1–2. 114 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 159. 115 L’Italia musicale, 7 July 1847, i/1, 1–2. 116 Letter to Escudier 30 March 1872, in Hans Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Aida’: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 292–3. 117 Giraldoni, 1864, in Sergio Durante, ‘The Opera Singer’, in Opera Production and Its Resources, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 345–418; here, 402. 118 Verdi’s later operas do not show such a frequency of these terms, even when musically such accents are still prominent, perhaps because by the 1850s an accepted Verdian ‘style’ had been established and performers were more familiar with what was expected from them. 119 Guerrazzi, L’asino, 165–6. 120 Parker, ‘“Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati”’, 90–1; Il pirata, 5 April 1848, XIII/118, 477. Giovanni Berchet also led the procession. 121 Ghislanzoni, Libro serio, 9. 122 Raffaello Ricci (ed.), Memorie della Baronessa Olimpia Savio, 2 vols. (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911), vol. i, 288–9. 123 Letter from marchese Roberto d’Azeglio, 20 February 1860, in Costanza D’Azeglio, Souvenirs historiques de la marquise Constance d’Azeglio née Alfieri (Rome, Turin, Florence: Bocca Frères, 1884), 631–2. 124 Cesare Cimegotto, Arnaldo Fusinato: studio biografico-­critico (Verona: Fratelli Drucker, 1898), 27–8. 125 Brunelli, I teatri di Padova, 477–8. 126 Raccolta per ordine cronologico, vol. iv, 180. 127 This event took place after the return of Carlo II (prior to his abdication in favour of his son, Carlo III, on 14 March 1849). Ferrari, Spettacoli drammatico-­musicali, 225–7. A concert was also given at Rome’s Teatro Argentina on 9 December 1848 – see Rinaldi, Due secoli di musica al Teatro Argentina, vol. ii, 838. Other concerts given at Turin, Vercelli, Voghera, Venice, and Livorno were noted by Raccolta per ordine cronologico, vol. iv, 245. 128 Abbadia (b. Genoa 1821; d. either Rome or Milan 1896); De Giuli Borsi (b. Mondovi, Piemonte 1817; d. Naples 1877); Gazzaniga (b. Voghera 1824; d. Milan 1884); Parodi (b. Genoa

Notes to pages 44–46 1821/27; d. 1878?); Sannazzaro (no dates, but b. Voghera). On Parodi’s US career, see Vera Brodsky Lawrence and George Templeton Strong, Strong on Music, vols. ii and iii (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The male singers included Angelo Brunacci, Francesco Gnone, Manari, Bianchi and Raffaele Mirate. 129 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 21 August 1842, i/34, 149–50. 130 Quirino Galli, ‘Il teatro a Viterbo durante la Repubblica Romana’, Biblioteca e Società, 4 (1980), 1: 37–42. 131 Francesco Regli, Dizionario biografico dei più celebri poeti ed artisti melodrammatici, tragici e comici, maestri, concertisti, coreografi, mimi, ballerini, scenografi, giornalisti, impresarii, ecc. ecc. che fiorirono in Italia dal 1800 al 1860 (Turin: Enrico Dalmazzo, 1860), 230–2; Ferdinando Pinelli, Storia militare del Piemonte in continuazione di quella del saluzzo cioè dalla pace d’Aquisgrana sino ai dì nostri con carte e piani (Turin: DeGiorgis, 1855), 35. Gazzaniga and Malaspina had a son, Carlo, in 1850. 132 When Parodi sang the role, she inserted an aria from Mercadante’s Emma d’Antochia (composed for Pasta) in the farewell scene to Jacopo. 133 Duggan, Creare la nazione, 55–7. 134 Isaac Clark Pray, Teresa Parodi and the Italian Opera (New York: Wm. Parsons, 1851), 49. 135 L’Italia musicale, 27 March 1850, ii/17, 66. De Giuli Borsi gave birth around this time to a daughter, Giuseppina – later a mezzo-­soprano active from 1870. 136 Conati, Bottega, 218. 137 See L’Italia musicale, 30 March 1850, ii/18, 70; also 3 August 1850, ii/54, 214 (‘We repeat that Abbadia is still available for future seasons and an artist of so much talent does not deserve to be left unemployed’), and again on 10 August, ii/56, 223. She was eventually contracted for Stradella in Attila and Nabucco. On returning from Oporto, she was again unemployed, but was then contracted by the Teatro Carcano for a season in 1851 as Elvira in Ernani, as reported by L’Italia musicale, 26 July 1851, iii/60, 237: ‘In passionate canto di slancio, in the andante agitato, in those eminently dramatic situations in which the artist’s talent supports all the other means and with strong tints better colours the subject, Abbadia was superb. Every phrase, every word was delivered with such intelligence, with such sense as to lacerate the souls of the audience.’ Abbadia finally obtained another contract, this time for Barcelona – ironically, perhaps, alongside Luigia Ponti. 138 Letter from Verdi to Marzari, 20 February 1852, in Conati, Bottega, 273–4. 139 Ibid. 140 As Odabella with Ghislanzoni (Ezio) on 3 November 1847. Everything was applauded, but ‘the aria Allor che i forti corrono, performed by Abbadia in very praiseworthy fashion both with regard to singing and acting, made an indescribable impression’: L’Italia musicale, 17 November 1847, i/20, 158. See also La fama: Abbadia had barely appeared in the prologue when ‘clamorous vivas’ broke out, she was much applauded in the cavatina, and twice recalled to the stage; Ghislanzoni’s aria was also warmly welcomed. La fama, 2 December 1847, vii/96, 355. 141 ‘Affairs of Italy’, The Times, 18 February 1848. 142 L’Italia musicale, 20 December 1847, i/24, 207; see also La fama, 30 December 1847, vii/104, 415.

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Notes to pages 46–49 143 Rivista contemporanea, 1856, 196. The text of the aria began ‘Prodi guerrier d’America, / Non manchi in voi l’ardire: / Bello è per lei combattere, / Bello è per lei morire!’ Later, Fanny yearns to follow the American soldiers: ‘Di morire anch’io son degna / Per la patria e per l’amor.’ 144 Verdi wanted Piave to give Jacopo ‘a more energetic character, I would not have him tortured, and after that tender apostrophe to Venice I would search for something more robust in order to make a beautiful aria for him’. Letter to Piave, 14 May 1844, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. i, 514. 145 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 71. 146 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 31 August 1845, iv/35, 147–50, here 147. 147 Ibid., 149. 148 In his review of Rosalia Gariboldi at the Teatro Carcano, Cominazzi claimed that the role ‘forces the singer to almost continual slanci, which often resemble shouts to the listener’. La fama, 8 August 1850, ix/61, 242. 149 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. i, 527. 150 During 1849 and 1851 alone productions took place in Bergamo, Biella, Bologna, Busto Arsizio, Cesena, Città di Castello, Codogno, Cuneo, Faenza, Fabriano, Fano, Fermo, Ferrara, Genoa, Imola, Livorno, Mantua, Messina, Mirandola, Modena, Mortara, Milan (Teatro Carcano, Teatro Re), Naples (Teatro di San Carlo and Teatro Fondo), Novara, Oleggio, Padua, Palermo, Parma, Persiceto, Perugia, Piacenza, Pinerola, Pisa, Reggio Emilia, Rome (Teatro Apollo), Roveredo, Savigliano, Savona, Tortona, Treviso, Turin and Venice, among others. 151 L’Italia musicale, 9 November 1850, ii/82, 328. 152 Pescanti Botti, Donne nel Risorgimento italiano, 71–9. Teresa Casati Confalonieri’s pleas for the life of her husband Count Federico Confalonieri began in 1823; his death sentence was commuted in 1824. Some part of her efforts were recorded by Piero Maroncelli in his Addizioni di Piero Maroncelli alle Mie prigioni di Silvio Pellico (Italy: n.p., 1833), 230–1. Casati Confalonieri died in 1830, supposedly broken by her fruitless attempts to free Federico. 153 Carte segrete e atti ufficiali della polizia austriaca, vol. iii, 167–8. 154 Luigia Codemo, Pagine famigliari, artistiche, cittadine (1750–1850) (Venice: Marco Visentini, 1875), 472. 155 Pescanti Botti, Donne nel Risorgimento italiano, 303–12; Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 126. On Perlasca’s incarceration and relationship with Luigi Pastro, see Charles Klopp, Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro (University of Toronto Press, 1999), 74. 156 Whitaker, Sicily and England, 93–94. Alfonso Scalia’s ‘greatest friend’ was the patriot Rosolino Pilo. Such stories were also evident in Verdi’s own family – his mother supposedly took refuge in a belfry with her infant son in 1814 from marauding Russian soldiers. Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), 4. 157 Teresa Giraud Spaur, Relazione del viaggio di Pio IX. P.M. a Gaeta (Florence: Galileiana, 1851). 158 Among others, it included Alina Peret, the wife of Luigi Settembrini, Rosa Valentino, Carlo Poerio’s aunt and sister, the wife, mother and sisters of Niccolò Nisco, and Cecilia Dono and her sisters-­in-­law. Sigismondo Castromediano, Carcere e galerie politiche. Memorie, 2 vols. (Lecce: Salentina, 1895).

Notes to pages 49–55 159 Leopoldo Cassese, La spedizione di Sapri (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 1969), 177–8; 247; see also Luigi Antonio Pagano, ‘La spedizione di Sapri e la prigionia di G. Nicotera nelle carte della polizia borbonica di Sicilia’, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 21 (1934), 347–78; here, 362–4. 160 Maria Sofia Corciulo, ‘A Woman Patriot and Fighter for Italy’s Unity and Freedom: Antonietta De Pace in Southern Italy’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 24 (2004), 1: 199–206. 161 La fama, 30 March 1846, vi/26, 103. 162 This role was created by Tadolini. 163 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 18 April 1847, vi/16, 124–5. 164 Ibid. 165 Il cosmorama pittorico, 13 March 1847, xiii/11, 85. 166 Letter to Cammarano, 23 November 1848, in David Rosen and Andrew Porter (eds.), Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’: A Sourcebook (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 66–7. 167 La fama, 29 November, 1847, vii/93, 379. 168 Strenna teatrale europea, 1848, xi, 217–18. 169 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 76. 170 See Smart’s discussion of both characters in ‘“Proud, Indomitable, Irascible”’. See also Mary Ann Smart, ‘Liberty On (and Off ) the Barricades: Verdi’s Risorgimento Fantasies’, in Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 103–18. 171 Candido Augusto Vecchi, Italia: Storia di due anni 1848–1849 (Turin: Claudio Perrin, 1851), 29–30. 172 Ibid., 55. 173 www.brescialeonessa.it/xgiorni/immagini/stampe/index.htm. 174 Giuseppe Ricciardi, Cenni storici intorno agli ultimi casi d’Italia e documenti da ricavarsene (Italy: n.p., 1849), 429. 175 Raccolta per ordine cronologico, vol. ii, 394. Battistotti Sassi’s actions were honoured by the new government of Milan, and she was awarded an annual pension. 176 See a letter (unsigned) written to Guglielmo Pepe on 25 June 1848, in Raccolta per ordine cronologico, vol. ii, 394; also Felice Venosta, I martiri della rivoluzione lombarda (dal settembre 1847 al febbraio 1853) (Milan: Gernia & Gianuzzi, 1861), 93. 177 This figure is suspect, as apparently the official figures failed to include all female casualities. 178 Fuller, Un’americana a Roma 1847–1849, 333. 179 Giuseppe La Farina, Istoria documentata della rivoluzione siciliana e delle sue relazioni co’governi italiani e stranieri, 1848–1849 (Capolago: Elvetica, 1850), 356. 180 Michael Burke Honan, The Personal Adventures of ‘Our Own Correspondent’ in Italy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852), vol. i, 152. 181 Ibid., 155. 182 Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 190, 193. 183 Letter to Clara Maffei, 27 December 1845, in Conati, Bottega, 168. The Papadopoli family had close connections with the world of opera. Teresa was the sister-­in-­law of Antonio Papadopoli, whose correspondence with Giuditta Pasta in the 1830s has recently been published by Luisa Dodi and Maria Luigia Saibene in ‘Amicizia, musica e teatro nelle lettere

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Notes to pages 55–56 di Antonio Papadopoli a Giuditta Pasta (1829–1836)’, Storia in Lombardia (2007), 3: 93–141. Teresa’s husband, Spiridione, held an administrative role at the Teatro Fenice during the 1843/4 seasons – see Michele Girardi and Franco Rossi, Il Teatro La Fenice: cronologia degli spettacoli, 1792–1936 (Venice: Albrizzi, 1989), 167. Teresa Papadopoli died in 1853. 184 Corriere delle dame, 15 April 1848, xlviii/21, 167. 185 For example, see the illustrations in Lo spirito folletto, June 1848, i/21, 83, and June 1848, i/25, 99. 186 Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 119. We should note that our lack of information about these women sometimes was a result of the actions of their own families; for example, Enrichetta di Lorenzo’s family destroyed her papers on her death. See Laura Guidi, ‘Relazioni epistolari di Enrichetta di Lorenzo’, in Scritture femminili e storia, ed. Laura Guidi (Naples: ClioPress. Editoria digitale, n.d.), 239–70; here, 241. 187 In acknowledging the decision to establish the battalion, the Corriere delle dame noted that its tasks would ‘to care for wounded soldiers, prepare shells, and do whatever also the patria required of them’. Corriere delle dame, 20 April 1848, xlviii/22, 176. 188 Letter to Elizabeth Hoar, dated 17 June 1849, in Fuller, Un’americana a Roma 1847–1849, xxi. 189 Il monitor romano, 14 June 1849, 428. 190 An eye-­witness to the incident, the artist Jan Philip Koelman, left yet another account. Passing by the breached walls, he saw a young soldier wounded, who died almost instantly. As the body was being carried away, he heard a hoarse cry, and saw an officer running desperately towards them. He stopped for a moment staring at the corpse, and then fainted. Only later did Koelman learn that the fallen soldier was a woman, Colomba Antonietti Porzi, and the grieving officer her husband. Maurizio Mari, ‘Colomba Antonietti: una donna a difesa della repubblica romana’, 2 giugno 1882–2 giugno 2008, no. 1, 5. 191 Isabella Luzzatti of Udine ‘leapt in her saddle’ at the news of open conflict, and rode round the countryside encouraging men to enlist in the cause (Corriere delle dame, 25 April 1848, no. 23, 184); contessa Maria Martini della Torre, daughter of General Salasco, was a mountain guide for Garibaldi in the Second War of Independence (Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 193). 192 For example, see poems by Giuseppina Turissi-­Colonna (‘A Giuditta’), and the letters of Rosa Ferrucci in 1854 about Joan of Arc; Caterina Ferrucci (ed.), Rosa Ferrucci e alcuni suoi scritti (Florence: Barbèra and Bianchi, 1858), 29–30. 193 See the intentional positioning of Teresa Manin as a ‘model’ for all women in the pages of Il circolo delle donne italiane, 3 October 1848. Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 122. 194 Belgioioso’s arrival was welcomed by the Corriere delle dame, 8 April 1848, xlviii/20, 153, as an example of female involvement in the conflict and a changed social order that no longer rested on what you wore, but rather what you did in support of the patriotic cause. 195 Belgioioso’s efforts extended across a range of political fields: apparently persuading Napoléon III, then in exile in Britain, to aid the Italians once he returned to power (he reneged); funding insurrections, as in the 1830s; writing political essays, founding and editing political journals; sewing flags; organizing hospitals and nursing the wounded. 196 Diary entry, 1 December 1856, cited in Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 192. Both Caterina Segurana and Cinzica de’ Sismondi were legendary figures, rather than actual women.

Notes to pages 56–61 Caterina Segurana is identified with Nice in 1543, where her supposed bravery inspired the defence of the fortress against Barbarossa and the French, and changed what seemed to be impending defeat into victory. Around the turn of the tenth century, Cinzica de’ Sismondi purportedly alerted Pisa’s leaders to the invading Saracens, when all around her were fleeing the city: she sounded the alarm, incited the citizens to arms and oversaw the defeat of the invaders. First suggested by a Roman statue, this legend was treated as fact by a number of Italian nineteenth-­century writers, among them Isabella Rossi in her long poem ‘Cinzica de’ Sismondi’. 197 Lettere inedite d’illustri scrittori a Concettina Ramondetta Fileti (Palermo: Virzì, 1901), 11–12. 198 Concettina Ramondetta Fileti, Poesie (Imola: I. Galeati, 1876), 70–1. 199 Codemo, Pagine famigliari, 439. Other spectators might have shared Codemo’s own response: such as contessa Maddalena Montalban-­Comello, later a prominent activist who was imprisoned by the Austrians in the 1860s and who (according to Codemo) was a frequent attender at the Fenice: ibid., 438. On Montalban-­Comello’s political activities, see Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 130. 200 Vecchi, Italia: Storia di due anni 1848–1849, 172. 201 Giuseppe Garibaldi, I mille (1873; repr. Bologna: L. Cappelli, 1982), 37–9. 202 Marco Meriggi, ‘Il seduttore e il cappellano. Elaborazioni della guerra e del genere lungo la strada dei Mille’, in Vivere la guerra. Percorsi biografici e ruoli di genere tra Risorgimento e primo conflitto mondiale, ed. Laura Guidi (Naples: ClioPress, 2007), 39. 203 Ippolito Caffi, ‘La mia prigionia’, a letter addressed to the marchese Antinori dated 17 June 1848, and published in Raccolta per ordine cronologica, vol. ii, 340–6. 204 Meriggi, ‘Il seduttore e il cappellano’, 36. 205 Ibid., 37. 206 Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 195. 207 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. i, 94–5. 208 As according to Michele Lessona, Volere è potere (Florence: G. Barberà, 1869), 297–8. Verdi claimed to Arrivabene that Lessona’s account of his early career was accurate, although this has been disputed by various scholars, including Budden. Given that Verdi’s usual practice was to compose chronologically, the claim that he began with the final scene was either out of character, or simply untrue. However, while Lessona’s (and/or Verdi’s) other claim about being inspired by the slaves’ chorus ‘Va pensiero’ had a certain political usefulness, there seems less reason to fabricate with regard to Abigaille’s death scene – especially as this scene swiftly dropped from favour and was rarely performed. 209 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. i, 308. 210 For a discussion of the gender aspects of the different versions by Pacini and Verdi, see Hadlock, ‘“The firmness of a female hand”’. 211 Letter from Verdi to Marianna Barbieri-­Nini, 6 October 1848, in Giuseppe Verdi, Il corsaro: melodramma tragico in tre atti, ed. Elizabeth Hudson (University of Chicago Press, 1999), xx. 212 Ibid. 213 The words ‘l’oppressor’ and ‘schiava’ were exchanged for ‘Ed il mio core un palpito / Per esso aver potria? / A foco così ignobile / Non arde l’alma mia’: ibid., xxii. 214 Ibid., xx.

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Notes to pages 61–65 215 This pattern of two demisemiquavers followed by a quaver on repeated notes is identified by Frits Noske as an ‘anapaestic formula’: one of three versions of a topos he terms the ‘musical figure of death’, occurring commonly in nineteenth-­century opera and denoting approaching mortality. Verdi made particular and often inventive use of it. See Frits Noske, ‘The Musical Figure of Death’, in The Signifier and the Signified: Studies in the Operas of Mozart and Verdi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 171–214; here, 172. 216 Verdi, Il corsaro, ed. Hudson, xx. 217 F. L. Zacharias Werner, Attila, König der Hunnen (Berlin, 1808), Act v, 253. 218 Madame [Anne-­Louise-­Germaine] de Staël, Oeuvres complètes de Madame la baronne de Staël­Holstein (Paris: F. Didot, 1836), vol. x, 127–32; here, 129. 219 Budden argues that in her transformation from Werner’s drama, the character of Odabella ‘has lost all plausible identity’: ‘Odabella is not only the most unpleasant heroine in all Verdian opera; she is vocally and dramatically two people  – an Abigaille-­like dramatic soprano in the prologue, and a suffering lirico in the rest of the opera.’ Budden, Operas of Verdi, vol. i, 262. See also Smart’s useful discussion of Odabella from a different perspective in ‘“Proud, Indomitable, Irascible”’, 232–9. 220 Werner, Attila, 32. 221 Marta Marri Tonelli, Andrea Maffei e il giovane Verdi (Riva del Garda: Museo Civico, 1999), 118. 222 La repubblica, 19 July 2007; http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/ 2007/07/19/ardente-­poetessa-­in-­camicia-­rossa.html. 223 See the various productions staged in northern Italy by the Fratelli Marzi, for example. 224 Letter from Verdi to Scribe, 18 August 1852, in Andrew Porter, ‘Les Vêpres siciliennes: New Letters from Verdi to Scribe’, 19th-­Century Music, 2 (1978), 2: 95–109; here, 98. An opera on this theme was later set by the Czech composer Fibich at the end of the century. Sarká (1897) relates the medieval Bohemian tale of a group of warrior women rebelling against male rule. The libretto for Fibich’s opera was written by a woman – Fibich’s lover, Anezka Schulzová. 225 Simonetta Ricciardi (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Somma (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2003), 82. 226 Letter from Verdi to Somma, 16 December 1853, ibid., 117. 227 Letter from Verdi to Somma, 8 January 1855, ibid., 126. 228 See Andrew Porter, ‘A Note on Princess Eboli’, Musical Times, 113 (August 1972), 1554: 750–4; here, 753. Only two of Verdi’s post-­1848 female characters commit homicide, and in rather different contexts. Maddalena colludes in Gilda’s death in Rigoletto (1851); Azucena’s target in Il trovatore (1853) is not her loathed enemy, the conte di Luna, but his infant son (although it is her own son she actually kills). 229 Marcello’s review of Villanis’ opera (staged at Turin’s Teatro Regio with Gazzaniga in the title role) in 1856 suggests that there was still a public taste for such roles: he criticises Villanis’ music for its ‘lack of muscle’ [‘nerbo’]. Rivista contemporanea, 1856, iii/6, 197. 230 Letter dated 19 March 1847; in Gabriele Baldini, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi, trans. Roger Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 124–5. 231 Raffaello Barbiera, Il salotto della contessa Maffei (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1895), ­74. 232 Marcello Conati, Giuseppe Verdi: Guida alla vita e alle opere (Pisa: ETS, 2003), 68.

