Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

6. 19th century.

(i) Opera.

(ii) Church music.

(iii) Instrumental music.

(iv) Musicology.

(v) Cultural systems and aesthetics.

Italy, §I, 6: 19th century art music

(i) Opera.

The multifarious activities of the previous century slackened at the beginning of the 19th and concentrated on musical theatre, where a code of communication between the composer and the Italian audience was firmly established. Whereas in the rest of Europe Romantic aspirations were expressed through instrumental music, in Italy this spirit was entirely manifested in opera; in fact the melodramma mirrored the behaviour of Italian society, in the manner of the novel in France, England and Russia. The middle classes began to rule the country even at the level of musical life, and publishers (such as Ricordi in Milan) and impresarios (such as Barbaia, Jacovacci, Lanari and Merelli) were the arbiters of operatic life. There was no place in the new century for a learned scholar like Padre Martini; his heirs, Padre Mattei at Bologna, Bonifazio Asioli at Milan and G.B. Baini at Rome, were restricted to a narrower sphere of activity. Men of culture were less important, while the clever impresario (often of humble origins) and the efficient publishers grew in power as they began to employ the medium of newspapers or new industrial techniques. Revolutionary opera, with its contemporary social implications, had little following in Italy. In his preface to the libretto of La congiura pisoniana (1797, Milan), F.S. Salfi presented an opera that aimed at ‘instruction’, at ‘the heart’ as well as ‘the ear’; but such purposes would have required a freer form like the opéra comique or the Singspiel, foreign to taste in Italy where opera sung from beginning to end was a deep-rooted tradition. The revolutionary storm shipwrecked many composers of the old school. Cimarosa and Paisiello led turbulent lives under revolutionary and Bourbon governments, and the peaceful life of the second half of the 18th century ended in a period of great confusion. Significantly, after starting conventional careers in Italy, the two greatest Italian composers of the age, Cherubini and Spontini, worked abroad and wrote operas in foreign languages. At the same time, at least in northern Italy, the scene was dominated by a foreigner, Simon Mayr, who introduced a type of serious, carefully orchestrated opera influenced by Gluck.

The Restoration period was brightly illuminated by Rossini, whose star rose in 1813 just as that of Napoleon was about to set. Rossini’s comic operas perfectly mirror the ‘average Italian’, with his disillusioned view of existence and his refusal to accept extreme solutions; similarly, the distinction between the Neapolitan and Venetian schools, between south and north, ended after 1815, when Barbaia summoned Rossini to Naples for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra. As his operas were produced throughout Italy, many composers such as Mayr, Pietro Generali and Nicola Vaccai, who a few decades earlier would have scored a deserved success in their respective centres, were eclipsed by Rossini; those who, like Pacini and Mercadante, competed with Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti on the one hand, and Verdi on the other, suffered even more from the comparison.

The musical unification of the country achieved by Rossini soon bore fruit; Bellini, a Sicilian, triumphed in Milan, while Donizetti, a Lombard, conquered Naples and Rome. Italy seemed smaller and more united, its boundaries increasingly connected by modern means of transport, its roads travelled by political exiles from one end of the country to the other. The number of major theatres was smaller than in the 18th century, but their prestige grew in inverse proportion, and La Fenice at Venice, La Scala at Milan, the Pergola at Florence, the Apollo and Argentina at Rome and the S Carlo at Naples were renowned throughout Italy. The export of Italian music, checked by the flourishing Romantic movement at the beginning of the century, was revived by Rossini; connections with Paris were renewed, and Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi followed in Rossini’s footsteps, while for nearly the whole of the century France acted as the channel through which English and German literature reached Italy.

Italian opera, though still based on the supremacy of the voice, was no longer a self-sufficient and united world. It had to adapt itself to Romantic ideals. One of the first results was the waning popularity of comic opera after the peak reached by Rossini. Works in the style continued to be written (for instance by Valentino and Vincenzo Fioravanti at Rome and Naples), but after Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (1832) the next comic masterpiece in Italy was Verdi’s Falstaff (1893). Meanwhile new sources were discovered in European fiction and literature and particularly in English history (after the downfall of Napoleon such subjects became very popular); they were treated with a modified form of Romanticism, as for instance in the librettos of Felice Romani, who remained faithful to classical rules of plot construction. However, a new feeling for specific environment and a new interest in the development of the emotions produced new forces in opera, directed essentially towards the creation of dramatic tensions by musical means. Principally in pursuance of this aim, the plots drawn from novels were reduced to stock situations, allowing the music to come into its own. Significantly, no major composer set Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, the greatest Italian novel, whose complexity of events and non-tragic dénouement found no echo in operatic forms.

Though intrinsically less perfect than his comic works, Rossini’s serious operas contained greater potential for development. A fine thread connects Piccinni’s Cecchina and Paisiello’s Nina to the Desdemona of Rossini’s Otello and through her to the heroines of Bellini and Donizetti, in whose operas love – a love thwarted by outside circumstances – forms the nucleus of the plot. Rossini also pointed the way to action through music, by the regular transference of the ensemble from comic into tragic opera. All these composers aimed, in different ways, at dramatic consistency. Bellini’s dramatic sense, particularly strong in Norma, was not allowed to prejudice the supremacy of bel canto but permeated and combined with the great voices of the epoch, Pasta, Malibran and above all Rubini, for whom Bellini wrote the first typical Romantic tenor roles (e.g. Gualtiero in Il pirata, 1827). Donizetti and Mercadante, from 1835 onwards, reflected their concern for action and consistency in trenchant and pithy thematic material and in a melodic line immediately responsive to expressive demands; they, rather than Bellini, were the direct precursors of early Verdi.