Notes to pages 65–68 233 Mazzini, L’Italia del popolo, vol. ii, 239–40. 234 Aurelio Bianchi Giovini, L’Austria in Italia e le sue confische: il conte di Ficquelmont e le sue confessioni (Turin: Libreria Patria, 1853), 514–16. 235 Le Mois, 1 October 1849, ii/22, 299. 236 Filippini, Donne sulle scena pubblica, 125–6. 237 Both surnames occur in families of musicians during the period, but no precise link has yet been found to these two singers.

2  Pr ayer 1 Verdi’s first prayer was in fact for a male character, Riccardo, in Oberto, Act ii, scene vii. 2 Mary Ann Smart argues the position of kneeling has especial meaning in Verdi’s operas, signalling a development towards ‘a more “transcendent” musical style and toward a dramatic mode in which the body (and especially the female body) is more symbolic than concrete’. ‘“Cadere in ginocchio”: Melodrama and the Erasure of the Body in Middle-­Period Verdi’, in Verdi 2001, ed. Della Seta, Montemorra Marvin and Marica, vol. ii, 855–77; here, 864. 3 On forms of prayers in nineteenth-­century opera, see Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, ‘Conventions of Prayer in Some 19th-­Century Operas’, Musical Times, 146 (2005), 1893: 45–60. 4 Friedrich Lippmann, ‘“Casta diva”: la preghiera nell’opera italiana della prima metà dell’Ottocento’, Recercare, 2 (1990), 173–209; here, 174–5. 5 Romeo also has an earlier prayer in the opera, ‘Sommo Ciel, che il cor mi vedi’, in Act ii, scene iii. 6 Performance at the Tuileries on 9 March 1809. Comte Emmanuel-­Auguste-­Dieudonné Las Cases, Le Mémorial de Sainte-­Hélène, ed. Marcel Dunan (Paris: Flammarion, 1951), vol. ii, 408. See Jean Starobinksi’s discussion of the importance of this aria in cultural discourse in Enchantment: The Seductress in Opera, trans. C. Jon Delogu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 177–230. 7 Sutherland Edwards remarked on this terzetto: ‘It was a novelty in those days to see operatic characters address a formal invocation to Heaven. Now it is the first thing that occurs to them when they are in trouble.’ H. Sutherland Edwards, The Life of Rossini (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1869), 183–6. Other examples of Rossini’s best-­known prayer scenes include Desdemona’s ‘Deh calma, o ciel, nel sonno’ (Otello) and Semiramide’s plea to her deceased husband, ‘Al mio pregar, t’arrendi’ (Semiramide). 8 Goethe cites Matthew 6:6. Diary entry of 7 October 1828, in Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford, 2  vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850), vol. ii, 76–7. 9 Faust was performed in full for the first time in Brunswick on 19 January 1829. Henry and Mary Garlans, Oxford Companion to German Literature (Oxford University Press, 1997), 222. 10 See, for example, Giger, ‘Social Control’, 239–44. 11 Letter from Jacovacci to Cammarano, 18 November 1851, in Mossa (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Cammarano, 230. 12 Ibid., 230.

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Notes to pages 68–71 13 Marco Capra, ‘“Et in ecclesiis et in plateis”: La musica e i suoni della tradizione profana’, in Vivere il Medioevo. Parma al tempo della Cattedrale, ed. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006), 118–23. 14 Laura Basini, ‘Verdi and Sacred Revivalism in Post-­Unification Italy’, 19th-­Century Music, 28 (2004), 2: 133–59; here, 141. 15 ‘Among the different kinds of modern music, that which appears less suitable for accompanying the functions of public worship is the theatrical style, which was in the greatest vogue, especially in Italy, during the last century. This of its very nature is diametrically opposed to Gregorian Chant and classic polyphony, and therefore to the most important law of all good sacred music.’ Pius X, Inter sollicitudines: motu proprio, 22 November 1903. 16 See, for example, George Sand, Consuelo: A Romance of Venice (1842; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1979); also La scena illustrata, 1 January 1887, xxiii/1, 5: ‘Attori di chiesa … Attori di scena’: an article by Crick on the similarities between performers in church and the theatre. 17 I Corinthians 15: 34–35. 18 Jerome, The Principal Works of St. Jerome, Letter liv: 13, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1954), 106. 19 Congregational singing by both men and women was banned by the Council of Laodicea in ad 367. Church singing then acquired a quasi-­priestly dimension and became the province of specially trained male choirs. See Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 273–4; Sophie Drinker, Music and Women: The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music (New York: Coward McCann, 1948), 179. 20 On the often complex history surrounding nuns’ singing in convents, see K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-­Reformation Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 266–87. 21 Letter to Mendelssohn’s father from Rome, 30 December 1830, in Felix Mendelssohn­Bartholdy, Letters from Italy and Switzerland, trans. Lady Wallace (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1862), 87. 22 Cited in Carlo Matteo Mossa, ‘Una Messa per la storia’, in Messa per Rossini, ed. Pierluigi Petrobelli, Quaderni dell’Istituto di Studi Verdiani, 5 (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani; Milan: Ricordi, 1988), 11–78; here, 53. 23 Letter from Arrivabene to Verdi, 7 August 1879, in Alberti, Verdi intimo, 109. 24 This ban remained in force for much of the twentieth century. There was some progress in 1955, when it was acknowledged that there might be occasions when women’s voices could be used, providing the women remained outside the santuario. 25 ‘Donna e cantante’, La scena illustrata, 15 April 1885, xxi/7, 4. 26 See, for example, Roger Parker, ‘“One Priest, One Candle, One Cross”: Some Thoughts on Verdi and Religion’, Opera Quarterly, 12 (1995), 1: 27–34; see also Mila, Verdi, 772–3. 27 Letter from Strepponi to Cesare Vigna, 9 May 1872, in Cesari and Luzio (eds.), I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 501. 28 Letter from Strepponi to Clara Maffei, September 1872, ibid. 29 Cited Walker, The Man Verdi, 257. 30 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iii, 85. Troops were massing on the banks of the River Po, and so Verdi was potentially in the front line of any assault.

Notes to pages 71–74 31 Cesari and Luzio (eds.), I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 728. 32 There is contradictory material of doubtful origin. A further letter by Strepponi, again supposedly dating again from 1872 and written to the archbishop of Genoa, Monsignor Magnasco, argued that Verdi’s beliefs should not be judged by appearances, that he had been brought back into the religious fold by the priest who had officiated at their wedding, that he was ‘a believer like me’ and never failed to observe ‘those practices in order to be a good Christian as he wants to be’. Walker has demonstrated conclusively that this letter, along with others to don Montebruno, has been falsified. Walker, The Man Verdi, 395–9. 33 The Sillabo degli Errori (issued by Pius IX on 8 December 1864) was a reactionary condemnation of various ‘errors’ of modern society, including liberalism, rationalism and naturalism, equality between different religions and the state’s attitudes toward the Church. 34 Verdi concluded: ‘All that he did either well or badly succeeded in being useful to the country; and at bottom he had a good nature and was a good Italian; better that so many others who shout Patria, Patria, and … May he therefore have peace, this poor Pope!’ Verdi to Clara Maffei, 12 February 1878, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 47. 35 Cited Mario Rinaldi, Verdiana (Rome: Atena, 1961), 219–20. 36 Letter from Somma to Verdi, 4 December 1853, in Ricciardi (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Somma, 102. 37 Letter from Verdi to Somma, 8 January 1855, ibid., 126. Somma subsequently removed Delia’s prayer. 38 One notable but rather later occasion when mise-­en-­scène during an act of prayer aroused comment was in Puccini’s Tosca (1900), when the heroine places the candles around Scarpia’s body – this controversy occurred not in Italy, but the USA. 39 Tommaso Grossi, I Lombardi alla prima crociata, in Opere poetiche, ed. Raffaele Sirri (Naples: Fulvio Rossi, 1972), 61–341; here, 249. 40 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. i, 448–9. 41 Corriere delle dame, 23 March 1843, xliii/17, 130–1. Where this event took place remains unclear. By this time, Verdi was regularly attending three salons run by Milanese society women: those of Clara Maffei, Giuseppina Appiani and Emilia Morosini. The latter is the most likely candidate: Verdi taught singing to Morosini’s daughters. 42 Roger Parker, Studies in Early Verdi 1832–1844: New Information and Perspectives on the Milanese Musical Milieu and the Operas from Oberto to Ernani (New York and London: Garland, 1989), 155–9. 43 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 19 February 1843, ii/8, 32–4; here, 33. 44 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 5–6. Basevi himself was not unduly disturbed by Verdi’s ‘Salve, Maria’, finding in it ‘a tranquil character, well suited to the soul of an innocent young girl’; he particularly admired the tremolo of the muted violins, which ‘increases the expression, inducing in the soul of the listener a soft thrill, that moves it sweetly, and inclines it to ecstacy’. Ibid., 24–5. 45 Rivista europea: nuova serie del ‘Ricoglitore italiano e straniero’ (Milan), i/1, 1843, 348–51. 46 Francesco Flores D’Arcais, ‘Giuseppe Verdi e la musica italiana’, Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, vii, March 1868, 3: 566–75; here, 570. 47 ­Ibid.

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Notes to pages 74–80 48 Ibid. 49 D’Azeglio to Luisa Blondel d’Azeglio, 1 March 1844, in Giulio Carcano (ed.), Lettere di Massimo d’Azeglio a sua moglie Luisa Blondel (Milan: Fratelli Rechiedei and P. Carrara, 1870), 107. I Lombardi had its first performance in Turin at the Teatro Regio (again with Frezzolini as Giselda) on 26 December 1843 – suggesting that Costanza and Roberto d’Azeglio had not attended that production. Massimo d’Azeglio was himself at work on a novel on a similar topic, La lega Lombarda (about the battle of 1176), of which he wrote only seven chapters before abandoning it. 50 Francesco Izzo, ‘Verdi, the Virgin, and the Censor: The Politics of the Cult of Mary in I Lombardi alla prima crociata and Giovanna d’Arco’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60 (2007), 3: 557–98; here, 584. 51 Gerusalemme, opera in quattro atti, parole dei signor Alfonso Royer e Gustavo Vaëz, musica del maestro cav. Giuseppe Verdi, traduzione di Calisto Bassi (Milan: Gio. Ricordi, 1849). 52 Letter from Verdi to Giovanni Ricordi, 5 January 1851, in Cesari and Luzio (eds.), I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 112. 53 While the censors triumphed on this occasion, other composers began to follow the trend set by Verdi: see, for example, Giuseppe Apolloni’s Adelchi (librettist Giovanni Battista Nicolini, 1852), which includes a more explicit ‘Ave Maria’, sung by a chorus of nuns; or Angelo Villanis’ La vergine di Kent (1856). Much later, of course, would come Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (1876) with Laura’s ‘Stella del marinar’. 54 Izzo, ‘Verdi, the Virgin, and the Censor’, 590. 55 Aurelio Saffi, Ricordi e scritti di Aurelio Saffi, vol. xiii (Florence: Barberà, 1905), 231. 56 Ibid., 232. 57 Ugo Bassi, ‘La Madonna della passione’, in Opere sacre e politiche di Ugo Bassi, vol. iv, Panegirici e scritti vari, ed. Stefano Fioretti (Genoa: Enrico Monni, 1864), 41. 58 Among earlier prayers to dead mothers see that of Eläisa in Il giuramento (Mercadante/Rossi, 1837), in Act iii, scene i (‘Ah! Voi qui già stavate!’). 59 Beghelli, La retorica del rituale nel melodramma ottocentesco, 145–63. 60 David Kimbell, ‘Verdi’s First Rifacimento: I Lombardi and Jérusalem’, Music and Letters, 60 (1979), 1: 1–36; here, 24. 61 Raffaele Sirri, ‘Introduzione’, in Grossi, Opere poetiche, ed. Sirri, 13–51; here, 45–9. 62 Bruce Haddock, ‘Political Union without Social Revolution: Vincenzo Gioberti’s Primato’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 3: 705–23; here, 707–9. 63 Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 86–7. 64 Parker discusses Verdi’s possible interest in neoguelfismo but demonstrates that by 1849 Verdi was highly sceptical of Gioberti’s ideas. ‘“One Priest, One Candle”’, 28. 65 Geremia Vitali, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 19 March 1843, ii/2, 49–50. 66 Figaro, 15 February 1843, xi/13, 49. Review compiled by G. Romani. 67 Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 118–19. 68 On the feelings provoked by the news of the pope’s refusal to support the uprisings, see the Corriere delle dame, which described Rome as ‘in the grip of the greatest agitation’. The Roman people, once ‘so devoted, so pious, and so enthusiastic about the papacy’ had been

Notes to pages 80–82 forced ‘to raise themselves up against that hand that so many times had blessed them’. Corriere delle dame, 10 May 1848, xlviii/26, 204. 69 Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 205. 70 See, for example, the Corriere delle dame, 10 May 1848, xlviii/26, 204. 71 Luciano Cafagna, Cavour (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 170–7; see also Beales and Biagini, Il Risorgimento, 205–9; and Osanna Fantozzi Micali and Piero Roselli, Le soppressioni dei conventi a Firenze: riuso e trasformazioni dal sec. XVIII in poi (Florence: LEF, 1980). A number of small but important incidents added further to the distrust of the Church. For instance, the kidnapping by Christian authorities of six-­year-­old Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish parents in 1858, on the grounds that the child had been ‘baptised’ secretly by a servant girl and was therefore regarded by the Church as a Christian, awoke loud condemnation at home and abroad; interventions by Cavour and Napoléon III went unheeded. (The boy himself later embraced monastic life.) See David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (London: Picador, 1997). 72 David Kertzer, Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 3. 73 Ibid., 176. 74 Ibid., 227–9. 75 Ibid., 291. 76 ‘Congruenze sociali di una definizione dogmatica sull’immacolato concepimento della B. V. Maria’, in Pareri dell’episcopato cattolico, di capitoli, di congregazioni, di università, di personaggi ragguardevole ecc. ecc. sulla definizione dogmatica dell’immaculato concepimento della B. V. Maria, rassegnati alla santità di Pio IX. P.M. in occasione della sua enciclica data da Gaeta il 2 febbraio 1849, 10 vols. (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1851–4), vol. iii, vii–xxvi; here, xvi. 77 Ibid., xiv. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., xxii. 80 Marina Caffiero, ‘Dall’esplosione mistica tardo-­barocca all’apostolato sociale (1650–1850)’, in Donna e fede. Santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1994), 327–74; here, 364. 81 Emma Fattorini, ‘In viaggio dalla Madonna’, in Donna e fede, ed. Scaraffia and Zarri, 495–515. On the spread of the cult to other countries ‘in leaps and bounds between 1850 and 1870’, see Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-­Century Germany (Princeton University Press, 1984), 59 and 280. 82 For the text of the papal bull on the dogma of the Assumption of Mary on 1 November 1950, see www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-­xiI_apc_ 19501101_munificentissimus-­deus_en.html. 83 Lucetta Scaraffia, ‘“Il Cristianesimo l’ha fatta libera, collocandola nella famiglia accanto all’uomo” (dal 1850 alla “Mulieris Dignitatem”)’, in Donna e fede, ed. Scaraffia and Zarri, 441–94; here, 449–52. The expansion of the convents was not restricted to Italy; see Gloria McAdam, ‘Willing Women and the Rise of the Convents in Nineteenth-­Century England’, Women’s History Review, 8 (1999), 3: 411–41.

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Notes to pages 82–89 84 85 86 87

Scaraffia, ‘“Il Cristianesimo l’ha fatta libera”’, 445. Ibid., 445–­8. Ricci (ed.), Memorie della Baronessa Olimpia Savio, vol. i, 9. Enrichetta Caracciolo, Misteri del chiostro napoletano, ed. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (1864; repr. Florence: Giunti, 1986). 88 Notes made by Strepponi for a letter to Vigna, 29 May 1872, in Walker, The Man Verdi, 282. 89 La civiltà cattolica, 1854, v, 271. 90 Ibid. 91 In the play we see nothing of Doña Leonor after she has been given sanctuary in the hermitage by the Father Superior at the end of Act ii until her brief emergence in the final scene. 92 Beghelli, La retorica del rituale nel melodramma ottocentesco, 299–302. 93 Hans Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’ in Letters and Documents, 2  vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), vol. ii, 606. 94 Letter of 28 June 1886, ibid., vol. i, 220. 95 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 354. 96 Il pungolo, in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 20 February 1887, xlii/8, 63. 97 Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’, 199. 98 Ibid., 234. 99 Verdi to Faccio, 29 April 1887, in James A. Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: ‘Otello’ (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 95. 100 Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, 22 April 1887, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 331. Adjusted translation taken from Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, vol. i, 300–1. 101 Daniela Pizzagalli, L’amica: Clara Maffei e il suo salotto nel Risorgimento (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004), 53. 102 ‘To copy truth may be a good thing, but to invent truth is better, much better. There might appear to be a contradiction in these three words “to invent truth”; but you ask Papa [Shakespeare]. It may be that Papa found Falstaff just as he was, but it would have been difficult for him to find a villain as villainous as Iago, and never, never such angels as Cordelia, Imogene, Desdemona, etc., etc., and yet they are so true! To copy truth is a fine thing, but it is photography, not painting.’ Verdi to Clara Maffei, 20 October 1876, in Alessandro Luzio (ed.), Profili biografici e bozzetti storici, 2 vols. (Milan: Cogliati, 1927), vol. II, 536–7. 103 Giovanni Dupré, Pensieri sull’arte e ricordi autobiografici (Florence: Le Monnier, 1879), 434. 104 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford University Press, 2004), 17. 105 Ibid., 102. 106 See note 102 above. Verdi to Clara Maffei, 20 October 1876, in Luzio (ed.), Profili biografici, vol. II, 536–7. 107 Ibid. 108 Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, 5 May 1887, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 335–6. Despite Verdi’s disapproval, Gabbi at the Teatro Costanzi was doing well at the box office, with packed theatres.

Notes to pages 89–93 109 Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, 11 May 1887, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 336–7. Translation taken from Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, vol. i, 310–11. 110 Daniela Bini, Pirandello and His Muse: The Plays for Marta Abba (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 18. 111 Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, vol. ii, 486. 112 Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, 29 April 1887, ibid., vol. i, 303. 113 Letter to Ricordi, 3 March 1889, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 374. 114 ‘Teresa di Gesù’, La scena illustrata, 15 September 1887, xxiii/18, 10. 115 ‘Il monologo della carmelitana’, La scena illustrata, 1 February 1893, xxix/3, 37–8. 116 ‘Teresa di Gesù’, 10. 117 Ibid. 118 ‘Il monologo della carmelitana’, 37. 119 Ibid., 37–8. 120 Ibid., 37. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., 38. 123 ‘Teresa di Gesù’, 10. 124 Fattorini, ‘In viaggio dalla Madonna’, 497. See also Giovanni Mesolella, ‘Il femminismo cristiano in Padre Giovanni Semeria’, Evangelizare, April 1997, iv/4: 4–9.

3  Romance 1 Il trovatore, 5 September 1854, i/9. 2 Quoted in Don Harrán, ‘Guido Casoni on Love as Music, a Theme “For All Ages and Studies”’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), 3: 883–913, here 889. See also Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“For, Love’s a Good Musician”: Performance, Audition, and Erotic Disorders in Early Modern Europe’, Musical Quarterly, 82, Special issue: Music as Heard (1998), 3/4: 614–53. 3 Stendhal, De l’Amour (1822), quoted in Stephen Downes, ‘Musical Pleasures and Amorous Passions: Stendhal, the Crystallization Process, and Listening to Rossini and Beethoven’, 19th­Century Music, 26 (2003), 3: 235–57; here, 239. 4 During the 1820s, Cesare Balbo complained that in opera of his day music did not ‘express as it should all the dramatic passions, anger, fury, valor, patriotism, self-­sacrifice; but only one, love; and even this, contrary to nature, [is] castrated’. Cesare Balbo, Pensieri ed esempi (Turin: Unione Tipografico-­Editrice Torinese, 1857), 178. 5 Letter to Nadezhda von Meck, in Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1984), vol. ii, 261. 6 Rovani, Storia delle lettere, vol. iv, 500. 7 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 100; see also Rosselli, The Life of Verdi, 41, and Roger Parker, Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton University Press, 1997), 187. Oberdorfer claims that Verdi’s early heroines – Elvira, Alzira, Amalia – ‘do not know love: they speak of love, [yet] they do not love’. Aldo Oberdorfer, Giuseppe Verdi: autobiografia dalle lettere (1941; repr. Milan: Rizzoli, 2001), 155.

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Notes to pages 93–96 8 Letter from Verdi to Ricordi, 9 March 1848, in Mossa (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Cammarano, 22. 9 See, for example, De Van, Verdi’s Theater, 228–31; and Budden, Operas of Verdi, vol. i, 35. Rather than being devoted to expressions of affection, Verdi’s duets between lovers are often centred on particular conflicts in the narrative (as between Odabella and Foresto in Attila), which sometimes offered the opportunity for extending the boundaries of convention governing the form of the duet in mid-­nineteenth-­century opera. See Scott Balthazar, ‘The Primo Ottocento Duet and the Transformation of the Rossinian Code’, Journal of Musicology, 7 (1989), 4: 471–97. 10 Oberdorfer, Giuseppe Verdi, 128. 11 Letter from Strepponi to Verdi, 3 September 1849, in Luzio (ed.), Carteggi verdiani, vol. iv, 260. 12 Letter from Strepponi to Verdi, 3 January 1853, ibid., 264. 13 Ibid., 263. 14 Ibid., 264. 15 Ibid. 16 Letter from Strepponi to Verdi, 17 January 1853, ibid., 267. 17 Letter from Strepponi to Verdi, 5 December 1860, ibid., 272. 18 For an extended consideration of the development of ideas of love and their significance in the nineteenth-­century European social context, see Niklas Luhmann, Amore come passione, trans. Maria Sinatra (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006). 19 ‘The family may be regarded as the first model of political society: the leader corresponds to the father, the people to the children, and all being born free and equal, none alienates his freedom except for reasons of utility.’ Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and the Social Contract, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford University Press, 1999), 46. 20 Niccolò Tommaseo, Delle nuove speranze d’Italia, presentimenti (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1848), 87. 21 Giuseppe Mazzini, Doveri dell’uomo. Agli operai italiani (London: n.p., 1860), 65. 22 See Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga, Gendering History, 1780–1920 (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), 97. 23 Giuseppe Mastriani, Doveri delle donne: Lezioni (1866; 2nd edn, Florence, Turin, Milan: Paravia, 1870), 138. 24 Girolamo Venanzio, ‘Amore di un sesso per l’altro’, in Pietro Thouar (ed.), La sposa e la madre. Scelta di prose e poesie di scrittori antichi e moderni intorno al matrimonio. Lettura per le donzelle e donativo di nozze (1856; 2nd edn, Florence: Felice Monnier, 1864), 72–3. 25 Yvonne Knibiehler, ‘Corpi e cuori’, in Storia delle donne in Occidente. L’Ottocento, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (1991; repr. Bari: Laterza, 2007), 307–54; here, 307. 26 Corriere delle dame, 6 November 1855, liii/45, 356–8. 27 Daniela Maldini Chiarito, ‘Norma e trasgressione nei carteggi dell’800’, in Amori e trasgressioni. Rapporti di coppia tra ’800 e ’900, ed. Antonia Pasi and Paolo Sorcinelli (Bari: Dedalo, 1995), 35–52; here, 38. 28 De Giorgio describes the dowry as ‘a universal family institution’; only after Unification did this practice remain mainly in the upper middle-­classes, and more commonly in the south of Italy. Michela De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 1992), 328. The

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30 31 32

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34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

commercial aspects of marriage are summed up in the title of the British suffragette Cicely Hamilton’s Marriage as a Trade (London: Chapman and Hall, 1909). The Holy Roman Empire effectively ceased to exist in 1806, following the defeat at Austerlitz and the enforced cessation of Austrian territory demanded by the Treaty of Pressburg. Franz II abdicated his title and became Franz I, Emperor of Austria and King of  Hungary. Carlo Fornari, Maria Luigia: un amore di donna (Parma: Palatina Editrice, 1997), 72. Ibid., ­77. On 10 January 1810, Maria Luigia wrote to Victoire Colloredo that she had heard rumours about a marriage with Napoléon, but discounted them in part because ‘Papa is too good to constrain me on a point of such importance’; on the same day she wrote to another friend that she was untroubled by the gossip and only felt sorry for the ‘poor princess’ Napoléon would choose, because ‘I am sure that it won’t be me who will become the victim of politics.’ Again on 23 January to Victoire, she was still hoping that the marriage would not take place, and if it did, ‘I believe that I will be the only person here [in Vienna] who will not rejoice.’ Correspondance de Marie Louise, 1799–1847, 141–5. According to Fornari, Maria Luigia ultimately declared: ‘I am ready to sacrifice, if necessary, my personal happiness for the good of the State. I place myself in the hands of Providence.’ Fornari, Maria Luigia, 78. The proxy wedding in March in Vienna was followed by a civil ceremony with Napoléon in France, with a religious service the next day at the Louvre. Napoléon II, King of Rome and later Duke von Reichstadt; died 1832. The various accounts of his birth are considered by June K. Burton, Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799–1815 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007), 15–23. Although Austria contributed troops to Napoléon’s Russian campaign in 1812, Metternich was already scheming against the French emperor. Albertine, contessa di Montenuovo, born on 1 May 1817, and Wilhelm Albrecht, conte di Montenuovo, 8 August 1819. A third child, Mathilde, was born in 1822 but died that same year. Maria Luigia’s first son by Napoléon was largely raised in Vienna, and had only limited contact with his mother. Fornari, Maria Luigia, 160. Maria Luigia’s daughter Albertine, born out of wedlock in 1817, would make a love match with her mother’s blessing with Luigi Sanvitale, conte di Fontenallato on 26 October 1833 – although we might note Albertine was only sixteen years old, while Sanvitale was thirty­four. Maria Luigia herself would marry for the third time (and less happily) a year later, to another member of her court: comte Charles-­René de Bombelles. C. A., Voto per l’emancipazione delle donne (Milan: Valentini, 1851), 80. Cristina di Belgioioso, Il 1848 a Milano e a Venezia, con uno scritto sulla condizione delle donne, ed. Sandro Bortone (Milan: Feltrinelli Economica, 1977), 177. Ibid., 178. Sibilla Aleramo, Una donna (1906; repr. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999), 157–8. Thouar, ‘Pensieri intorno al matrimonio’, in La sposa e la madre, 17. See, for example, Paolo Mantegazza’s comments that love approached its ‘ideal perfection’ when ‘it is consecrated by free choice and reciprocal sympathy: a marriage founded on love

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Notes to pages 100–104 instead of commerce had ‘the best chances for lasting happiness.’ Paolo Mantegazza, Gli amori degli uomini, saggio di una etnologia dell’amore, 2 vols. (Milan: Paolo Mantegazza, 1886), vol. ii, 3. 44 Harry Oosterhuis, ‘Medical Science and the Modernisation of Sexuality’, in Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories, ed. Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall and Gert Hekma (Manchester University Press, 1999), 221–41; here, 239. 45 ‘Del teatro italiano’, La civiltà cattolica, 1854, ­v/261. 46 Courting couples in northern Europe were generally regarded as enjoying greater freedoms, with less rigid family control. De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 276. 47 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 137. The role of Amelia in the original 1857 production was created by Luigia Bendazzi, a powerful Lady Macbeth and described by Verdi in 1854 as ‘too much of a donna di forza’ for Violetta. 48 Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, 20 November 1880, in Pierluigi Petrobelli, Marisa Di Gregorio Casati and Carlo Matteo Mossa (eds.), Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi 1880–1881 (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1988), vol. i, 69. Budden supports this view, arguing that beyond Amelia’s double aria in Act I, the role doesn’t require a donna di forza. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. II, 252. 49 The only other exceptions are Alzira and Zamoro, and (much later), Nannetta and Fenton. 50 Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, 20 November 1880, in Petrobelli, Di Gregorio Casati and Mossa (eds.), Carteggi Verdi–Ricordi, 1880–1881, vol. i, 69–70. 51 See David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 17. 52 Linda Reeder, Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Italian Women, Sicily, 1880–1920 (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 68. 53 Steven Hughes, ‘Men of Steel: Dueling, Honor and Politics in Liberal Italy’, in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 64–81; here, 66–8. 54 The rate of convicted homicides in France and Germany around 1880 was less than 2 per 100,000 inhabitants; in England and Scotland, less than 1; while in Italy, the rate was 9 per 100,000 inhabitants. Daniele Boschi, ‘Homicide and Knife Fighting in Rome, 1845–1914’, in Men and Violence, ed. Spierenburg, 128–58; here, 129–30. 55 La forza del destino, Act i, scene iv. 56 See in particular Giselda’s vision of Oronte in I Lombardi alla prima crociata; and Alzira’s dream of Zamoro in her opening scene in Alzira. On the role played by dreams in Aida, for example, see Steven Huebner, ‘“O patria mia”: Patriotism, Dream, Death’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 14 (2002), 1 and 2: 161–75. 57 Mastriani, Doveri delle donne, 60. 58 Anna Vertua Gentile, Come devo comportarmi? Libro per tutti (1897; 3rd edn, Milan: U. Hoepli, 1899), 137. Gentile’s best-­selling book was still being reprinted in 1931. 59 Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, 23–32; also Davis, ‘Italy’, 198–203. 60 Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3–8.

Notes to pages 104–110 61 Emanuele Muzio recorded a conversation with Lind during the rehearsals of I masnadieri: ‘She leads a very withdrawn life: she does not receive visitors … she lives alone; she hates, or so she told me, the theatre and the stage; she says that she is unhappy, and that she will only feel content and a little pleasure when she no longer has anything to do with theatre people and the theatre itself. On this point, she is very much in agreement with the opinions of the Maestro, who also hates the theatre and only sees the day when he can retire.’ Letter to Barezzi, 29 June 1847, in Luigi Agostino Garibaldi (ed.), Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio ad Antonio Barezzi (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1931), 334–5. 62 Daily News, 23 July 1847, 4. 63 Marco Marcelliano Marcello, ‘Rassegna musicale’, Rivista contemporanea, iv/8, 128–36; here, 134. 64 Augusta Palombarini, ‘La seduzione con “promessa di matrimonio”’, in Amori e trasgressioni, ed. Pasi and Sorcinelli, 53–82. 65 V. Veritas [Virginia Paganini], La missione della donna (2nd edn, Florence: Cellini, 1884), 90. 66 Igino Ugo Tarchetti, Fosca (1869; repr. Milan: Mursia, 1989), 37. 67 During her debut season at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples in 1880, Gemma Bellincioni (aged only sixteen) met a young student, Enrico, who lived opposite her lodgings: he ‘devoured me with his eyes every time that he saw me at the window. My mother and father had the air of two policemen not inclined to tolerate suitors hanging around, so that my southern lover had to limit himself to the fiery glances of his black eyes in order to make me understand his love! … and I was sighing!’ The entire relationship was communicated via looks and glances and the occasional letter, until Bellincioni’s mother discovered all and put an end to the flirtation. Gemma Bellincioni, Io e il palcoscenico (Trenta e un anno di vita artistica) (Milan: R. Quintieri, 1920), 16–17. 68 Vertua Gentile, Come devo comportarmi?, 148–9. 69 It is a mistake also made by Luisa Miller, who describes how she fell instantly in love with Rodolfo the moment she saw him. 70 Corriere delle dame, 6 November 1855, liii/45, 356–8. 71 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 25 September 1853, xi/39, 167–8. 72 Belgioioso, Il 1848 a Milano e a Venezia, 172. 73 Arrigo Boito, Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1942), 1085. 74 Anna Maria Mozzoni, Alle fanciulle (1885; repr. Milan: Flaminio Fantuzzi, 1891), 8. 75 Vertua Gentile, Come devo comportarmi?, 5. Mastriani similarly argued that women’s ‘heroism’ lay in their submissivity and abnegation ‘of sexual pleasure, egoism and self-­interest’: this sacrifice was necessary in order to propagate the ‘cause of virtue’. Mastriani, Doveri delle donne, 65. 76 La scena illustrata, 1 February 1885, xxi/2, 5. 77 Ibid. 78 Neera (Anna Zuccari Radius), L’indomani (Milan: Libreria Editrice Galli, 1889), 54. See also L’innamorata by Contessa Lara (Evelina Cattermole), which concludes with its betrayed heroine, Leona, questioning the nature of love. Contessa Lara, L’innamorata (1892; repr. Catania: N. Giannotta, 1901), 76.

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Notes to pages 111–114 4  Sexuality 1 Niccolò Tommaseo, Dell’educazione: scritti varii (Lugano: G. Ruggia, 1836), 9. 2 For a broader consideration of this topic, see Lucia Re, ‘Passion and Sexual Difference: The Risorgimento and the Gendering of Writing in Nineteenth-­Century Italian Literature’, in Making and Remaking Italy, ed. Ascoli and von Henneberg, 155–200. 3 Mastriani, Doveri delle donne, 58. 4 See, for example, Massimo d’Azeglio’s comments on the deleterious influence of (mainly French) novels read so hungrily by women. And yet, he claimed, in the real world ‘one makes love much less often than generally believed. Love is mostly the consequence of idleness and indolence: it is an artificial product of literature. And French literature has made it an ignoble item of speculation.’ D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi, vol. i, 294–5. Mastriani similarly counselled against the reading of foreign novels (designed to ‘stimulate the affections, without aligning them with a moral goal’); his list of proscribed women authors included (not surprisingly) de Staël and Mozzoni. Mastriani, Doveri delle donne, 88–9. 5 Charles Fourier (1772–1837) claimed that humans experienced ‘passionate attraction’ towards five sensual pleasures (taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell), and four affective pleasures (friendship, love, consanguinity, ambition). The relationship between the five sensual pleasures and the four affections is governed by the ‘mechanism of the passions’ that establishes their harmony ‘in internal and external play’. Charles Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, ou Invention du procédé d’industrie attrayante et naturelle distribuée en séries passionnées (Paris: Bossange, 1829), 59. 6 Charles Fourier, ‘Des Trois Groupes d’ambition, d’amour et de famillisme’, Manuscrits de Fourier (Paris, 1849), 141. 7 Pasi and Sorcinelli (eds.), Amori e trasgressioni, 5–10. 8 Letter from Verdi to Cammarano, 23 November 1848, in Mossa (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Cammarano, 84. 9 De Van, Verdi’s Theater, 229. 10 ‘I know the subject that you’ve suggested to me. The protagonist is of a character that I don’t care for. I don’t like to see whores on stage. Otherwise, it would be an attractive subject were it not for this obstacle.’ Letter to Giovanni Demaldé (often referred to by Verdi as ‘Finola’), May 1844, Venice. Luzio (ed.), Carteggi verdiani, vol. iv, 79. 11 Letter to Cesare De Sanctis, 7 February 1856, ibid., vol. i, 32. 12 Letter to Borsi, 8 September 1852; Cesari and Luzio (eds.), I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 497. 13 Luzio (ed.), Carteggi verdiani, vol. ii, 32. 14 Conati, Verdi: interviste ed incontri, 379. 15 See Verdi’s letter to his father-­in-­law, Antonio Barezzi, 21 January 1853, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 150–2. 16 Pizzagalli, L’amica, 49. 17 In Hugo’s original text, the scene concludes with an impassioned kiss, as we learn from the aside of the watching Dame Bérarde, who admires the king’s ardour (‘Mais c’est un

Notes to pages 114–117

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37

embrasseur tout-­à-­fait furieux!’): it only ends when Blanche pushes the king away. Le Roi s’amuse, Act ii, scene iv. Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 231. Ibid., 233. De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 51–8. Mastriani, Doveri delle donne, 116. Jolanda (Maria Majocchi Plattis), in De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 342. Mantegazza argued that keeping women ignorant of sex meant condoning legal rape, as that was often the result of the wedding night. Mantegazza, Gli amori degli uomini, vol. i, 254. See, for example, Aleramo, Una donna, 37, 47, 80–1, 87. Jules Michelet’s L’Amour (Paris: L. Hachette, 1859) was translated and published in Milan by Daelli in 1863. De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 283–4. David I. Kertzer and Dennis P. Hogan, Family, Political Economy and Demographic Change: The Transformation of Life in Casalecchio, Italy, 1861–1921 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 131. In order to allow for any discrepancy caused by the new system of both religious and civil marriages introduced in 1866, Kertzer based his study solely on couples who had performed both ceremonies. In Lille, for example, apparently 50 per cent of brides were pregnant during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Kertzer and Hogan, Family, Political Economy and Demographic Change, 132. Ibid., 135. See David I. Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 67–8. Thomas Laqueur, ‘Orgasm, Generation and the Politics of Reproductive Biology’, in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 1–41. ‘Passioni sociali: L’amore’, Corriere delle dame, 20 July 1852, xlix/49, 230–2. Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (1891; repr. Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1903), 123–4. Bruno Wanrooij, ‘Italy: Sexuality, Morality and Public Authority’, in Sexual Cultures in Europe, ed. Eder, Hall and Hekma, 114–37; here, 131. Lombroso and Ferrero, La donna delinquente, 125. Michelet, L’Amour, 152–5. Paolo Mantegazza, The Physiology of Love and Other Writings, ed. Nicoletta Pireddu, trans. David Jacobson (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 19. Mantegazza nonetheless regarded masturbation in negative terms: ‘Sexual love in any form (even the most abject) is natural and can be acknowledged: manual love is ridiculous and obscene, stupid and sweaty.’ Paolo Mantegazza, Igiene dell’amore (1876; Milan: Gaetano Brigola, 1881), 80. Mantegazza, Gli amori degli uomini, vol. i, 61–127. Mantegazza’s progressive views on sex and sex education (coupled with his support for divorce) were regarded with hostility by the establishment.

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Notes to pages 118–122 38 Letter from Verdi to Cammarano, 17 May 1849, in Mossa (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Cammarano, 112. 39 Maguelonne: ‘Ce jeune homme est de fort bonne mine. / Grand, fier comme Apollo, beau, galant par-­dessus. / Il m’aime fort. Il dort comme un enfant Jésus. / Ne le tuons pas.’ Le Roi s’amuse, Act iv, scene v. 40 Letter to Charles Nuitter, 1 December 1882, in Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. iii, 35. 41 Letter to Nuitter, 30 November 1882, ibid., 35–6. 42 The 1886 version is in essence the 1884 score (now usually the most performed version) with the addition of the original opening scene in Fontainebleau. The dramaturgical aspects of the various revisions are discussed by Gloria Staffieri, ‘“L’action traînant sa lune”: note sulla drammaturgia del Don Carlos’, in Pensieri per un maestro: studi in onore di Pierluigi Petrobelli, ed. Stefano La Via and Roger Parker (Turin: EDT, 2002), 335–59. 43 Porter, ‘A Note on Princess Eboli’, 753–4. 44 In Schiller’s drama, Eboli does attempt to save Carlos, but by trying to explain to the king that he has been deceived about the supposedly illicit relationship between his wife and son, rather than by organising militant action. 45 Porter, ‘A Note on Princess Eboli’, 753. 46 La perseveranza, 3 July 1883, xxv/8516, in Marisa Di Gregorio Casati, Franca Cella and Madina Ricordi (eds.), Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi 1882–1885 (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1994), 343. 47 Corriere della sera, 11 January 1884, repr. Gazzetta musicale di Milano, supplement, 13 January 1884, xxxix/2, 3. 48 Ibid., 3. 49 See Ricordi’s letter to Verdi, 25 October 1883, in Di Gregorio Casati, Cella and Ricordi (eds.), Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi 1882–1885, 155. 50 Elizabeth Hudson, ‘Gilda Seduced: A Tale Untold’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (November 1992), 3: 229–51. 51 Ibid., 248. 52 The image of a key had long carried particular sexual overtones in Italy, in part because during the sixteenth century ‘a close analogy existed between the female body and the house. Forcing a stranger’s door was the same, symbolically, as piercing a hymen.’ Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity, Violence and Honor: An Introduction’, in Men and Violence, ed. Spierenburg, 1–29; here, 7. On the use of the key as a similar sexual metaphor in visual art, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton University Press, 2001), 43. 53 Giovanni Greco, Peccato, crimine e malattia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Bari: Dedalo, 1985), 76–7. 54 This figure includes not only women, but girls and boys. Ibid., 76–81. 55 Ibid., 77. 56 See, for example, the account of rape victims in sixteenth-­century Italy (who were sometimes forced to undergo torture during the legal process to validate their claims) in Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 147. 57 In the kingdom of Sardinia, the penal code in 1859 provided for a penalty of up to ten years of forced labour for violent rape. Article 489, Codice penale per gli stati di S. M. re di Sardegna (Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1859), 150.

Notes to pages 122–129 58 Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor, 61. 59 See, for example, Mantegazza’s comments: ‘Often, however, in Australia as in Europe, love follows the initial rape, healing the first wound; and the woman, at first weeping and offended, later manages to love the rapist.’ Gli amori degli uomini, vol. i, 209. 60 Filippo Ambrosoli, Studi sul codice penale toscano, confrontato specialmente coll’austriaco (Mantua: Negretti, 1857), 112. 61 Ibid., 114. 62 Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor, 60–2. 63 Sibilla Aleramo was the pseudonym of Rina Faccio (1876–1960). On Aleramo’s life and work, see Bruna Conti and Alba Morino (eds.), Sibilla Aleramo e il suo tempo: vita raccontata e illustrata (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981); and Sharon Wood, ‘Breaking the Chain: Sibilla Aleramo (1876–1960)’, in Italian Women’s Writing, 1860–1994 (London: Athlone, 1995), 74–90. 64 Aleramo, Una donna, 34. 65 See Paganini, La missione della donna, 20–1. 66 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 184. 67 Gazzetta musicale di Firenze, 7 July 1853, i/4, 13–14. 68 Gazzetta musicale di Firenze, 29 September 1853, i/16, 61–2. 69 Palombarini, ‘La seduzione con “promessa di matrimonio”’, 72. 70 Ibid., 71. 71 Vittorio Alfieri, Opere filosofiche (Paris: Tenré, 1822), vol. ii, 86. 72 Ibid., 87. 73 Ibid., 89. 74 Ibid., 90. 75 Ibid., 91. 76 Vittorio Alfieri, Virginia, in Le opere di Vittorio Alfieri (Padua: Nicolò Zanon Bettoni, 1809), vol. ii. 77 De Van, Verdi’s Theater, 73. 78 Alfieri, Virginia, Act v, 84. English translation adjusted from Charles Lloyd, The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, 3  vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1815), vol. i, 239–40. 79 Victor Hugo, Le Roi s’amuse (Paris: Eugène Renduel, 1832), viii–xiv. 80 Preface to printed libretto of Rigoletto first prepared by Ricordi for the production at La Scala during the 1852/3 season; taken here from the reprint issued for the 1855 production at Pavia’s Teatro del Nobile Condominio, 7. 81 Letter from Verdi to Marzari, 3 June 1850, in Conati, La bottega, 201. These comments about the ‘moral’ of the narrative were repeated by Piave, again to Marzari, on 15 August 1850, ibid., 207–8. 82 Gli ultimi giorni del Carlo III, duca di Parma. Racconto popolare d’un profugo parmigiano, trascritto da un brontolone milanese (Milan: Libreria Dante, 1861), 5–6. 83 Ibid., 93. 84 Preface to printed libretto of Rigoletto, 6. 85 L’Italia musicale, 24 March 1858, x/24, 93. 86 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 239.

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Notes to pages 130–133 87 For a consideration of the opera’s popularity in London, see Susan Rutherford, ‘La traviata, or the “willing grisette”: Male Critics and Female Performance in the 1850s’, in Verdi 2001, ed. Della Seta, Montemorra Marvin and Marica, vol. ii, 585–600. 88 Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-­Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 42. 89 Ibid., 16. 90 Foreign Quarterly Review, 1843, xxxi, 234. 91 Fourier, Manuscrits, 135. 92 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. ii, 165–6. David Kimbell, however, argues that the work was ‘tacitly dedicated’ to Strepponi, and displays clear echoes of the Verdi/Strepponi/Barezzi relationship. Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, 653–4, 666. As an example of older assumptions of a similar order, see Emilio Radius, Verdi vivo (1951; repr. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2001), 214. 93 Verdi to Antonio Barezzi, 21 January 1853, in Walker, The Man Verdi, 205. 94 Verdi’s fierce allegiance to ‘liberty of action’ might be viewed in the context of Giacomo Leopardi’s summary of the ‘Italian’ characteristic prior to Unification and the lack of a ‘society’: ‘everyone follows their own custom, whatever that might be’. Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani (1824; repr. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008), 67. 95 See Rosselli, Life of Verdi, 80–5. 96 Walker, The Man Verdi, 219. The surviving letters from Strepponi contain a gap between 1853 (when she is still signing with her own name) and 1857, when she signs herself ‘Giuseppina Verdi’. This was also a name she was using in Paris in 1854, and her handkerchiefs bore the initials ‘G.V.’ in 1856. See Rosselli, Life of Verdi, 70. 97 See, for example, Margherita Pelaja, ‘La Chiesa e i concubini (Roma, secolo XIX)’, in Amori e trasgressioni, ed. Pasi and Sorcinelli, 165–225. Pelaja demonstrates that despite such penalities, some couples nevertheless chose to live together rather than marry. See also the imprisoning of Mazzini’s companion Susan Tancioni in Genoa in 1849 on the grounds that the couple were living together (although there might have also been political inflections to this police action). Sarti, Mazzini, 126–7. 98 Rosselli hazards two possibilities: that Verdi rejected an earlier marriage because it would have made him legally responsible for the upkeep of Strepponi’s illegitimate children; or that Strepponi was in fact already secretly married to someone else, and was not therefore free to marry Verdi until the presumed death of this other man. Rosselli, Life of Verdi, 70. 99 Il trovatore, 11 August 1855, ii/4, 4. 100 Rutherford, ‘La traviata, or the “willing grisette”’, 585–600. 101 Il trovatore, 18 October 1856, iii/23, 1–2. 102 Ibid. 103 Letter from Virginia Boccabadati to Giulio Cesare Ferrarini, 18 October 1854; Archivio del Teatro Regio (Parma), Carteggio 22. 104 Rutherford, ‘La traviata, or the “willing grisette”’, 585–90. 105 Bruno P. F. Wanrooij, ‘“The Thorns of Love”: Sexuality, Syphilis and Social Control in Modern Italy’, in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (New York: Routledge, 2001), 137–59; here, 138.

Notes to pages 133–136 106 Alexandre J.-­B. Parent-­Duchâtelet, De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris, considérée sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique, de la morale et de l’administration, 2 vols. (Paris: J.-­B. Baillière et fils, 1836), vol. ii, 513–14. 107 Letter from Verdi to De Sanctis, 16 February 1854, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 262. 108 Undated letter from Verdi to Luccardi, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. i, 503. On theatrical censorship in Rome, see Ornella Di Tondo, La censura sui balli teatrali nella Roma dell’Ottocento (Turin: UTET, 2008). 109 Violetta (Rome: Giovanni Olivieri, 1854), 9. 110 Wanrooij, ‘“The Thorns of Love”’, 137–9. 111 Ibid., 139. 112 Lombroso and Ferrero, La donna delinquente, ix. 113 Ibid., ix. 114 Giovanni Greco, Lo scienzato e la prostituta: due secoli di studi sulla prostituzione (Bari: Dedalo, 1987), 104. 115 Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor, 57. 116 Greco, Lo scienzato e la prostituta, 104. 117 Ibid., 148–212. 118 Giuseppe Tammeo, La prostituzione. Saggio di statistica morale (Turin: L. Roux, 1890), 69–70. 119 Ibid., 285. 120 Ibid., 277. 121 Ibid., 135–47. Gurrieri (sometimes given as Guerrieri) published his paper ‘Sensibilità anomalie fisiche e psichiche nella donna normale e nella prostituta’, in Archivia di Psichiatria e Scienze penali ed Antropologia criminale, nos. 4–5 (1892); a later work with Ettore Fornasari followed: I sensi e le anomalie somatiche nella donna normale e nella prostituta (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1893). Similar experiments were conducted by (among others) Salvatore Ottolenghi, La sensibilità della donna (Turin: Bocca, 1896). Mary Gibson discusses the effect of these supposedly scientific findings that women were physically inferior to men in the context of women’s attempts to achieve suffrage: ‘On the Insensitivity of Women: Science and the Woman Question in Liberal Italy, 1890–1910’, Journal of Women’s History, 2 (1990), 2: 11–41. 122 Lombroso and Ferrero, La donna delinquente, 332. 123 Ibid., 349. 124 Ibid., 350. 125 Ibid., 381. 126 Ibid., 334. 127 Ibid., 381. 128 Ibid., 527. 129 Ibid., 527–8. 130 Ibid., 543. 131 Ibid., 543–4. 132 Lombroso mainly considered the ‘born’ prostitute, but concluded that women from otherwise respectable backgrounds who had become prostitutes were ‘always notably abnormal’ – his examples of such women included victims of incest, rape and adultery.

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133 134

135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

143 144 145

146 147

148 149

They shared the ‘irresponsibility, volubility, incoherence, and improvidence of the born prostitute’, but simply in slightly lesser degree. Ibid., 574–7. La scena illustrata, 1 May 1885, xxi/8, 4. Josephine Butler, ‘The Constitution Violated’, 1871, in The Woman Question, ed. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, 3 vols. (Manchester University Press, 1983), vol. ii, 161–2. Anna Maria Mozzoni, ‘Discorso al Congresso internazionale per il diritto delle donne a Parigi’, 1878. See also Pieroni Bortolotti, Appunti sulle origini del movimento femminile, 72. Anna Maria Mozzoni, La liberazione della donna, ed. Franca Pieroni Bortolotti (Milan: Mazzotta, 1975), 58 and 64. Emma (Emilia Ferretti-­Viola), Una fra tante (1878; repr. Rome: Lucarini, 1988), 51. Ibid., 49. Paganini, La missione della donna, 85. Ibid., 93. Greco, Lo scienzato e la prostituta, 56–7. Rina Macrelli, L’indegna schiavitú: Anna Maria Mozzoni e la lotta contro la prostituzione di Stato (La Questione femminile) (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1981); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Wanrooij, ‘Italy: Sexuality, Morality and Public Authority’, 118. Ibid., 129–30. Marchesa Colombi (Maria Antonietta Torriani Torelli-­Viollier), ‘Le affittacamere’, in Senz’amore (1883; repr. Milan: Alfred Brigola, n.d.), 37. On a consideration of women writers in this epoch and their contribution to debates about women’s roles, see Katharine Mitchell, ‘La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Matilde Serao: Forging a Female Solidarity in Late Nineteenth-­Century Journals for Women’, Italian Studies, 63 (2008), 1: 63–84. Neera (Anna Zuccari Radius), Teresa (1886; repr. Turin: Centopagine Einaudi, 1976), 34. Music was described by Anna Vertua Gentile as both ‘precise and indefinite at the same time’, expressing a given sentiment yet  also allowing the listener to interpret it within the context of his or her own feelings, and awakening ‘memories and aspirations’. Vertua Gentile, Come devo comportarmi?, 144. Marchesa Colombi, ‘Le affittacamere’, 37. Matilde Serao, Addio, amore! All’amica morta (Naples: Giannini e figli, 1890), 79–81.

5  Marriage 1 La sposa e la madre, ed. Thouar, 5. 2 Pockel, ‘L’amicizia in matrimonio’, ibid., 224. 3 See, for example, an undated letter from the mid 1860s written to Luisa Cora Mancinelli, where Strepponi writes: ‘The maestro rises at dawn, and I with him in order not to lose an instant of his precious company’. Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iii, 32. 4 One biographer of Strepponi claims (but offers no evidence) that she regarded her marriage as ‘the most important achievement of her life’. Gaia Servadio, The Real Traviata: The Life of Giuseppina Strepponi, Wife of Giuseppe Verdi (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), 177.

Notes to pages 143–147 Certainly, Strepponi’s use of Verdi’s name prior to their marriage, and her subsequent sensitivity about being addressed by her maiden name after marriage, suggests that the aspect of respectability conferred by marriage was extremely significant  to  her. 5 Neera (Anna Zuccari Radius), Una giovinezza del secolo XIX (Milan: L. F. Cogliati, 1919), 59. 6 Mozzoni, Alle fanciulle, 8. 7 Rita Verdirame, Narratrici e lettrici (1850–1950). Le letture della nonna dalla contessa Lara a Luciana Peverelli (Padua: libreriauniversitaria.it, 2009), 61–2. 8 Mantegazza, The Physiology of Love, 272–3. 9 Garibaldi’s first wife, Anita, was married when they met; his later years after her death were marked by numerous affairs with women. See Garibaldi’s own veiled account of the beginning of his relationship with Anita, in Memorie di Giuseppe Garibaldi date in luce da Alessandro Dumas, trans. Piero Veroli (Florence: Fioretti, 1860), 131–2. The ending of Cavour’s intense relationship with Anna (Nina) Giustiniani, wife of the marchese Giustiniani, was later followed by her suicide in 1841. See Rosario Romeo, Vita di Cavour (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 2004), 26–8, 43–5; and Daniela Maldini Chiarito, ‘Norma e trasgressioni nei carteggi dell’800’, in Amori e trasgressioni, ed. Pasi and Sorcinelli, 49–51. 10 Duggan, Creare la nazione, 458–61. 11 Mila, Verdi, 493–4. 12 For a succinct and recent account of the Verdi/Strepponi/Stolz triangle, see Rosselli, Life of Verdi, 134–47. Lengthier but older discussions can be found in Walker, The Man Verdi, and Servadio, The Real Traviata. Stolz’s letters can be read in Umberto Zoppi, Angelo Mariani, Giuseppe Verdi e Teresa Stolz in un carteggio inedito (Milan: Garzanti, 1947). 13 Claudio Sartori, Casa Ricordi: Profilo storico. Itinerario grafico editoriale (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 45. 14 Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 48. 15 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (2nd edn, London and New York: Longman, 1989), 30. 16 On this practice, see Roberto Bizzocchi’s recent study, Cicisbei: morale privata e identità nazionale in Italia (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2008). 17 Balbo, Pensieri ed esempi, 378. Published posthumously, this book was a collection of Balbo’s essays and writings from much earlier in his career: this particular ‘dialogue’ probably dates from 1842/3. 18 Cristina di Belgioioso, Studi intorno alla storia della Lombardia negli ultimi trent’anni e delle cagioni del difetto d’energia dei Lombardi (Paris, 1847), 4–5. At least some of the men she named as antagonistic to cicisbeismo (including the three fratelli Verri, the marchese Beccaria, Paolo Frisi, Longhi and Visconti) were, according to Bizzocchi, active practitioners. 19 Wanrooij, ‘Italy: Sexuality, Morality and Public Authority’, 116–17. 20 Bizzocchi, Cicisbei, 347. 21 Nead, Myths of Sexuality, 56. On similar attitudes to male adultery in France, see Knibiehler, ‘Corpi e cuori’, 347–8. 22 Article 308, Codice di Napoleone il grande pel Regno d’Italia (Florence: Landi, 1806), 64. Penalties for female adultery were similar in France: see Nicole Armand-­Duc, ‘Le contraddizioni del diritto’, in Storia delle donne, ed. Duby and Perrot, 51–88.

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Notes to pages 147–149 23 Codice civile del regno d’Italia, corredato della relazione del ministro Guardasigilli fatta A.S.M. in udienza del 25 giugno 1865 (Florence: Stamperia reale; Turin: Eredi Botta, 1866), 55. 24 De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 336. 25 See articles 561–2, I codici del regno d’Italia, aggiuntevi in supplemento tutte le leggi risguardanti l’ordinamento giudiziario e le funzioni della giustizia civile e penale (Naples: Stamperia Governativa, 1866), 392. 26 Alfredo Oriani, Matrimonio (1886; repr. Bologna: Cappelli, 1942), 402. 27 De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 336. 28 See, for example, Anna Bolena (Donizetti, 1830), Beatrice di Tenda (Bellini, 1833), Rosmonda d’Inghilterra (Donizetti, 1834) and Gemma di Vergy (Donizetti, 1834). Examples of the treatment of male adultery in comic opera include Federico Ricci’s Il marito e l’amante (1852). 29 Fricka’s contrasting anger and bitterness at Wotan’s infidelity in Wagner’s Die Walküre (1870) drew mixed comment. Male critics often portrayed Fricka as a ‘nagging wife’; Rutland Boughton, for instance, claimed Wotan was ‘hen-­pecked’ by Fricka’s ‘dull wifely lectures’ in an article entitled ‘The Valkyrie’, Music Student, mid-­November 1910, 44. The soprano Lilli Lehmann, who sang the role on a number of occasions, saw things rather differently, and sought to portray her not as ‘a vindictive woman but one who was fighting strongly for honour and right’. Lilli Lehmann, My Path through Life, trans. Alice Benedict Seligman (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914), 316. 30 On the theme of adultery in Italian theatre of the late nineteenth-­century, see Paolo Puppa, ‘The Theatre of United Italy’, in The Cambridge History of Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 223–34; here, 225–6. 31 Ibsen lived in Italy from 1864 to 1868, and again from 1878 to 1885. Ghosts was first performed in Italy as Gli spettri at the Teatro Manzoni, Milan, on 22 February 1892, staged by the Marini company. 32 Paganini warned against the infective consequences of male ‘libertinaggio’ (either before or during marriage) on wives and children. Paganini, La missione della donna, 23–4. 33 Wood, Italian Women’s Writing, 82; also Marina Beer, ‘Miti e realtà coniugali nel romanzo italiano tra Ottocento e Novecento’, in Storia del matrimonio, ed. Michela De Giorgio and Christiane Klapisch-­Zuber (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 439–63; here, 459. 34 Also see Donizetti’s Pia de’ Tolomei (1837). 35 For examples of the male lover’s death by duel, see Marino Faliero (Donizetti, 1835); in execution, Roberto Devereux (Donizetti, 1837); via heroic exploits in battle, La battaglia di Legnano (Verdi, 1850); and by murder, Un ballo in maschera (Verdi, 1859). 36 ‘Del teatro italiano’, in La civiltà cattolica (Rome, 1854), v/271–2. 37 Other examples include Imogene in Il pirata (1827), Élisabeth in Don Carlos (1867), Laura in La Gioconda (1876) and Lola in Cavalleria rusticana (1890). 38 On the influence of Parisian theatre on Verdi’s development with specific reference to Stiffelio, see Emilio Sala, ‘Verdi and the Parisian Boulevard Theatre, 1847–9’, trans. Mary Ann Smart, Cambridge Opera Journal, 7 (1995), 3: 185–205; and Giovanni Morelli (ed.), Tornando a Stiffelio: popolarità, rifacimenti, messinscena, effettismo e altre ‘cure’ nella drammaturgia del Verdi romantico: atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Venezia, 17–20 dicembre 1985) (Florence: Olschki, 1987).

Notes to pages 150–155 39 Roger Parker, ‘Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings’, in Leonora’s Last Act, 149–67; Gustavo Marchesi, ‘Il libretto’, in Stiffelio, Quaderni dell’Istituto di Studi Verdiani 3 (1968), 21–36; here, 36. 40 Émile Souvestre and Eugène Bourgeois, Le Pasteur, ou L’Évangile et le foyer (Poissy: G. Olivier, n.d.), Act i, 10. 41 Émile Souvestre, Le Pasteur d’hommes (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861), 193–4. 42 Ibid., 215. 43 Souvestre and Bourgeois, Le Pasteur, ou L’Évangile et le foyer, Act v, scene vi, 78. 44 Stifellius!, trans. Gaetano Vestri, in Florilegio drammatico, ovvero scelto repertorio moderno di componimenti teatrali, iii/6, ed. Pietro Manzoni (Milan: Borroni e Scotti, 1848), Act v, scene v, 65. 45 Souvestre, Le Pasteur d’hommes, 271. 46 Further evidence of censorship can be found in the opera’s reworking as Guglielmo Wellingrode, cobbled together for Rome in 1851. Here, an abstract of the story was provided in the printed libretto in order to clarify any misunderstanding. Not only is the religious context removed, Lina remains physically uncontaminated by her seducer, Leuthold. In Wellingrode’s absence, Leuthold had declared his passion for Lina, but had been rejected. In this account, Lina is ‘the honest spouse’ tormented by Leuthold’s attentions; he is merely ‘imprudent’, although he pays for this with his life. As Lina is not raped, she is therefore unstained, and can be absorbed more easily back into the fold. In the final moments of the opera, Guglielmo draws Lina into his embrace and sings: ‘Within my arms! The heart decrees it.’ (This version, although printed by Ricordi, was disowned by Verdi and Piave.) 47 Italia musicale, 23 November 1850, ii/86, 342. Basevi (who presumably saw a later production of the opera) was also unimpressed, declaring the final scene ‘of no importance’, for which he blamed the librettist and the subject of the opera rather than the composer. Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 171–2. Signs of doubts about the ending are evident in Italia musicale’s claim that Verdi was about to oversee a production of Stiffelio in Bologna with a revised finale. 48 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 25 January 1852, x/4, 18. 49 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 171–2. In revising the opera as Aroldo seven years later, the change at this juncture is marked. No longer a pastor but a Saxon crusader, the opera’s hero is unexpectedly reunited with his erring wife (now Mina) during a storm some years after their separation; she and her father had run away after the killing of the lover (here Godvino), while Aroldo had become a hermit. Mina’s impassioned plea for forgiveness (her hair is white, she feels on the edge of death) finally persuades Aroldo to accept her back – the curtain falls on their embrace. This version of the opera did not have much more success than the first. Basevi found it even less believable; another critic said the libretto did not even deserve discussing. The most extensive comparison between the two operas (from the Gazzetta ufficiale di Venezia, reprinted in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 25 October 1857, xv/43, 340) has a nice touch: ‘Christ’s words to the adulteress in Stiffelio are the principal motive for the resolution; in Aroldo they are only an accessory.’ 50 Giovanni Boccaccio, Il decameron (1353; repr. Florence: Borghi, 1834), 2308. 51 Michelet, L’Amour, 284–5.

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Notes to pages 156–161 52 Ibid., 292–3. Translation taken from Michelet, Love, trans. J. W. Palmer (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1860), 222. 53 Laqueur, Making Sex, 161. 54 Ibid., 162. 55 Michelet, L’Amour, 289–90; Love, 220. 56 In Enrico Veronesi (ed.), Un viaggio al femminile lungo quarant’anni. Dai congressi femministi italiani del 1908 alla caduta del fascismo: una rilettura della stampa, dei libri, delle leggi sulla donna: una ricerca negli archivi di Stato (Milan: M&B, 2004), 40. 57 Ibid. 58 The question of the prevalence of female orgasm in rape is still disputed today – see Elisabeth Anne Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 85. 59 Laqueur, Making Sex, 190–7. 60 Guidi, ‘Relazioni epistolari di Enrichetta di Lorenzo’, 253. 61 Ibid., 263–4. 62 Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-­Century Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 150–2; Baldini, Abitare la battaglia, 300. 63 Ricciardi (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Somma, 374. The problems Verdi and Antonio Somma endured with the censors in Naples (the opera was originally destined for the Teatro di San Carlo) illustrate how problematic this topic was at the time. In fact, the adultery of the narrative had been simply removed by the censor; Amelia was converted from Renato’s wife to his sister. The opera was eventually staged at Rome instead. 64 Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 200. Cavour wrote to Lamamora on 24 July 1858 that although the French emperor did not appear to be pushing the case, ‘I remain convinced that he ascribes a very great importance to this marriage, and that on it depends if not the alliance then its final outcome.’ Rejecting the marriage, he argued, would constitute ‘an offence that the Emperor would never forget’. Camillo Benso di Cavour, Il carteggio Cavour–Nigra dal 1858 al 1861, 4 vols. (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1961), vol. i, 115. 65 Maria Beatrice (1792–1840) married her maternal uncle Francesco IV of Modena (1779–1846) in 1812; they had four children. 66 Maria Teresa (1803–79) married Carlo II, Duke of Parma (1799–1883) in 1829; they had two children. 67 Maria Anna (1803–84), married Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria (1793–1875) in 1831; a devoted couple, they had no children (possibly the marriage was never consummated). Ferdinand abdicated power in 1848, owing to severe epilepsy. 68 Letter to Vittorio Emanuele II, 24 July 1858, in Il carteggio Cavour–Nigra, vol. i, 112–13. 69 Ibid., 113. On the impact of these negotiations, see Dennis Mack Smith, The Making of Italy, 1796–1866 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 246–7. 70 Cavour, Il carteggio–Cavour-­Nigra, vol. i, 128. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid.

Notes to pages 161–166 73 Ibid., 129. 74 On this marriage, see James E. Jordan, ‘Matrimony and Machiavellianism: The Marriage of Prince Napoleon’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 115 (1971), 4: 317–23. After remarking that ‘Few marriages in modern history have been the result of such tedious attention by such talented intriguers’, Jordan concludes with Cavour’s own words to Villamarina in a letter dated 23 January 1859: ‘The first act of the drama closes. Now we pass on to others still more grave, but which certainly will not be more difficult to carry out. For I assure you, I have worked harder to bring this about than I have worked for anything else in my life.’ 75 After the disbanding of the French monarchy in the revolution of 1870, Maria Clotilde lived in Switzerland and entered a Domenican convent, before returning to Italy in 1878. 76 This was only one of the marriage possibilities that were designed for Clotilde. Ferdinando II delle Due Sicilie was apparently persuaded by his court to consider her for his son, with the aim of thus uniting the two major powers in Italy. 77 For example, see the adjustment Verdi made to the character of Élisabeth in the 1884 version during the exchange with her husband following the theft of Carlos’ letters. Verdi wanted to cut the cantabile of the original score in favour of ‘something declamatory and energetic; first because Elisabeth’s role is throughout an inward one, and here she could be given a phrase in which to show her teeth. Secondly, because after having found her jewel-­case broken into and the letters from Don Carlos stolen Elisabeth should be upset and very angry, and I find the words “Et que Dieu fit” which give a feeling of resignation quite out of place. To conclude: a mere four long alexandrine verses will do for me. Proud and forceful, the last of which should run: “Moi! fille de Valois! Moi! La Reine de France [sic]!” The actress would have the chance of a good yell, which would not be beautiful poetically or musically, but it would be theatrical. And as you know only too well, my dear Nuitter, when you write for the theatre, you have to make theatre.’ Letter from Verdi to Nuitter, 15 December 1882, in Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. iii, 36. 78 Roger Parker, ‘Elisabeth’s Last Act’, in Siren Songs, ed. Smart, 93–117; here, 116. 79 Letter to Di Lorenzo’s mother, 18 May 1847, in Guidi, ‘Relazioni epistolari di Enrichetta di Lorenzo’, 253. 80 Pizzagalli, L’amica, 49. 81 Ibid., 53. 82 Ibid. 83 Alberto Mario Banti, Il Risorgimento italiano (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004), 236. 84 Marina D’Amelia, La mamma (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 51. 85 Grossi, I Lombardi alla prima crociata, in Opere poetiche, ed. Sirri, 326–7. 86 Martha Feldman, ‘The Absent Mother in Opera Seria’, in Siren Songs, ed. Smart, 29–46. 87 For information on the fees paid to different categories of singers during the epoch, see John Rosselli, Singers in Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 114–50. 88 Luigi Baldacci, Libretti d’opera e altri saggi (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974), 184. 89 Letter to Piave, 17 April 1853, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 241. 90 Verdi to Cammarano, 9 April 1851, in Mossa (ed.), Carteggio Verdi–Cammarano, 190.

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Notes to pages 166–174 91 First published in 1830, Giovanni Berchet’s poem ‘Il trovatore’ had strong political inflections: see, for example, its appearance in the Corriere delle dame, 25 April 1848, 183. On the similarities between Manrico’s serenade in Act i (‘Deserto sulla terra’) and stanzas and rhythms of Berchet’s poem, see Paolo Fabbri, ‘Istituti metrici e formali’, in Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi, ed. Bianconi and Pestelli, 163–233; here, 218. 92 Mila, Verdi, 490. 93 David Thatcher Gies, The Theatre in Nineteenth-­Century Spain (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 115–17. 94 The illustration accompanied the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 22 December 1847, vi/51, 405. Beyond the the two illustrations in this number of the journal, the Gazzetta published another three in the earlier editions of 3 November and 8 December, along with short articles discussing the significance of the costume designs and characterisation. Three of the figurini (one of Macbeth and two of Lady Macbeth) reproduced by the Gazzetta were later published in Il cosmorama pittorico. 95 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 25 September 1853, xi/39, 167–8. 96 Greco, Peccato, 72–73. 97 Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor, 157. 98 Ibid., 56. 99 Greco, Peccato, 95–102. 100 Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor, 28. 101 Ibid., 56. 102 Letter dated 28 October 1847, Marseilles, in Guidi, ‘Relazioni epistolari di Enrichetta di Lorenzo’, 255. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 256. 105 Greco describes infanticide in the Salerno region as a secret crime, rarely coming to the attention of the parish authorities and committed by women of all social classes. There were twenty-­seven infanticides (almost 9 per cent of total crimes) registered during 1849–62. Greco, Peccato, 77. 106 Letter to Verdi, 3 January 1853, in Luzio (ed.), Carteggi verdiani, vol. iv, 264. 107 Rosselli, Life of Verdi, 68–9. Strepponi’s son Camillino was by the impresario Cirelli; he also acknowledged the paternity of her daughter Sinforosa (although it seems clear that he was not the father). The father[s] of Sinforosa and the other two infants are unknown, although the subject of much speculation. 108 According to Servadio, Sinforosa was taken into care sometime in 1841 by foster-­parents Luisa Stefani and her husband on Strepponi’s instructions. She died in a mental hospital in 1925. Servadio, The Real Traviata, 57. 109 Rosselli, Life of Verdi, 69. 110 Letter to Verdi, 3 January 1853, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 205. 111 See Walker, The Man Verdi, 395–400. 112 Letter from Strepponi to Caterina De Sanctis, 27 March 1864, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 787. 113 See Kertzer and Hogan, Family, Political Economy and Demographic Change, 97–99.

Notes to pages 174–179 114 Antonella Pinnelli and Paola Mancini, ‘Gender Mortality Differences from Birth to Puberty in Italy, 1887–1940’, in The Decline of Infant and Child Mortality: The European Experience, 1750– 1990, ed. Carlo Corsini and Pier Paolo Viazzo (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997), 73–94; here, 76. 115 Godelieve Masuy-­Stroobant, ‘Infant Health and Infant Mortality in Europe: Lessons from the Past and Challenges for the Future’, in Corsini and Viazzo (eds.), The Decline of Infant and Child Mortality, 1–34; here, 9. 116 See, for example, Servadio’s approach to this issue in The Real Traviata, 41–4. 117 See the work of Antonietta De Pace, and the Circolo femminile she established in Naples in 1849. Other such groups were active in Venice and Milan. 118 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 2 October 1853, xi/40, 173–5. 119 Ibid. 120 Guidi, ‘Relazioni epistolari di Enrichetta di Lorenzo’, 263–4. 121 Ibid., 270. 122 Maura Palazzi, Donne sole. Storia dell’altra faccia dell’Italia tra antico regime e società contemporanea (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1997), 52–3. 123 Arcanum divinae, Lettera Enciclica di Sua Santità Leone PP. XIII, 10 February 1880. 124 Letter to Vittoria Ferrucci, 8 December 1881, in Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, Epistolario di Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, edito ora la prima volta, con lettere di scrittori illustri a lei, ed. Giuseppe Guidetti (Reggio Emilia: Guidetti, 1910), 424.

6  Death 1 ‘L’idea dell’amore’, Corriere delle dame, 6 November 1855, liii/45, 356–8. 2 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Virago Press, 1989), 6. 3 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Paris: Pagnerre, 1861), vol. viii, 5. 4 De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 39–40. 5 Edward Shorter, Women’s Bodies: A Social History of Women’s Encounter with Health, Ill-­health, and Medicine (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1997), 241; 247–54. 6 Pinnelli and Mancini, ‘Gender Mortality Differences’, 75. For example, the average life expectancy in Italy was forty, compared with the Scandinavian countries, where it was fifty­five years for men and fifty-­seven to fifty-­nine for women. 7 Shorter, Women’s Bodies, 230. 8 Linda and Michael Hutcheon make a similar point, arguing that ‘some operas function like more formalized funeral rites’, in Opera: The Art of Dying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 21. 9 Walker, The Man Verdi, 33. Verdi’s daughter Virginia was born on 26 March 1837 and died in August 1838; his son Icilio was born on 11 July 1838 and died on 22 October 1839. His wife Margherita Barezzi died in 1840. 10 Letter to Clara Maffei, 20 January 1853, in Luzio (ed.), Profili biografici, 516. 11 W. H. Auden, ‘Notes on Music and Opera’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 470.

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Notes to pages 180–186 12 Philippe Ariès, ‘The Reversal of Death: Changes in Attitudes toward Death in Western Societies’, American Quarterly, 26, Special issue, Death in America (1974), 5: 536–60. 13 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. IV, 668. 14 Ariès, ‘The Reversal of Death’, 541. 15 Ibid., 548. 16 Engel’s work was translated into French in 1795, English in 1807 by Henry Siddons and then Italian in 1818/19 by Giovanni Rasori. 17 Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, adapted to the English Drama, from a work on the same subject by M. Engel (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 15–16. 18 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52. 19 Izzo, ‘Verdi, the Virgin, and the Censor’, 591. 20 See, for example, Il pirata, 18 February 1845, x/69, 279. 21 Figaro, 15 February 1845, xiii/15, 57–9; here, 57. 22 Ibid., 57. 23 Ibid., 57–9. Figaro published a short article about the actual death of Jeanne d’Arc a few weeks later. This account, too, was romanticised, designed to demonstrate how her ability to inspire ‘ardent courage, patriotism and disdain of danger’ was evident in her death; extending her arm into the flames, Jeanne dies murmuring the words ‘O mia patria diletta, o mia re!’ ‘Fantasie: La morte di Giovanna d’Arco’, Figaro, 26 March 1845, xiii/25, 99–100. 24 Letter from Pauline Viardot to Julius Rietz, 1 January 1859, in ‘Pauline Viardot-­Garcia to Julius Rietz (Letters of Friendship)’, Musical Quarterly, 1 (1915), 3: 350–80; here 370. 25 ‘Ah! Fernando! è vano! Il fier tormento … la mia vita è compiuta. Io muoio perdonata, Fernando, e son beata! oltre la tomba saremo riuniti, addio! addio, ah!’, La favorita, Act iv. The original French version had a subtly different emphasis: to Fernand’s urging that they flee the monastery, Léonor responds: ‘“Je ne puis … ma vie est terminée … Mais je meurs pardonnée, Fernand, je te bénis. Adieu! dans le tombeau nous serons réunis” (elle meurt)’. 26 Walker, The Man Verdi, 33. 27 At an early production of the opera at Rome, Teresa De Giuli Borsi evoked special praise for the ‘incomparable way she expressed the anguish of the unhappy Luisa who died of poison’. L’Italia musicale, 11 May 1850, ii/30, 119. 28 Verdi to Mazzari, 14 December 1850, in Conati, La bottega, 233. 29 This was not wholly innovative – Romeo does the same thing in Vaccai’s version of Giulietta e Romeo – but there the music does not pause in the same fashion as it does here in Rigoletto. 30 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 200. 31 ‘Rassegna musicale’, Rivista contemporanea, 1856, iv/8, 128–36; here, 135. 32 However, Italian political exiles produced a vast body of literature on the conflict, mostly published in Piedmont, France or Switzerland. 33 ‘Il dramma di Misckiewicz’ [sic], L’Italia musicale, 10 January 1852, iv/3, 9–10, and 14 January 1852, iv/4, 13–14. 34 Rosselli argued that Ernani and Il trovatore are in effect ‘the most “risorgimental”’ of Verdi’s operas, despite their apparent literary distance from ideas of nationalism or analogy to the Italian political situation. John Rosselli, ‘Riposta a Giuliano Procacci’, in Verdi 2001, ed. Della Seta, Marvin and Marica, vol. i, 223–6.

Notes to pages 186–189 35 See, for example, Dan Latimer, ‘Erotic Susceptibility and Tuberculosis: Literary Images of a Pathology’, MLN, 105 (1990), 5: 1016–31. ‘It may be that sexual immorality and other forms of crime are increased by consumption.’ Lilian Brandt, ‘Social Aspects of Tuberculosis’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 21 (May 1903), 65–76. 36 Louis Henry, ‘Men and Women’s Mortality in the Past’, Population, 44 (1989), 1: 177–201. 37 Ortaggi Cammarosano, ‘Labouring Women in Northern and Central Italy’, 176–9. 38 René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 59. 39 Arthur Groos provides a telling analysis of both the musical and textual implications of this aria in his essay ‘“TB Sheets”: Love and Disease in La traviata’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 7 (1995), 3: 233–60; here, 252–5. 40 During this passage in La traviata, the anapaest is played by full orchestra (marked pianissimo), thus giving the figure a particular emphasis – an effect that Verdi had already used in the ‘Miserere’ in Il trovatore. 41 A clear paradox existed between the real symptoms of the disease – diarrhoea, expectoration of blood and yellow sputum, swollen neck, clawlike hands, white pallor and emaciation – and its romanticization in art and literature. But it is perhaps not surprising that society should have sought more reassuring images of a disease that was endemic (René and Jean Dubos claimed that by the turn of the century virtually the whole American population was tuberculin positive, demonstrating some level of exposure to the disease). See Latimer, ‘Erotic Susceptibility and Tuberculosis’, 1016; and René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague, 122. 42 Letter to Mme Baronne de Maistre, 26 July 1839, in Eugénie de Guérin, Letters of Eugénie de Guérin, ed. G. S. Trebutien (London and New York: Alexander Strahan, 1866), 266. 43 Journal entry of 10 February 1843, in Ferronnays Craven, A Sister’s Story, 480–1. After an hour, Pauline and her mother withdrew from the room; on their return, ‘the most consoling change had taken place. All trace of sickness had disappeared, and the room had been turned into a chapel, in the centre of which our angel lay asleep, dressed in white and surrounded with flowers. She was looking more beautiful than she had ever done in life. We spent the rest of the day peacefully beside her, feeling almost joyful, praying and weeping indeed, but without any of the bitterness of grief.’ Ibid., 436. 44 Tierl Thompson (ed.), Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women (1897–1917) (London: The Women’s Press, 1987), 42. 45 Ibid., 143. 46 Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux camélias, trans. David Coward (Oxford University Press, 1986), 199. 47 Beghelli, La retorica del rituale nel melodramma ottocentesco, 149. 48 Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, 233. 49 Dumas, La Dame aux camélias, 199. 50 Ibid. 51 Ricci (ed.), Memorie della Baronessa Olimpia Savio, vol. ii, 273–4. 52 Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’, 57. 53 Marie Bashkirtseff, The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Mathilde Blind (1891; repr. London: Virago, 1985), 303.

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Notes to pages 190–194 54 Letter from Virginia Boccabadati to Giulio Cesare Ferrarini, 18 October 1854. Archivio Storico del Teatro Regio (Parma), Carteggio 22. Boccabadati was one of three singers (the others were Rosina Penco and Marietta Piccolomini) suggested by Verdi for the creation of Violetta in the first production at the Teatro La Fenice at Venice in 1853. See Verdi’s letter to the Presidenza of the Teatro La Fenice, 30 January 1853, in Conati, La bottega, 312. 55 Il trovatore, 18 October 1856, iii/23, 1–2. 56 L’Italia musicale, 10 January 1855, vii/3, 11. 57 L’Italia musicale, 10 February 1855, vii/12, 48. 58 Verdi to De Sanctis, 17 February 1855, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 283. 59 The Athenaeum, 22 May 1875, 696. 60 Filippi in La perseveranza, in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 3 March 1869, xxiv/9, 71. 61 Parker, ‘Leonora’s Last Act: La forza del destino’, in Leonora’s Last Act, 61–99. 62 La fama, 2 March 1869, xxvii/9, 33–4. For an analysis of the two versions, see Parker, ‘Leonora’s Last Act’ 92–9. 63 Letter to Ghislanzoni, c. 12 November 1870, in Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Aida’, 101. 64 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. iii, 255. 65 Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Aida’, 101. The ‘great devil of the subterranean chamber imagined by Verdi’ kept Mariette up until three in the morning trying to resolve the difficulties it posed in terms of sight-­lines in the theatre. Letter from Mariette to Draneht, 6 October 1871, ibid., 233. Despite Mariette’s efforts, Verdi was not satisfied with the result; during the preparations for the Paris production some years later, he wrote to Escudier: ‘The final scene should be a subterranean chamber, and not a cave, as it was in Cairo.’ Verdi to Escudier, 12 March 1876, ibid., 390. 66 Fred S. Licht, ‘Italy Funerary Sculpture after Canova’, in Sandra Berresford (ed.), Italian Memorial Sculpture 1820–1940: A Legacy of Love (London: Frances Lincoln, 2004), 22–32; here, 23. 67 Ibid., 26. 68 Dupré, Pensieri e ricordi autobiografici, 428. 69 Berresford, Italian Memorial Sculpture, 154. 70 Ibid., 155. 71 Karl S. Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 254. 72 Corriere delle dame, 6 November 1855, liii/45, 356–8. 73 ‘An opera is not a play; our art lives by elements unknown to spoken tragedy. An atmosphere that has been destroyed can be created all over again. Eight bars are enough to restore a sentiment to life; a rhythm can re-­establish a character; music is the most omnipotent of all the arts; it has a logic all its own – both freer and more rapid than the logic of spoken thought, and much more eloquent.’ Boito to Verdi, 18 October 1880, in Verdi–Boito Correspondence, ed. Marcello Conati and Mario Medici, trans. W. Weaver (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 6–8. 74 Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’, 196. 75 Verdi to Boito, 5 October 1885, in Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, vol. i, 177.

Notes to pages 194–199 76 Ibid., vol. II, 616. 77 Boston Globe, 27 November 1873; cited in Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘Othello’: A Contextual History (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168. On Salvini’s rationale for his interpretation, see also Marvin Carlson, The Italian Shakespearians: Performances by Ristori, Salvini and Rossi in England and America (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985), 76. 78 Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: ‘Otello’, 166. 79 Ibid., 169. 80 Victor Maurel, Dix ans de carrière, 1887–1897 (1897), cited in Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, vol. ii, 638. 81 Camille Bellaigue, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 March 1887, cited in Busch, Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, vol. ii, 701. This effect was clearly not fully evident at the first performance in Milan, with Ginevra Petrovich as Emilia. After the third evening, the Corriere della sera sought an ‘end to the hilarity and “noises” that greet, every evening of the performance, Emilia’s entrance in the last act. Without wishing to discuss now the vocal means of the artist, we will say that it is the maestro’s intention that her words might have an almost convulsive accent of terror. The artist does what she can to give a realistic tone to the text. One should also remember that anxiety about these disagreeable greetings from the audience does nothing to make musical intonation more secure’ (reprinted in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 20 February 1887, xlii/8, 61). Blanche Roosevelt had less sympathy: ‘Petrovich as Emilia was deservedly hooted’ (Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’, 199). Emanuele Muzio had tried to warn Ricordi of the problems of casting the role effectively much earlier in the production process: ‘Watch out for Emilia, who is a soprano (not a mezzo, as you wrote to me): a robust voice – and above all, one in tune – is needed for the curses upon Otello in the fourth act.’ Letter to Ricordi, 28 January 1886, in Busch, Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, vol. ii, 203. 82 Letter to Ricordi, 22 January 1888, in Abbiati, Guiseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 356. 83 Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’, 196–7. 84 Ibid.

7  Laughter 1 Giornale della donna, 5 May 1885, xvii/9, 193. 2 De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 77–80. 3 Ibid., 90. In 1853, Strepponi talked about the difficulty of going out alone now that she had retired from the stage, but how earlier it had been ‘another matter’ because her name had ‘served as a sort of companion’. Letter to Verdi, 3 January 1853, in Walker, The Man Verdi, 209. 4 Lessona, Volere è potere, 7–8. On Verdi’s opinion of Lessona, see Conati, Verdi: interviste ed incontri, 379–80. 5 Paolina Leopardi (1800–69), Lettere di Paolina Leopardi a Marianna ed Anna Brighenti (Parma: L. Battei, 1877), 13. 6 Ibid., 301–2. 7 On the way women’s laughter was controlled in earlier periods of Italian history, see Helena Sanson, ‘Donne che (non) ridono: parola e riso nella precettistica femminile del XVI secolo in Italia’, Italian Studies, 60 (2005), 1: 6–21.

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Notes to pages 199–203 8 On the significance of the trill as a device of malevolence, see David Rosen, ‘“Mentir cantando”: Verdi’s Deception Scenes’, in Pensieri per un maestro, ed. La Via and Parker, 313–34; here, 323–4. 9 Daniel Albright, ‘The Witches and the Witch: Verdi’s Macbeth’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 17 (2005), 3: 225–52; see also Jane Bernstein, ‘“Bewitched, bothered and bewildered”: Lady Macbeth, Sleepwalking and the Demonic in Verdi’s Scottish Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 14 (2002), 1 and 2: 31–46. 10 See Ernani (1843), I due Foscari (1844), Alzira (1845), Attila (1846). 11 See, for example, Nabucco (1842), I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843), Giovanna d’Arco (1845). 12 Letter to Escudier, 8 February 1865, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’, 99–100. 13 Letter to Escudier, 3 February 1865, ibid., 91. 14 Some roles are larger than others: Verdi regretted not being able to supply more for Virginia Guerrini as Meg, and actively expanded the role of Mistress Quickly for Giuseppina Pasqua. See Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 443; and James A. Hepokoski, ‘Verdi, Giuseppina Pasqua, and the Composition of “Falstaff ”’, 19th-­Century Music, 3 (1980), 3: 239–50. 15 Daniela Danna, Amiche, compagne, amanti. Storia dell’amore tra donne (Trento: Editrice UNI Service, 2003), 250. 16 Mastriani, Doveri delle donne, 154–5. 17 De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 128–30. 18 Mantegazza, Fisiologia della donna (1893), cited in Danna, Amiche, compagne, amanti, 310. 19 Verdi to Ricordi, 1892, in Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: ‘Falstaff ’, 117. 20 See Tia DeNora, ‘The Biology Lessons of Opera Buffa: Gender, Nature and Bourgeois Society on Mozart’s buffa Stage’, in Opera buffa in Mozart’s Vienna, ed. Mary Hunter and James Webster (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 146–4. 21 Mallach comments that during the 1880s, ‘not a single opera buffa was performed at either La Scala or Venice’s La Fenice’. Comic opera was still performed regularly in theatres that were not supported by any form of subsidy and which attracted a more inclusive audience than the élite opera houses. Alan Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2007), 274. 22 On the part played by women writers and journals designed for a female readership in exploring facets of ideas of gender, see Katharine Mitchell, ‘La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Matilde Serao’; also Silvia Franchini, Editori, lettrici e stampa di moda: giornali di moda e di famiglia a Milano (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2002). 23 Cited in De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 20. 24 Ibid., 495–7. 25 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, ed. Ada Testaferri (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989), 25–37; here, 26. 26 Some of the links between patriots and feminists are traced by Emma Scaramuzza, ‘Dalle madri della patria alla cittadinanza sociale. Il caso lombardo’, Cantieri di Storia III: Terzo incontro Sissco sulla storiografia contemporaneistica in Italia (Bologna, 22–24 settembre 2005), www.sissco.it/. On the developing movement for women’s emancipation see Liviana Gazzetta and Maria Teresa Sega, ‘Movimenti di emancipazione: reti, iniziative,

Notes to pages 203–206

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37

38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

rivendicazioni (1866–1914)’, in Donne sulla scena pubblica: società e politica in Veneto tra Sette e Ottocento, ed. Nadia Maria Filippini (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2006), 138–217. On Morelli, see Emilia Sarogni, Salvatore Morelli. L’Italia e la Donna (Turin: Daniela Piazza, 2004), 85–109. Anna Maria Mozzoni, La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali (Milan: G. Ferrari, 1864), 238. Palazzi, Donne sole, 52–3. On women’s increasing engagement in industry and its political context, see Fiorella Imprenti, Operaie e socialismo: Milano, le leghe femminili, la Camera del lavoro (1891–1918) (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2007). De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 421. Ibid., 412. Lessona, Volere è potere, 7–8. Ibid., 9. Bills arguing for partial or full women’s suffrage were supported by Giovanni Lanza (1865 and 1871), Salvatore Morelli (1867 and 1877), Giuseppe Zanardelli (1880), Michele Coppino (1881), Francesco Crispi (1887) and Giovanni Giolitti (1907–10): all failed. On the position of women under the fascist regime, see Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Oxford and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Some parties were banned, such as the Associazione nazionale per la donna; others simply faded away; yet others aligned themselves with the fascists and assisted in the retrograde reordering of the state. Laws were introduced that barred women from their recently acquired positions of authority in schools and other institutions, and from their access to certain professions. De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi, 20–3. Verdi’s initially amicable relationship with the Luccas had become hostile by the late 1840s; the machinations over Il corsaro proved the final straw from Verdi’s perspective. See Il corsaro, ed. Hudson, xiii–xvi. Julian Budden, Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford University Press, 2002), 38. Wanda de Nunzio Schilardi, Matilde Serao: giornalista (con antologia di scritti rari) (Lecce: Milella, 1986); Ursula Fanning, Gender Meets Genre: Women as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002). Susan Rutherford, ‘The Prima Donna as Opera Impresario: Emma Carelli and the Teatro Costanzi’, in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford University Press, 2012), 272–89. Carelli’s achievement would be followed (albeit briefly) by Anita Colombo at La Scala in 1930–1. Augusto Carelli, Emma Carelli: trent’anni di vita del teatro lirico (Rome: Casa Libraria Editrice, 1932), 53. The production opened at La Scala on 26 December 1899. Strepponi replaced Antonietta Rainieri-­Marini, who had created the role of Leonora, during the first production in Milan. Letter to Giuseppina Appiani, 9 March 1848, in Matz, Verdi, 223. Walker, The Man Verdi, 402. Ibid., 403. Letter from Strepponi to Clara Maffei, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iii, 34–5. Ibid., 40.

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Notes to pages 206–211 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64

Walker, The Man Verdi, 408. Letter to Piroli, 7 August 1886, in Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’, 230. Barbiera, Il salotto della contessa Maffei, 6. Pizzagalli, L’amica, 53. Busch (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Aida’, 415. See Walker, The Man Verdi, 427–9. Emanuele Senici, ‘Verdi’s Falstaff at Italy’s Fin de Siècle’, Musical Quarterly, 85 (2001), 2: 274–310; here, 289–90. This anecdote along with Ricordi’s publicity article (with its inaccuracies and exaggerations) is discussed by James Hepokoski in ‘Under the Eye of the Verdian Bear: Rehearsals and Première of Falstaff’, Musical Quarterly, 71 (1985), 2: 135–56; here, 9. See Parker, ‘Falstaff and Verdi’s Final Narratives’, in Leonora’s Last Act, 100–25. Letter to Barberina Strepponi, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 472. Mallach, Autumn of Italian Opera, 117–21. 1 February 1893; Cesira Ferrani created the title role. Jolanda (Maria Majocchi Plattis), Le donne dei poemi di Wagner (Milan: Max Kantorowicz, 1893). Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iv, 497. Italo Pizzi, Ricordi verdiani inediti, con undici lettere di Giuseppe Verdi ora pubblicate per la prima volta (Turin: Roux and Viarengo, 1901), 85–6. Verdi was possibly also influenced by Strepponi’s strong dislike and distrust of doctors (see her letter to Caterina De Sanctis, 27 March 1864, in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, 787) and her reputation as the family’s own self­appointed doctor. The first Italian woman to graduate in medicine was Maria Montessori (1870–1952) in 1896. She was preceded by a handful of other women, all of foreign nationalities, including Ernestina Paper (1877), and Anna Kuliscioff (1887). Montessori’s presence at the university of Rome nevertheless created notable press interest, with L‘Illustrazione popolare giving her a full article and photograph. Shortly afterwards, she represented Italy at the Congresso internazionale di diriitti femminili at Berlin in 1896. Her innovative research into teaching children with special needs became known as the Montessori method. Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and ‘Othello’, 201.

­B i b l i o g r a p h y

Journals and newspapers The Athenaeum La civilità cattolica Corriere delle ­dame Il cosmorama pittorico Daily News La fama Figaro Foreign Quarterly Review Gazzetta musicale di Firenze Gazzetta musicale di Milano The Harmonicon L’Italia musicale La moda Il monitor romano Museo scientifico, letterario ed artistico Music Student Il pirata Revue des Deux Mondes Rivista contemporanea Rivista europea Rivista teatrale e giornale di mode Rivista teatrale melodrammatica La scena illustrata Lo spirito folletto Strenna teatrale europea Teatri, arti e letteratura Il teatro illustrato The Times Il trovatore

Anonymous works Carte segrete e atti ufficiali della polizia austriaca in Italia dal 4 giugno al 22 marzo 1848, 3  vols. (Capolago and Turin: Elvetica and Patria, 1852).

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­Bibliograph Codice civile del regno d’Italia, corredato della relazione del ministro Guardasigilli fatta A.S.M. in udienza del 25 giugno 1865 (Florence: Stamperia reale; Turin: Eredi Botta, 1866). Codice di Napoleone il grande pel Regno d’Italia (Florence: Landi, ­1806). Codice penale per gli stati di S. M. re di Sardegna (Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1859). I codici del regno d’Italia, aggiuntevi in supplemento tutte le leggi risguardanti l’ordinamento giudiziario e le funzioni della giustizia civile e penale (Naples: Stamperia Governativa, 1866). Pareri dell’episcopato cattolico, di capitoli, di congregazioni, di università, di personaggi ragguardevole ecc. ecc. sulla definizione dogmatica dell’immaculato concepimento della B. V. Maria, rassegnati alla santità di Pio IX. P.M. in occasione della sua enciclica data da Gaeta il 2 febbraio 1849, 10 vols. (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1851–4). Raccolta per ordine cronologico di tutti gli atti, decreti, nomine ecc. del Governo provv. della Repubblica veneta: non che scritti, avvisi, desiderj ecc. di cittadini privati, che si riferiscono all’epoca presente (Venice: Andreola, 1848). Gli ultimi giorni del Carlo III, duca di Parma. Racconto popolare d’un profugo parmigiano, trascritto da un brontolone milanese (Milan: Libreria Dante, 1861).

Bo oks and articles Abbiati, Franco, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan: Ricordi, 1959). Alberti, Annibale, Verdi intimo. Carteggio di Giuseppe Verdi con il conte Opprandino Arrivabene (1862– 1886) (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1931). Albright, Daniel, ‘The Witches and the Witch: Verdi’s Macbeth’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 17 (2005), 3: 225–52. Aleramo, Sibilla, Una donna (1906; Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999). Alfieri, Vittorio, Le opere di Vittorio Alfieri (Padua: Nicolò Zanon Bettoni, 1809).   Opere filosofiche (Paris: Tenré, 1822). Algozini, Alessandro (ed.), Lettere inedite d’illustri scrittori a Concettina Ramondetta Fileti (Palermo: Virzì, 1901). Amari, Michele, La guerra del vespro siciliano, o un periodo delle istorie siciliane del secolo XIII, 2 vols. (Paris: Baudry, 1843). Ambrosoli, Filippo, Studi sul codice penale toscano, confrontato specialmente coll’austriaco (Mantua: Negretti, 1857). André, Naomi, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-­Century Opera (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). Ariès, Philippe, ‘The Reversal of Death: Changes in Attitudes toward Death in Western Societies’, American Quarterly, 26, Special issue: Death in America (1974), 5: 536–60. Armand-­Duc, Nicole, ‘Le contraddizioni del diritto’, in Storia delle donne. L’Ottocento, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Bari: Laterza, 2007), 51–88. Ascoli, Albert Russell and Krystyna von Henneberg (eds.), Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001). Auden, W. H., ‘Notes on Music and Opera’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 465–74.

­Bibliograph Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘“For, Love’s a Good Musician”: Performance, Audition, and Erotic Disorders in Early Modern Europe’, Musical Quarterly, 82, Special issue: Music as Heard (1998), 3/4: 614–53. Balbo, Cesare, Pensieri ed esempi (Turin: Unione Tipografico-­Editrice Torinese, 1857). Baldacci, Luigi, Libretti d’opera e altri saggi (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974). Baldini, Gabriele, Abitare la battaglia: la storia di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Fedele d’Amico (Milan: Garzanti, 2001).   The Story of Giuseppe Verdi, trans. Roger Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Balsamo, Cinisello (ed.), Vivere il Medioevo. Parma al tempo della Cattedrale (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006). Balthazar, Scott, The Cambridge Companion to Verdi (Cambridge University Press, 2004).   ‘The Primo Ottocento Duet and the Transformation of the Rossinian Code’, Journal of Musicology, 7 (1989), 4: 471–97. Banti, Alberto Mario, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2000).   Il Risorgimento italiano (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2004). Barbiera, Raffaello, Il salotto della contessa Maffei (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1895). Barblan, Guglielmo and Alberto Basso (eds.), Storia dell’opera, 3 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1977). Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988). Basevi, Abramo, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (1859; repr. Bologna: Antiquae Musicae Italicae Studiosi, 1978). Bashkirtseff, Marie, The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Mathilde Blind (1891; repr. London: Virago, 1985). Basini, Laura, ‘Verdi and Sacred Revivalism in Post-­Unification Italy’, 19th-­Century Music, 28 (Autumn 2004), 2: 133–59. Bassi, Adriano, Le eroine del Risorgimento: amore e politica al femminile (Montichiari: Zanetti, 1996). Bassi, Ugo, ‘La Madonna della passione’, in Opere sacre e politiche di Ugo Bassi, vol. iv, Panegirici e scritti vari, ed. Stefano Fioretti (Genoa: Enrico Monni, 1864), 37–64. Battaglia, Giacinto, Mosaico. Saggi diversi di critica drammatica (Milan: Guglielmini, 1845). Beales, Derek and Eugenio F. Biagini, Il Risorgimento e l’unificazione dell’Italia, trans. Maria Luisa Bassi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005). Beer, Marina, ‘Miti e realtà coniugali nel romanzo italiano tra Ottocento e Novecento’, in Storia del matrimonio, ed. Michela De Giorgio and Christiane Klapisch-­Zuber (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 439–63. Beghelli, Marco, La retorica del rituale nel melodramma ottocentesco (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2003). Belgioioso, Cristina Trivulzio di, Il 1848 a Milano e a Venezia, con uno scritto sulla condizione delle donne, ed. Sandro Bortone (Milan: Feltrinelli Economica, 1977).   Studi intorno alla storia della Lombardia negli ultimi trent’anni e delle cagioni del difetto d’energia dei Lombardi (Paris, 1847). Bellincioni, Gemma, Io e il palcoscenico (Trenta e un anno di vita artistica) (Milan: R. Quintieri, 1920).

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­Bibliograph Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1997). Bent, Ian, Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, vol. ii, Hermeneutic Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Bernheimer, Charles, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-­Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Berresford, Sandra (ed.), Italian Memorial Sculpture 1820–1940: A Legacy of Love (London: Frances Lincoln, 2004). Bernstein, Jane, ‘“Bewitched, bothered and bewildered”: Lady Macbeth, Sleepwalking and the Demonic in Verdi’s Scottish Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 14 (2002), 1 and 2: 31–46. Bianchi Giovini, Aurelio, L’Austria in Italia e le sue confische: il conte di Ficquelmont e le sue confessioni (Turin: Libreria Patria, 1853). Bianconi, Lorenzo, ‘Risposta a Giuliano Procacci’, in Verdi 2001. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, New York, New Haven 24 gennaio–1o febbraio 2001, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Marco Marica, 2  vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2003), vol. i, 205–16. Bianconi, Lorenzo and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and Its Resources (University of Chicago Press, 1998).   Storia dell’opera italiana, vol. vi, Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi (Turin: EDT/Musica, 1988). Bini, Daniela, Pirandello and His Muse: The Plays for Marta Abba (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998). Bizzocchi, Roberto, Cicisbei: morale privata e identità nazionale in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 2008). Boccaccio, Giovanni, Il decameron (1353; repr. Florence: Borghi, 1834). Boito, Arrigo, Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1942). Boschi, Daniele, ‘Homicide and Knife Fighting in Rome, 1845–1914’, in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 128–58. Bragaglia, Leonardo, Verdi e i suoi interpreti (1839–1978): vita scenica delle opere del cigno di Busseto attraverso una antologia critica e uno studio delle ventotto opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979). Brandt, Lilian, ‘Social Aspects of Tuberculosis’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 21 (May 1903), 65–76. Britten, Benjamin, ‘A Verdi Symposium’, in Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford University Press, 2003), 102–3. Brunelli, Bruno, I teatri di Padova dalle origini alla fine del secolo XIX (Padua: Libreria Angelo Draghi, 1921). Budden, Julian, The Operas of Verdi, vols. i–iii (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd, 1973, 1978, 1981).   Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford University Press, ­2002).   Verdi (London and Melbourne; J. M. Dent, 1985). Burke Honan, Michael The Personal Adventures of ‘Our Own Correspondent’ in Italy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852).

­Bibliograph Burton, June K., Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799–1815 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007). Busch, Hans (ed.), Verdi’s ‘Aida’: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978).   Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’ in Letters and Documents, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Butler, Josephine, ‘The Constitution Violated’, 1871, in The Woman Question, ed. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, 3 vols. (Manchester University Press, 1983), vol. ii, 161–2. Byerly, Carolyn M. and Karen Ross, Women and Media: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Wiley­Blackwell, 2006). C. A., Voto per l’emancipazione delle donne (Milan: Valentini, 1851). Cafagna, Luciano, Cavour (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999). Caffiero, Marina, ‘Dall’esplosione mistica tardo-­barocca all’apostolato sociale (1650–1850)’, in Donna e fede. Santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Bari: Laterza, 1994), 327–74. Caine, Barbara and Glenda Sluga, Gendering History, 1780–1920 (London and New York: Continuum, 2000). Calico, Joy Haslam, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). Cantalamessa, Giulia Cavallari, La donna nel Risorgimento nazionale (Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1892). Cantù, Cesare, Storia degli italiani, 6 vols. (Turin: L’Unione, 1856). Capra, Marco, ‘“Et in ecclesiis et in plateis”: La musica e i suoni della tradizione profana’, in Vivere il Medioevo. Parma al tempo della Cattedrale, ed. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006), 118–23. Caracciolo, Enrichetta, Misteri del chiostro napoletano, ed. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (1864; repr. Florence: Giunti, 1986). Carcano, Giulio (ed.), Lettere di Massimo d’Azeglio a sua moglie Luisa Blondel (Milan: Fratelli Rechiedei and P. Carrara, 1870). Carelli, Augusto, Emma Carelli: trent’anni di vita del teatro lirico (Rome: Casa Libraria Editrice, 1932). Carlson, Marvin, The Italian Shakespearians: Performances by Ristori, Salvini and Rossi in England and America (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985). Cassese, Leopoldo, La spedizione di Sapri (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 1969). Castromediano, Sigismondo, Carcere e galerie politiche. Memorie, 2 vols. (Lecce: Salentina, 1895). Catelani, Angelo, Cataloghi della musica di composizione e proprietà di M Angelo Catelani, ed. Luigi Francesco Valdrighi (Modena: Soliani, 1893). Cavour, Camillo Benso di, Il carteggio Cavour–Nigra dal 1858 al 1861, 4  vols. (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1961). Celletti, Rodolfo, ‘Caratteri della vocalità di Verdi’, in Atti del iiio congresso internazionale di studi verdiani, 12–17 giugno 1972. Il teatro e la musica di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Mario Medici and Marcello Pavarani (Parma: Istituto di Studi Verdiani, 1974), 81–88.

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­Bibliograph   ‘La vocalità romantica’, in Storia dell’opera, 3 vols., ed. Guglielmo Barblan and Alberto Basso (Turin: UTET, 1977), vol. iii, 105–262. Cesari, Gaetano and Alessandro Luzio (eds.), I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (1913; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1987). Chadwick, Henry, The Early Church (London: Penguin Books, 1967). Chorley, Henry Fothergill, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2  vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). Chusid, Martin (ed.), Verdi’s Middle Period: Source Studies, Analysis and Performance Practice (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Cimegotto, Cesare, Arnaldo Fusinato: studio biografico-­critico (Verona: Fratelli Drucker, 1898). Ciompi, Luc, and Jaak Panksepp, ‘Energetic Effects of Emotions on Cognitions: Complementary Psychobiological and Psychosocial Findings’, in Consciousness and Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice and Selective Perception, ed. Ralph D. Ellis and Natika Newton (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005), 23–56. Cirani, Paola, Maria Luigia e la musica (Mantua: Edizioni Postumia, Publi Paolini, 1999). Clément, Catherine, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Virago Press, 1989). Codemo, Luigia, Pagine famigliari, artistiche, cittadine (1750–1850) (Venice: Marco Visentini, 1875). Cohen, Ralph and Michael S. Roth (eds.), History and …: Histories within the Human Sciences (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995). Cohen, Thomas V., Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Colombi, Marchesa (Maria Antonietta Torriani Torelli-­Viollier), ‘Le affittacamere’, Senz’amore (1883; repr. Milan: Alfred Brigola, n.d). Conati, Marcello, La bottega della musica: Verdi e La Fenice (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1983).   ‘Il cantante in scena … fuoco, anima, nerbo ed entusiasmo …’, in La realizzazione scenica dello spettacolo verdiano. Atti del congresso internazionale di studi, Parma, 28–30 settembre 1994, ed. Pierluigi Petrobelli and Fabrizio Della Seta (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1996), 265–72.   Giuseppe Verdi: Guida alla vita e alle opere (Pisa: ETS, 2003).   Rigoletto: Un’ analisi drammatico-­musicale (Venice: Marsilio, 1992).   Verdi: interviste e incontri (Turin: EDT, 2000). Conati, Marcello, and Mario Medici (eds.), Verdi–Boito Correspondence, trans. W. Weaver (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Contessa Lara (Evelina Cattermole), L’innamorata (1892; repr. Catania: N. Giannotta, 1901). Conti, Bruna and Alba Morino (eds.), Sibilla Aleramo e il suo tempo: vita raccontata e illustrata (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981). Corciulo, Maria Sofia, ‘A Woman Patriot and Fighter for Italy’s Unity and Freedom: Antonietta De Pace in Southern Italy’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 24 (2004), 1: 199–206. Corsini, Carlo and Pier Paolo Viazzo (eds.), The Decline of Infant and Child Mortality: The European Experience, 1750–1990 (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997).

­Bibliograph Cowgill, Rachel and Hilary Poriss (eds.), The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012). Craven, Pauline de la Ferronnays, A Sister’s Story, trans. Emily Bowes (1868; 5th edn, London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1882). d’Amelia, Marina, La mamma (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005). Danna, Daniela, Amiche, compagne, amanti. Storia dell’amore tra donne (Trento: Editrice UNI Service, 2003). D’Arcais, Francesco Flores, ‘Giuseppe Verdi e la musica italiana’, in Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti (March 1868), vol. vii, 566–75. Davidson, Roger and Lesley A. Hall (eds.), Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870 (New York: Routledge, 2001). Davis, John A., ‘Italy’, in The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-­Century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 190–228.   ‘Italy 1796–1870: The Age of the Risorgimento’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford University Press, 1997), 177–209. Davis, John A. and Paul Ginsborg (eds.), Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento: Essays in Honour of Denis Mack Smith (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Davis, Tracy C., ‘Questions for a Feminist Methodology in Theatre History’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1989), 59–81. d’Azeglio, Costanza, Souvenirs historiques de la marquise Constance d’Azeglio née Alfieri (Rome, Turin, Florence: Bocca Frères, 1884). d’Azeglio, Massimo, I miei ricordi (Naples: Bideri, 1908). De Giorgio, Michela, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 1992). De Giorgio, Michela and Christiane Klapisch-­Zuber (eds.), Storia del matrimonio (Bari: Laterza, 1996). Degrada, Francesco (ed.), Giuseppe Verdi: l’uomo, l’opera, il mito (Milan: Skira, 2000).   Verdi e la Scala (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001). De Grazia, Victoria, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Oxford and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Della Peruta, Franco (ed.), Scrittori politici dell’Ottocento, vol. i, Giuseppe Mazzini e i democratici (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969). Della Seta, Fabrizio, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Marco Marica (eds.), Verdi 2001. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, New York, New Haven 24 gennaio–1o  febbraio 2001, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2003). DeNora, Tia, ‘The Biology Lessons of Opera Buffa: Gender, Nature and Bourgeois Society on Mozart’s buffa Stage’, in Opera buffa in Mozart’s Vienna, ed. Mary Hunter and James Webster (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 146–64. de Nunzio Schilardi, Wanda, Matilde Serao: giornalista (con antologia di scritti rari) (Lecce: Milella, 1986). De Van, Gilles, Verdi’s Theater: Creating Drama through Music, trans. Gilda Roberts (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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­Bibliograph Diderot, Denis, Oeuvres de Théâtre de M. Diderot avec un discours sur la poésie dramatique, 2 vols. (Paris: Duchesne and Delalain, 1771). Di Gregorio Casati, Marisa, Franca Cella and Madina Ricordi (eds.), Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi 1882– 1885 (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1994). Di Tondo, Ornella, La censura sui balli teatrali nella Roma dell’Ottocento (Turin: UTET, 2008). Dodi, Luisa and Maria Luigia Saibene, ‘Amicizia, musica e teatro nelle lettere di Antonio Papadopoli a Giuditta Pasta (1829–1836)’, Storia in Lombardia, 3 (2007): 93–141. Downes, Stephen, ‘Musical Pleasures and Amorous Passions: Stendhal, the Crystallization Process, and Listening to Rossini and Beethoven’, 19th-­Century Music, 26 (2003), 3: 235–57. Drinker, Sophie, Music and Women: The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music (New York: Coward McCann, 1948). Dubos, René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Duby, Georges and Michelle Perrot (eds.), Storia delle donne in Occidente. L’Ottocento (Bari: Laterza, 2007). Duggan, Christopher, Creare la nazione. Vita di Crispi (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 2000).   The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). Dumas, Alexandre, La Dame aux camélias, trans. David Coward (Oxford University Press, 1986). Dupré, Giovanni, Pensieri sull’arte e ricordi autobiografici (Florence: Le Monnier, 1879). Durante, Sergio, ‘The Opera Singer’, in Opera Production and Its Resources, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 345–418. Eckermann, Johann Peter and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850). Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall and Gert Hekma (eds.), Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories (Manchester University Press, 1999). Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning, ‘Conventions of Prayer in Some 19th-­Century Operas’, Musical Times, 146 (2005), 1893: 45–60. Edwards, Geoffrey and Ryan Edwards, The Verdi Baritone: Studies in the Development of Dramatic Character (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). Ellis, Ralph D. and Natika Newton (eds.), Consciousness and Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice and Selective Perception (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005). Emma (Emilia Ferretti-­Viola), Una fra tante (1878; repr. Rome: Lucarini, 1988). Fabbri, Paolo, ‘Istituti metrici e formali’, in Storia dell’opera italiana, vol. vi, Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Turin: EDT/Musica, 1988), 163–233. Fanning, Ursula, Gender Meets Genre: Women as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002). Fantozzi Micali, Osanna and Piero Roselli, Le soppressioni dei conventi a Firenze: riuso e trasformazioni dal sec. XVIII in poi (Florence: LEF, 1980). Farrell, Joseph and Paolo Puppa (eds.), The Cambridge History of Italian Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

­Bibliograph Fattorini, Emma, ‘In viaggio dalla Madonna’, in Donna e fede. Santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Bari: Laterza, 1994), 495–515. Feldman, Martha, ‘The Absent Mother in Opera Seria’, in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton University Press, 2000), 29–46. Ferrari, Paolo-­Emilio, Spettacoli drammatico-­musicali e coreografici in Parma dall’anno 1628 all’anno 1883 (Parma 1884; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1969). Ferrucci, Caterina Franceschi, Degli studi delle donne, 4 vols. (Turin: Pomba, 1853).   Della educazione intellettuale: libri quattro indirizzati alle madri italiane (Turin: Pomba, 1849).   Della Repubblica in Italia. Considerazioni (Milan: Vallari, 1848).   Epistolario di Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, edito ora la prima volta, con lettere di scrittori illustri a lei, ed. Giuseppe Guidetti (Reggio Emilia: Guidetti, 1910).   Rosa Ferrucci e alcuni suoi scritti (Florence: Barbèra and Bianchi, 1858). Fileti, Concettina Ramondetta, Poesie (Imola: I. Galeati, 1876). Filippini, Nadia Maria, ‘Donne sulla scena politica: dalle Municipalità del 1797 al Risorgimento’, in Donne sulla scena pubblica: società e politica in Veneto tra Sette e Ottocento, ed. Nadia Maria Filippini (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2006), 81–137. Filippini, Nadia Maria (ed.), Donne sulla scena pubblica: società e politica in Veneto tra Sette e Ottocento (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2006). Fornari, Carlo, Maria Luigia: un amore di donna (Parma: Palatina Editrice, 1997). Foscolo, Ugo Scritti letterari e politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. Giovanni Gambarin (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1972). Fourier, Charles, ‘Des Trois Groupes d’ambition, d’amour et de famillisme’, in Manuscrits de Fourier (Paris, 1849), 141.   Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, ou Invention du procédé d’industrie attrayante et naturelle distribuée en séries passionnées (Paris: Bossange, 1829). Franchini, Silvia, Editori, lettrici e stampa di moda: giornali di moda e di famiglia a Milano (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2002). Frassi, Giovanni (ed.), Epistolario di Giuseppe Giusti, 2 vols. (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1859). Freeman, Daniel E., ‘La guerriera amante: Representations of Amazons and Warrior Queens in Venetian Baroque Opera’, Musical Quarterly, 80 (1996), 3: 431–60. Fuller, Margaret, Un’americana a Roma 1847–1849, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1986). Gallagher, Catherine and Thomas Laqueur (eds.), The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). Galli, Quirino, ‘Il teatro a Viterbo durante la Repubblica Romana’, Biblioteca e Società, 4 (1980), 1: 37–42. Garibaldi, Giuseppe, Memorie di Giuseppe Garibaldi date in luce da Alessandro Dumas, trans. Piero Veroli (Florence: Fioretti, 1860).   I mille (1873; repr. Bologna: L. Cappelli, 1982). Garibaldi, Luigi Agostino (ed.), Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio ad Antonio Barezzi (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1931).

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­Bibliograph Sarogni, Emilia, Salvatore Morelli. L’Italia e la Donna (Turin: Daniela Piazza, 2004). Sarti, Roland, Mazzini: La politica come religione civile (Rome-­Bari: Laterza, 2005). Sartori, Claudio, Casa Ricordi: Profilo storico. Itinerario grafico editoriale (Milan: Ricordi, 1958). Savini, Medoro, Laura Beatrice Oliva-­Mancini: studio (Florence: Galletti, Romei, 1869). Sawall, Michael, ‘“Viva V.E.R.D.I.”: Origine e ricezione di un simbolo nazionale nell’ anno 1859’, in Verdi 2001. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, New York, New Haven 24 gennaio– 1o febbraio 2001, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Marco Marica, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2003), vol. i, 123–31. Scaraffia, Lucetta, ‘“Il Cristianesimo l’ha fatta libera, collocandola nella famiglia accanto all’uomo” (dal 1850 alla Mulieris Dignitatem)’, in Donna e fede. Santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1994), 441–94. Scaraffia, Lucetta and Gabriella Zarri (eds.), Donna e fede. Santità e vita religiosa in Italia (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1994). Scaramuzza, Emma, ‘Dalle madri della patria alla cittadinanza sociale. Il caso lombardo’, in Cantieri di Storia iii: Terzo incontro Sissco sulla storiografia contemporaneistica in Italia (Bologna, 22–24 settembre 2005) (www.sissco.it/). Scherer, Klaus R. and Marcel R. Zentner, ‘Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules’, in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (Oxford University Press, 2001), 361–92. Scott, Joan, ‘Experience’ [1993], in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 57–71. Senici, Emanuele, ‘Verdi’s Falstaff at Italy’s Fin de Siècle’, Musical Quarterly, 85 (2001), 2: 274–310. Serao, Matilde, Addio, amore! All’amica morta (Naples: Giannini e figli, 1890). Servadio, Gaia, The Real Traviata: The Life of Giuseppina Strepponi, Wife of Giuseppe Verdi (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994). Shorter, Edward, Women’s Bodies: A Social History of Women’s Encounter with Health, Ill-­health, and Medicine (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1997). Siddons, Henry, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, adapted to the English Drama, from a work on the same subject by M. Engel (London: Richard Phillips, 1807). Smart, Mary Ann, ‘“Cadere in ginocchio”: Melodrama and the Erasure of the Body in Middle­Period Verdi’, in Verdi 2001. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, New York, New Haven 24 gennaio–1o febbraio 2001, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Marco Marica, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2003), vol. ii, 855–77.   ‘Liberty On (and Off ) the Barricades: Verdi’s Risorgimento Fantasies’, in Making and Remaking Italy: the Cultivation of National Identity Around the Risorgimento, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna Von Henneberg (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 103–18.   Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-­Century Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).   ‘“Proud, Indomitable, Irascible”: Allegories of Nation in Attila and Les Vêpres siciliennes’, in Verdi’s Middle Period: Source Studies, Analysis and Performance Practice, ed. Martin Chusid (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 227–56.   ‘Ulterior Motives: Verdi’s Recurring Themes Revisited’, in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton University Press, 2000), 135–159.

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­Bibliograph Tiby, Ottavio, Il Real Teatro Carolino e l’Ottocento musicale palermitano (Florence: Olschki, 1957). Tomalin, Margaret, The Fortunes of the Warrior Heroine in Italian Literature: An Index of Emancipation (Ravenna: Longo, 1982). Tommaseo, Niccolò, Dell’educazione: scritti varii (Lugano: G. Ruggia, 1836).   Delle nuove speranze d’Italia, presentimenti (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1848). Tonelli, Marta Marri, Andrea Maffei e il giovane Verdi (Riva del Garda: Museo Civico, 1999). Treitler, Leo, ‘History and Music’, in History and …: Histories within the Human Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 209–30. Ubersfeld, Anne, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (University of Toronto Press, 1999). Valdrighi, Luigi Francesco and Giorgio Ferrari-­Morena, Cronistoria dei teatri di Modena dal 1539 al 1871 del maestro Alessandro Gandini arrichita d’interessanti notizie e continuata sino al presente (Modena: Tipografia Sociale, 1873). Vecchi, Candido Augusto, Italia: Storia di due anni 1848–1849 (Turin: Claudio Perrin, 1851). Venanzio, Girolamo, ‘Amore di un sesso per l’altro’, in La sposa e la madre. Scelta di prose e poesie di scrittori antichi e moderni intorno al matrimonio. Lettura per le donzelle e donativo di nozze, ed. Pietro Thouar (1856; 2nd edn, Florence: Felice Monnier, 1864), 72–3. Venosta, Felice, I martiri della rivoluzione lombarda (dal settembre 1847 al febbraio 1853) (Milan: Gernia & Gianuzzi, 1861). Verdi, Giuseppe, Il corsaro: melodramma tragico in tre atti, ed. Elizabeth Hudson (University of Chicago Press, 1999). Verdirame, Rita, Narratrici e lettrici (1850–1950). Le letture della nonna dalla contessa Lara a Luciana Peverelli (Padua: libreriauniversitaria.it, 2009). Veritas, V. (Virginia Paganini), La missione della donna (2nd edn, Florence: Cellini, 1884). Veronesi, Enrico (ed.), Un viaggio al femminile lungo quarant’anni. Dai congressi femministi italiani del 1908 alla caduta del fascismo: una rilettura della stampa, dei libri, delle leggi sulla donna: una ricerca negli archivi di Stato (Milan: M&B, 2004). Vertua Gentile, Anna, Come devo comportarmi? Libro per tutti (1897; 3rd edn, Milan: U. Hoepli, 1899). Viardot-Garcia, Pauline and Theodore Baker, ‘Pauline Viardot-­Garcia to Julius Rietz (Letters of Friendship)’, Musical Quarterly, 1 (1915), 3: 350–80. Visconti Venosta, Giovanni, Ricordi di gioventù: cose vedute o sapute 1847–1860 (Milan: L. F. Cogliati, 1906). Walker, Frank, The Man Verdi (London: J. M. Dent, 1962). Wanrooij, Bruno P. F., ‘Italy: Sexuality, Morality and Public Authority’, in Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories, ed. Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall and Gert Hekma (Manchester University Press, 1999), 114–37.   ‘“The Thorns of Love”: Sexuality, Syphilis and Social Control in Modern Italy’, in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (New York: Routledge, 2001), 137–59. Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (2nd edn, London and New York: Longman, 1989).

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­I n d e x

Abba, Giuseppe Cesare, 57 Abbadia, Luigia, 44, 46, 52–3, 225 Accursi, Michele, 217 Aida, 4, 8, 35, 67, 69, 85, 87, 101, 114–5, 117–8, 139, 184, 190–3, 200, 207, 211, 240 Albertini, Augusta, 32, 221 Aleramo, Sibilla (Rina Faccio), ­123, 148, 243 Alfieri, Vittorio, 126 Saul, 35, 127 Virginia, 126–8 Alzira, 6, 8, 49, 50, 100, 237, 240, 260 Amari, Michele, 37 Anicet-­Bourgeois, Auguste, 3, 58 Antinori, marchese, 229 Apolloni, Giuseppe Adelchi, 234 Appiani, Giuseppina, 206 Ariosto, Ludovico Orlando furioso, 25 Aroldo, 251 Arrivabene, Opprandino, 1, 70, 207, 229 Attila, 4, 8, 25, 35–6, 38, 46, 49–53, 55, 61–3, 179, 205, 211, 222, 225, 238, 260 Auber, Daniel François Esprit La Muette de Portici, 19, 20 Auden, W. H., 179 audience, 1–3, 5, 9, 10–14, 16, 17, 20–1, 29–30, 37, 58, 68, 72, 85, 89, 105, 120, 124, 132–3, 140, 150, 151, 155, 156, 161, 175, 177–80, 185, 186, 188–95, 209 emotional contagion, 12–13, 21, 141 female spectators, 2, 9, 13–23, 33, 49, 55, 96, 115, 124, 129, 138–9, 141, 173, 189, 200, 211 and politics, 30, 31–8, 40, 42, 45–6, 50–2, 74 Balbo, Cesare, 146, 237 Baldare, Leone Emanuele, 166 Balzac, Honoré de Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, 130 Barbiera, Raffaello, 207

Barbieri-­Nini, Marianna, 10, 59–61, 165 Barezzi, Antonio, 130, 183 Barezzi, Margherita, 93, 183 baritone, 5, 8, 43, 112 Barnum, Phineas Taylor, 45 Basevi, Abramo, 41–2, 47, 53, 74, 112, 114, 123, 129, 138, 155, 157, 185, 189 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 189 bass, 17, 59 Bassi, Ugo, 76 Batilde di Turena. See Les Vêpres siciliennes Battaglia, Giacinto, ­9 Battistotti Sassi, Luisa, 54, 66 Battle of Nations, 98 Beauharnais, Joséphine de, 97 Beethoven, Ludwig van Fidelio, 46 Belgioioso, Cristina Trivulzio di, 34, 56, 98–9, 146 Bellaigue, Camille, 196 Bellincioni, Gemma, 241 Bellini, Vincenzo Beatrice di Tenda, 148, 250 I Capuleti e i Montecchi, 21 I puritani, 35, 114 Il pirata, 147, 149, 250 Norma, 19, 25, 35, 67, 148, 164 Bendazzi, Luigia, 240 Benvenuti, Antonietta, 55 Berchet, Giovanni, 34, 166 Berlioz, Hector, 109 Benvenuto Cellini, 73 Bermani, Benedetto, 74 Bianchetti, Emilia (suor Crocifissione), 90–1 Bianchi, 225 Bianchi-­Giovini, Aurelio, 65 Bizet, Georges Carmen, 67, 115, 193 Blanc, Louis, 163

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­Inde Boccabadati, Virginia, 132–3, 189, 190 Boccacio, Giovanni Decameron, 155 Boito, Arrigo, 3, 85, 87, 90, 108, 180, 193–5, 209 Boito, Camillo, 180 Bolza, Luigi, 30, 51 Bombelles, Charles-­René de, 239 Bonaparte, Prince Jérôme, 160–1 Boniforti, Carlo Giovanna di Fiandre, 54 Borghi-­Mamo, Erminia, 89 Borsi, Carlo Antonio, 113 Bosio, Angiolina, 132 Botto, Domenico Francesco, 28 Bourgeois, Eugène, 149 Brambilla, Teresa, 222 Brecht, Bertolt, 11, 13, 32, 35 Mother Courage, 11 Verfremdungseffekt, 11 Brenna, Guglielmo, ­217 Brighenti, Marianna, 198–9, 201 Brighenti, Nina, 198 Britten, Benjamin, 214 Brunacci, Angelo, 225 Burke Honan, Michael, 32, 54 Butler, Josephine, 137 Buttà, Giuseppe, 57 Byron, George Gordon, 6th baron, 3 The Corsair, 50, 60 The Two Foscari, 46–7 Caffi, Ippolito, 57 Calderini, Angelo, 44 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 9 Calvini, Italo, 94 Cammarano, Salvadore, 3, 5, 28, 68, 93, 100, 113, 165, 166, 184, 221, 227, 242, 244 Campanari, Umberto, 180 Camuri, Pietro, 32 Cantù, Cesare, 29, 219 Caracciolo, Enrichetta, 82, 203 Carelli, Emma, 205 Carlo II, duke of Parma, 160 Carlo III, duke of Parma, 128–9 Caroline of Brunswick, 20 Carrara, Filomena Maria Verdi, 174, 180

Casoni, Guido, 93, 110 castrato, 26, 43, 68 Cataneo, Aurelia, 90 Catelani, Angelo, 30 Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 6, 28, 80, 133, 134, 138, 146, 160–1, 203, 235, 252–3 censorship, 3, 30, 34, 36, 38, 43, 53, 60, 68, 74–6, 85, 100, 104, 113–14, 118, 124, 128, 133, 154, 159, 181, 185, 189, 220 Charles d’Anjou, 37 Cherubini, Luigi Médée, 148 Chorley, Henry Fothergill, 20 cicisbeismo, 146, 249 Cimegotto, Cesare, 44 Cinque Giornate, 43, 54 Cirelli, Camillo, 254 Clara di Perth. See Rigoletto Coccia, Carlo Caterina di Guisa, 128 Codemo, Luigia, 48, 57 Codice civile italiano, 5, 147, 203 Codice civile Pisanelli, 5, 177 Codice civile napoleonico, ­203 Codice Napoleone il Grande pel regno d’Italia, 147 Codice penale toscano, 122 Codice Pisanelli. See Codice civile italiano Coffa Caruso, Mariannina, 144–5, 163 Collegno, Giacinto Provana di, 192 Collegno, Margherita Trotti Bentivoglia Provana di, 192 Colloredo, Marie Victoire, 239 Colombi, Marchesa (Maria Antonietta Torriani Torelli-­Viollier), 138 Comello, Maria Montalban, 203 Cominazzi, Pietro, 191 Comitato politico femminile, 49 Confalonieri, Teresa Casati, 48 Congress of Vienna, 14, 42, 98 Conti, Maria, 65–6 contralto, 26, 79, 90 Corelli, Pietro, 37 Cortesi, Antonio, 58 Corvetti, Placida, 167 Craven, Pauline de la Ferronnays, 20, 188 Crescentini, Girolamo, 68

­Inde Crispi, Francesco, 36, 138, 146 Czoernig-­Czernhausen, Karl von, 29 Dante Alighieri, 56, 99, 110 D’Arcais, Francesco Flores, 74 d’Azeglio, Costanza, 44, 74 d’Azeglio, Luisa Blondel, 74 d’Azeglio, Massimo, 29, 31, 74 d’Azeglio, Roberto, 74 De Bassini, Achille, 43 De Boni, Filippo, 31 de Crescenzo, Marianna (La Sangiovannara), 54 De Giuli Borsi, Teresa, 44–6, 64, 113 De Pace, Antonietta, 49, 255 De Sanctis, Caterina, 174, 262 De Sanctis, Cesare (Cesarino), 133, 174, 190, 212–3, 242 De Val, Antonio, 26 Del Buono, Filippo, 167 Demaldé, Giovanni (Finola), 242 Diderot, Denis, 8 Don Carlos, 4, 8, 64, 69, 85, 118–21, 142, 148, 160–1, 191, 211, 250, 253, 282 Donato, Rosa, 54 Donizetti, Gaetano, 3, 25, 42, 45 Anna Bolena, 17, 250 Don Pasquale, 202 Gemma di Vergy, 35, 45, 217, 250 Il furioso nell’isola di San Domingo, ­149 L’elisir d’amore, 32, 202 La Fille du régiment, 164 Le Duc d’Albe, 25, 37, 64 Les Martyrs, 68 Linda di Chamounix, 51 Lucia di Lammermoor, 68, 213, 217 Lucrezia Borgia, 26, 128, 164, 213, 217 Maria de Rudenz, 217 Maria Stuarda, 217 Marino Faliero, 250 Otto mesi in due ore, 46 Poliuto, 68 Roberto Devereux, 217, 250 Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, 217, 250 Dono, Cecilia, 226 Dottesio, Luigi, 48 Draneht, Paul Bey, 258

Du Locle, Camille, 3, 119, 161–2 Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 3, 5, 10, 130, 188 La Dame aux camélias, 11, 113, 130, 189 Dumas, Alexandre, père, 66 Dupré, Giovanni, 88 Duse, Eleonora, 89 Duveyrier, Charles, 37 en travesti roles, 26 Engel, Johann Jacob, 180–1, 188 Ernani, 8, 26, 30, 48, 50, 217, 225, 256, 260 Escott, Lucy, 30 Escudier, Léon, 43, 65, 258, 260 Eugénie de Montijo, empress of France, 40 Faccio, Franco, 87 Falstaff, 5, 8, 142, 175, 198–202, 208–9, 211, 236 Fambri, Paolo, 102 Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria, 160 Ferdinando II delle Due Sicilie, 65 Ferni, Virginia, 89 Ferrarini, Giulio Cesare, 189 Ferretti, Jacopo, 212 Ferronnays, Albert de la, 17–21, 186 Ferronnays, Alexandrine d’Alopeus de la, 17–21, 186 Ferronnays, Olga de la, 186, 188 Ferrucci, Caterina Franceschi, 29, 34, 41, 164, 177, 204 Ferrucci, Rosa, 228 Ferrucci, Vittoria, 177 Fibich, Zdenĕk Sarká, ­230 Fileti, Concettina Ramondetta, 56–7, 63 Filippi, Filippo, 120 Flaùto, Vincenzo, 221 Focosi, Roberto, 6, 8, 165, 167 Fourier, Charles, 111, 130 Francesco IV of Modena, 160 Franchi, Anna, 148 Franz II of Austria, 97 Franz Joseph I of Austria, 65 Frassi, Giovanni, 31 Fratelli Marzi, 230 Frezzolini, Erminia, 10, 73–4, 76, 79 Fuller, Margaret, 34–5, 54–5

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288

­Inde Gabbi, Adalgisa, 88–9 Gabussi, Rita, 173 Gaggio, Giacomo, 48 Gail, Sophie, 17 Gaisruck, Karl, archbishop of Milan, 73–4 Galli, Ernesta, 65–6 Galli, Selene, 65 Garbin, Edoardo, 209 Garibaldi, Anita, 55, 57 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 28, 31, 56–7, 80, 82, 146, 203 Gariboldi, Rosalia, 226 Gazzaniga, Marietta, 44–6 Gazzoletti, Antonio, 219 Gentile, Anna Vertua, 103, 109 Gerusalemme. See Jérusalem Ghidini, Livia, 44 Ghislanzoni, Antonio, 3, 35, 43, 46, 53, 191 Giacosa, Giuseppe, 214 Giarelli, Francesco, 90–1 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 78, 81 Giovanna d’Arco, 4, 6, 8, 30, 43, 50, 50, 53, 57, 61, 64, 74, 79, 83, 92, 102, 112, 179, 181, 184, 185, 187, 190, 260 Giovanna de Guzman. See Les Vêpres siciliennes Giovine Italia, 31 Giraldoni, Leone, 43 Giraud, Giovanni, 49 Giusti, Giuseppe, 28, 65–6 Giustinian, Elisabetta Michiel, 55 Giustiniani, Anna (Nina), 249 Gnone, Francesco, 225 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 68, 178 Faust, 68 Grossi, Tommaso, 3, 74, 78 I Lombardi alla prima crociata, 72, 73, 77–8, ­164 Guérin, Eugénie de, 188 Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico, 29, 43 Guerrini, Virginia, 260 Guéymard, Pauline, 121 Guglielmo Wellingrode. See Stiffelio Gurrieri, Raffaele, 135 Gutiérrez, Antonio García, 3, 5, 166 El trovador, 166 Hayez, Francesco, 41, 192, 222 Hicks, George Elgar, 105

Hoar, Elizabeth, 228 Hohenstein, Adolf, 209 Hugo, Victor, 3–4, 9, 128 Angelo, tyran de Padoue, 149 Hernani, 26 Le Roi s’amuse, 114, 118, 121–3, 127 Les Misérables, 178 Marion Delorme, 113 I due Foscari, 8, 27, 45, 46, 48–50, 59, 142, 165, 260 I Lombardi alla prima crociata, 4, 8, 30, 35, 46, 49, 67, 69, 72–80, 83–5, 92, 96, 101, 164–7, 199, 215, 240, 260 I masnadieri, 8, 32, 35, 50, 96, 103–6, 108, 117, 183, 205, 208, 237, 241 I vespri siciliani. See Les Vêpres siciliennes Ibsen, Henrik Ghosts, 148 Il corsaro, 4, 8, 46, 50, 59–62, 150, 183, 187, 205, 261 Il trovatore, 4, 8, 30, 46, 49, 68–9, 83, 85, 93, 99, 101, 103, 107–8, 110, 131, 165–9, 173–5, 178–9, 185, 190, 211, 230, 256–7 impresario, 2, 30, 32, 45, 68, 73, 113, 205 Italian unification, 23, 26, 28, 37, 40, 64, 74, 82, 95, 102, 106, 116, 122, 134, 143, 147, 160, 176, 203, 204 Ivanov, Nikolay, 17, 20, 21 Jacovacci, Vincenzo, 68 Jerome of Stridon, Saint, 69 Jérusalem, 75–6, 234, 274 Gerusalemme, 75 Joan of Arc, Saint, 26, 56, 61, 181–2 Johnson, Ewart, 188 Jolanda (Maria Majocchi Plattis), 116, 209 Judith, 56, 61, 63 Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg, 97 Kärntnertortheater, Vienna, 30 Koelman, Jan Philip, 228 Kramer, Teresa Berra, 40 Kuliscioff, Anna, 262 La battaglia di Legnano, 28, 42, 44, 64, 83, 142, 145, 149, 158, 160, 250

­Inde La forza del destino, 8, 64, 83–6, 91, 101–3, 112, 179, 190–1, 200, 207, ­211 La traviata, 3, 6, 8, 10, 20, 29, 30, 45, 68, 87, 101, 111–5, 129–38, 169, 170, 178, 186–91, 193, 200, 209, 211, 240, 257, 258 Lagrange, Anna, 57 Laïs, 130 Lampugnani, Giuditta, 6 Lara, Contessa di (Evelina Cattermole), 241 Lazzari, Dionisio, 157, 176 Lecour, Charles, 136 Lehmann, Lilli, 250 Leo XIII, pope, 80, 177 Leoncavallo, Ruggero Pagliacci, 149 Leopardi, Giacomo, 186 Leopardi, Paolina, 198–9, 201 Les Mystères de Paris, 130, 151, 154–5 Les Vêpres siciliennes, 8, 30, 37–40, 46, 61, 64, 179, 191, 221, 230, 279, 282 Batilde di Turena, 38 Giovanna de Guzman, 38, 46 Lessona, Michele, 198, 204 Levi, Samuele Giuditta, 65 Lind, Jenny, 45, 104–5 Lionello. See Rigoletto Loewe, Sofia, 50, 55 Lombroso, Cesare, 117, 134–6 Lorenzo, Achille di, 172 Lorenzo, Enrichetta di, 157–8, 161, 163, 172, 173, 175–7 Lorenzo Muti, Nicoletta di, 172, 175, 177 Lucca, Francesco, 20, 205 Lucca, Giovannina, 205 Luccardi, Vincenzo, 133 Luisa Miller, 6, 8, 45–6, 49, 66, 100, 118, 178, 183–4, 190, 241 Luzzatti, Isabella, 228 Luzzi, Luigi Le grandi epoche della casa di Savoia, 219 Macbeth, 4, 8, 25, 50, 52, 58–9, 65, 88, 93, 112, 142, 165, 167, 169, 170, 179, 199, 200, 211–2, 220, 223, 240 Maffei, Andrea, 3, 28, 163, 192, 206

Maffei, Clara, 28, 34, 55, 65, 70, 71, 88, 114, 163, 179, 205–7, 214, 233, 236 Maistre, Mme Baronne de, 257 Malaspina, Marchese Oberto, 45 Malibran, Maria, 18, 21–2 Malvezzi, Settimio, 222 Manari, Lorenzo, 225 Mancinelli, Luisa Cora, 248 Mancini, Carlo, 40 Mancini, Grazia, ­56 Manin, Daniele, 40, 48 Manin, Teresa, 48, 228 Mantegazza, Laura Solera, 203 Mantegazza, Paolo, 117, 145–6, 148, 201, 239, 243, 245 Mantegazza, Saule, 40 Manzoni, Alessandro, 41, 74, 207 I promessi sposi, 99 Marcello, Marco Marcelliano, 41, 46, 105, 185 Marchesi, Luigi, 43 Maretzek, Max, 45 Maria Anna, wife of Ferdinand I of Austria, 160 Maria Beatrice, wife of Francesco IV of Modena, 160 Maria Clotilde di Savoia, 160–1 Maria Cristina, wife of Ferdinando II delle Due Sicilie, 160 Maria Luigia, Duchessa di Parma, Piacenza e Guastalla, 14, 16, 17, 20, 30–1, 96–9, 128, 161, 220–1 Maria Sofia delle Due Sicilie, 57 Maria Teresa, wife of Carlo II, Duke of Parma, 160 Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, 97 Mariette, Auguste, 192 Marinelli, Tonina, 55 Marini, Antonietta Rainieri, 261 Marini, Carlotta Michelesi, 205 Marini, Ignazio, 43 Mario, Jessie White, 34, 57 Martelli, Angiola, 54 Martini della Torre, Maria, 228 Marzari, Carlo, 128 Mascagni, Pietro Cavalleria rusticana, 250 Masini, Giulio, 135

289

290

­Inde Mastriani, Giuseppe, 95, 103, 111, 116, 201 Mauceri, Ascenzio, 144 Maurel, Victor, 196 Mayr, Johann Simon Medea in Corinto, 148 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 28, 31, 41, 49, 65, 95, 146, 163 Mazzoldi, Luigi, 30 Mazzucato, Alberto, 30, 41–2, 47, 50–1, 53–4, 108, 167–168, 175 I due sergenti, 220 Melegari, Dora, 201 Mendelssohn, Felix, 69 Mercadante, Saverio Caritea, regina di Spagna, 25–6, 35 Doralice, 46 Emma d’Antochia, 225 Il bravo, ­164 Il giuramento, 149 Merelli, Bartolomeo, 30, 58, 73 Méry, Joseph, 3 Messa da requiem, 84, 191, 207 Metternich, Prince Klemens von, 97 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 30 Les Huguenots, 73, 140 mezzo-­soprano, 5, 112, 118, 183 Michelet, Jules, 117, 155–6 Mickiewicz, Adam, 186 Milli, Giannina, 34 Mirate, Raffaele, 225 Mistrali, Franco, 69 Modena, Giulia, 55 Modena, Gustavo, 27–9, 31, 34–5, 38, 43 Molino-­Colombini, Giulia, 34 Montebruno, Don Francesco, 174 Montenuovo, Albertine di, 239 Montenuovo, Wilhelm Albrecht di, 239 Montessori, Maria, 262 Monteverdi, Claudio Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, 217 Montmasson, Rosalie, 55 Morano, Giorgio, 144 Morelli, Salvatore, 203 Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson), 14 Mortara, Edgardo, 235 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Don Giovanni, 20

Mozzoni, Anna Maria, 5, 109, 137–8, 144, 203–4, 242 Mussolini, Benito, 204, 210 Muzio, Emanuele, 28, 89, 206, 241, 259 Nabucco, 8, 25, 35, 44, 46, 48–9, 58, 78–9, 93, 205, 225, 260 Nagel, Adelaide, 205 Napoleon I Bonaparte, 14, 81, 97–8, 133 Napoléon II, King of Rome, Duke von Reichstadt, 239 Napoleon III, 40, 160, 228 National Women’s Rights Convention, 6 naturalism, 9, 35 Neera (Anna Zuccari Radius), 110, 139, 141, 143 Neipperg, Adam Adalbert, Graf  von, 98 Nicotera, Giovanni, 49 Nieves, Teresa Dolores de las (suor Beatrice), 90–1 Ninon de l’Enclos, 130 Nisco, Niccolò, 226 Nuitter, Charles, ­253 Oberto, 1, 8, 174, 200, 205, 231 Olivari, Annetta, 65–6 Oriani, Alfredo, 147, 156 Otello, 1, 8, 61, 85–91, 110, 142, 145, 160, 177, 193–7, 211, 214, 259, 262 Pachta, Karl, 30 Pacini, Giovanni Medea, 148 Paganini, Virginia (V. Veritas), 106, 137, 148 Paladini, Luisa Amalia, 34 Pallavicino, Giorgio, 40 Pantaleoni, Romilda, 87–8 Papadopoli, Antonio, 227 Papadopoli, Spiridione, 228 Papadopoli, Teresa Mosconi, 34, 227 Paper, Ernestina, 262 Parent-­Duchâtelet, Alexandre, 130, 133–6 Paris Opéra, 37 Parodi, Teresa, 44–5 Pasqua, Giuseppina, 121 Pasta, Giuditta, 26, 45, 227 Pastro, Luigi, 226 Patti, Adelina, 189 Penco, Rosa, 190

­Inde Pepe, Guglielmo, 163 Percoto, Caterina, 34 Perego, Pietro, 30 Peri, Achille Tancreda, 45, 65 Perlasca, Giuseppina, 48 Pesci, Ettore, 17 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 99 Petrovich, Ginevra, 259 Piave, Francesco Maria, 3, 10, 11, 28, 47, 63, 118, 121, 125–6, 130, 146, 149, 151, 157, 165, 188 Picchi, Ermanno, 123–4 Piccolomini, Marietta, 132–3 Pilo, Rosolino, 36 Pirandello, Luigi, 89 Pisacane, Carlo, 49, 157–8, 163, 172, 176 Pius IX, Pope, 49, 71, 80–1, 110 Pius X, Pope, 70 Pizzi, Italo, 210 Plato, 95 Pochini, Carolina, 44 Poe, Edgar Allan, 178 Poerio, Carlo, 226 Poggi, Odile, ­49 Ponchielli, Amilcare La Gioconda, 149, 250 Marion Delorme, 87 Ponti Dell’Armi, Luigia, 30, 225 Porzi, Colomba Antonietti, 55 prima donna, 8–9, 32, 43, 51–2, 54, 79, 88, 143, 157, 165, 178, 200, 214 Puccini, Giacomo Manon Lescaut, 209 Tosca, 46 Purcell, Henry Dido and Aeneas, 187 Quintana, Manuel José, 9 Radetzky von Radetz, Josef, 31 Regli, Francesco, 27, 33 rescue opera, 46 Ricci, Federico La prigione d’Edimburgo, 173 Ricci, Luigi Un’avventura di Scaramuccia, 33

Ricciardi, Giuseppe, 31 Ricciardi, Irene, 31 Ricordi, Giovanni, 20, 75, 93, 146, 238 Ricordi, Giulio, 88–9, 180, 205, 209, 240, 244, 259–60 Rietz, Julius, 183 Rigoletto, 3, 8, 10, 30, 45, 83, 91, 103, 105–9, 112–4, 117, 118, 121–2, 123–9, 131, 139, 148–50, 165, 169, 170, 179, 184–5, 200, 208, 211, 230 Clara di Perth, 128 Lionello, 128 Viscardello, 128 Risorgimento, 26–31, 33, 35–7, 41, 77, 83, 95, 163–4, 166, 175, 204 Romani, Felice, 3, 26, 33, 46 Romani, Girolamo, 182 Roosevelt Tucker Macchetta, Blanche, 1–2, 87, 189, 194, 197, 211 Rossi, Ernesto, 194 Rossi, Isabella, 33 Rossini, Gioachino, 3, 41–2, 45, 68–9 Guillaume Tell, 35 Il barbiere di Siviglia, 44, 201 La donna del lago, 26 La gazza ladra, 18, 68 Mosè in Egitto, 68, 83 Otello, 26, 110, 148, 193–4 Semiramide, 25–6 Tancredi, 26 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 178 Rovani, Giuseppe, ­213 Saavedra, Ángel de, 3, 84 Saint-­Saëns, Camille Samson et Dalila, 115 Salasco, General Carlo Canera di, 228 Salvini, Tommaso, 194 Salvini-­Donatelli, Fanny, 10 Samoyloff, Giulia, 30 Sannazzaro, Carolina, 44, 46 Sanvitale, Jacopo, 220 Sanvitale, Luigi, 220, 239 Savio Rossi, Olimpia, 43–4, 82, 189 Scalia, Alfonso, 40, 49 Scalia, Luigi, 49

291

292

­Inde Schiller, Friedrich, 3, 5 Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 181 Die Räuber, 104 Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien, 119, 161, 162 Kabale und Liebe, 118 Schulzová, Anezka, 230 Scott, Sir Walter The Bride of Lammermoor, 164 The Heart of the Midlothian, 173 Scribe, Eugène, 3, 37 Wlaska, ou Les Amazones de Bohème, 64 Scudo, Pierre, 40 Sebzeltern, Count, 17 Segurana, Caterina, 56, 228 Semeria, Giovanni, 92 Serao, Matilde, 140–1, 205 Settembrini, Alina Peret, 226 Settembrini, Luigi, 226 Shakespeare, William, 3–5, 9, 58, 88, 113, 208 Macbeth, 199 Othello, 85, 193 Sighele, Scipio, 202 Simon Boccanegra, 8, 43, 101–2, 165, 191, 200 Sismondi, Cinzica de’, 56, 228 slancio, 41–3, 47, 51, 59, 77, 112, 225 Slate, Ruth, 188 Solera, Antonio, 219 Solera, Temistocle, 3, 28, 58, 63, 72–3, 78, 181 Solera, Teresa Rusmini, 220 Somma, Antonio, 3, 64, 71–2 soprano, 10, 25, 30, 87, 101 Souliotes, 56 Souvestre, Émile, 3, 149 Le Pasteur d’hommes, 149–50, ­154 Souvestre, Émile and Eugène Bourgeois Le Pasteur, ou L’Évangile et le foyer, 149–51, 154–5 Spaur, Karl von, 49 Spaur, Teresa Giraud, 49 Spezia, Maria, 10 Staël, Anne-­Louise Germaine (Madame de), 61–3 Corinne, 198 Stamura, 56 Stefani, Guglielmo, 28 Stehle, Adelina, 209 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 35

Stiffelio, 8, 45, 68, 83, 142, 149–55, 156, 158–9, 162, 165–7, 170, 250, 251 Guglielmo Wellingrode, 251 Stocchi, Alessandro, 14–17 Stoltz, Rosine, 25 Stolz, Teresa, 93, 146, 173, 180, 205, 207 Strepponi Verdi, Giuseppina, 44, 70–1, 82, 93–5, 113, 130–2, 143, 146, 173–4, 205–7, 209 Strozzi, Rosa, 55 Sue, Eugène Les Mystères de Paris, 130 Superchi, Antonio, 44 Tadolini, Eugenia, 32, 50–4, 227 Tamagno, Francesco, 71, 205 Tammeo, Giuseppe, 135 Tarchetti, Igino Ugo Fosca, 106 Tasso, Torquato La Gerusalemme liberata, 25 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 93 Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 1, 27, 29, 32, 36, 43–5, 48, 50, 52, 54, 58, 72–3, 75, 87, 120, 177, 191, 205, 209 Teatro Apollo, Rome, 133, 166 Teatro Argentina, Rome, 35 Teatro Carcano, Milan, 32, 40, 60 Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa, 44 Teatro Carolino, Palermo, 45 Teatro Comunale, Imola, 171 Teatro Comunale, Modena, 32 Teatro Costanzi, Rome, 89, 205 Teatro dei Concordi, Padua, 44 Teatro della Pergola, Florence, 54 Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, 17, 54, 117, 140, 167, 168, 190 Teatro La Fenice, Venice, 10, 25, 26, 44–5, 128, 155, 220, 228–9, 258, 260 Teatro Nuovo, Naples, 30 Teatro Regio, Parma, 14, 17, 44, 89, 128–9 Teatro Ducale, 14 Teatro Regio, Turin, ­209 Teatro San Benedetto, Venice, 10 Tenca, Carlo, 28, 41–2, 114, 163, 206 tenore di forza, 26 Teodorini, Elena, 89 Théâtre Ambigu-­Comique, Paris, 58

­Inde Thouar, Pietro, 99, 143–4 Tolstoy, Leo, 136 Tommaseo, Niccolò, 95, 111 Torresani di Lanzelfeld, Baron Carlo, 73 Turissi-­Colonna, Giuseppina, 228 Turolla, Emma, 89 Tzavellas, Lambros, 56 Tzavellas, Moscho, 56 Un ballo in maschera, 8, 43, 142, 158–60, 191, 211, 250 Un giorno di regno, 8, 44 Vaccai, Nicola Giulietta e Romeo, 256 Valentino, Rosa, 226 Varesi, Felice, 222 Vatican, 26, 80, 82 Vela, Vincenzo Desolazione, 192 Venanzio, Girolamo, 95 Ventura, Marietta, 146 Viardot, Pauline Garcia, 183 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, 40 Vietti, Carolina, 26 Vigna, Cesare, 70 Villamarina, Marchesa Carolina di, 161 Villamarina, Marchese Bernardo di, 161 Villanis, Angelo La spia, ovvero il merciaiuolo americano, 46 La vergine di Kent, 65 Viola-­Ferretti, Emilia (Emma), 137 Viscardello. See Rigoletto Visconti Venosta, Giovanni, 40 Vitali, Geremia, 74, 79 Vittorio Emanuele I, 160 Vittorio Emanuele II, 31, 40, 43, 160–1 Voltaire (François-­Marie Arouet), 3, 9 Alzire, ou les Américains, 100 Wagner, Richard, 1, 30, 205, 209 Weber, Carl Maria von, 30

Weigl, Helene, 11 Wenkstern, Jeanne de, 17 Werner, Zacharias, ­3 Attila, König der Hunnen, 61 Whitaker, Tina Scalia, 40, 49 women adultery, 99, 142, 145–9, 155, 157, 163, 208, 247, 252 code of honour, 102, 111, 122–4, 131, 149, 161, 170, 172, 198 domesticity, 9, 22, 53, 81, 92, 106, 109, 116, 131, 143, 162, 198, 200–1, 203, 206 education, 5, 20, 80, 82, 112, 116–7, 157, 164, 202, 203–4, 211 emancipation, 5, 6, 81, 135–6, 138, 156, 202–5, 247, 260 feminism, 92, 99, 137, 202–4 friendship, 201, 207 ideas of womanhood, 6, 46, 58, 67, 81, 105, 200, 202, 207 marriage, 15, 19, 80, 96–100, 109–10, 113, 116–7, 122–3, 129, 131–2, 134, 143–6, 155, 157, 160–1, 162–3, 169, 175–7, 198, 202–3, 206, 207, 239, 248 military combat, 53–8, 64, 66 mortality, 178–81, 183, 186, 188, 191 motherhood, 117, 164–6, 170–6 New Woman (La donna nuova), 202, 205–6, 209 political activism, 33, 43–6, 48–9, 65–6 prostitution, 2, 29, 65, 112–3, 123, 129–30, 133–8, 148, 158, 161, 169, 172, 189 religious orders, 69, 74, 81–2, 90–2, 101 sexual violence, 116, 121–6, 129, 137, 150, 155–7, 170 sexuality, 82, 100, 102, 111–13, 115–17, 129, 136, 157–8, 208–9 Zilli, Emma, 201, 209 Zingarelli, Niccolò Antonio Giulietta e Romeo, 67 Zola, Émile, 113

293