The literary polemics between classical and romantic conceptions were also applied to music, dissolving into a series of artificial antitheses long current in Italian musical circles: melody (exclusively the heritage of Italy) and harmony (an oltremontana, i.e. German, quality), voice and orchestra, bel canto and canto declamato, idealized history and everyday reality. The debate between the traditionalists (who included men of letters such as Carlo Botta, Giuseppe Carpani and Felice Romani) and the innovators was still going on in 1836, when Giuseppe Mazzini published his Filosofia della musica, which proclaimed the ‘emancipation from Rossini’, the birth of a music-drama based on stronger moral principles, with greater chorus participation, and the decline of the typical situation drama with its soprano and tenor lovers separated by the baritone. The debate was echoed in 1847 by the poet Giuseppe Giusti, who advised Verdi, after the production of Macbeth at Florence (where the first Italian performances of Robert le diable and Der Freischütz had been given in 1840 and 1843 respectively) to leave such fantastic plots to northern artists.

The renewal of musical theatre advocated by Mazzini was achieved in the art of Verdi, who perfectly expressed the ideals of the second half of the century. Verdi triumphed in Milan at a time when La Scala was dominated by Bartolomeo Merelli and the power of Ricordi was increasing through the absorption of smaller firms and the foundation (in 1842, the year of Nabucco) of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano. Verdi learnt from Rossini, in particular from the choral grandeur of Mosè, which in hastier style and with more pressing rhythms he transferred to the Risorgimento operas Nabucco, I lombardi alla prima crociata and La battaglia di Legnano (the last named was performed in 1849 at Rome, which had been abandoned by the pope and was governed by the republicans Mazzini, Armellini and Saffi).

The years 1848–9 were a watershed in 19th-century Italian music, and not only because of the death of Donizetti. The war against Austria produced a crisis in theatrical life; fewer people attended, the number of performances decreased, and celebrated singers like Erminia Frezzolini and Eugenia Tadolini either worked abroad or lost confidence in the managements. The failure of the national revolution led to a neglect of heroic themes in favour of individual dramas in which conflict raged in the soul and not on the battlefield. This tendency achieved perfection in Verdi’s operas Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, produced at Venice and Rome between 1851 and 1853. The primacy of the individual seemed to herald a revival of the stories about individual characters such as had been treated by Bellini and Donizetti, but the ordering of events was no longer in the hands of a librettist such as Romani. The learned Salvadore Cammarano, librettist of Lucia di Lammermoor, could not understand the characterization of Azucena conceived by Verdi in Il trovatore; a librettist like F.M. Piave, willing to follow the composer’s wishes in supplanting the aria with the scena, was more useful. This broadened conception is realized in all three operas, but the subject of La traviata, with its contemporary setting, best illustrates the spirit of the 1850s, although it was considered a bad influence by the leaders of the Risorgimento, who preferred high-minded subjects and saw a dangerously complacent sentimentality in the choice of a fashionably consumptive courtesan as heroine.

Verdi’s ascendancy over Italy throughout the second half of the century is significantly based entirely on public acclaim; intellectual and cultural circles were not won over until much later (through the influence of Toscanini around 1920). The ‘classicists’ considered Verdi’s early operas ‘noisy’ because of their abuse of the chorus and of martial rhythms. In the middle years of his career, the writers Giuseppe Rovani and Carlo Dossi, from the Milanese milieu that formed the cradle of Verdi’s art, continued to prefer the operas of Rossini. The critic Basevi, who found Rigoletto’s physical deformity unacceptable, showed that strong classicist prejudice remained even in 1859. After about 1860 Verdi aroused opposition less in the traditionalists than in the younger generation, interested in the novelties of European music and attracted to the cultural and technical ambitions of Meyerbeer, the elegant precision of Gounod and the dramatic ideals of Wagner (whose music was still little known in Italy, apart from the overtures to Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser).

During its early years (1861–70), the newly formed kingdom of Italy had naturally to stand comparison with other European countries and to discover by how much it lagged behind in the cultural and artistic fields. In spite of Verdi, there was much talk of decadence in opera and of the reforms needed in the management of theatres and schools. Musical education became a national responsibility, developing from seeds planted in northern Italy by the short-lived Napoleonic governments at the beginning of the century. The Milan Conservatory, which maintained high standards, was instituted in 1807 and set the pattern for conservatories founded in mid-century in Florence, Turin, Rome, Palermo, Venice and Bologna. It was a difficult time financially; in 1867 theatrical subventions were curtailed and taxes imposed on contracts and profits; the following year Broglio, the minister for education, drew up a scheme for an association to administer and direct the conservatories, with Rossini, then in the last year of his life, in Paris, as president. A similar commission, with Verdi as president, was set up in 1871 to reform the musical institutions. Even so, many young people felt that Italy could not satisfy their thirst for knowledge, and in 1861 Arrigo Boito and Franco Faccio went abroad with scholarships – a significant reversal of the trend that since the Renaissance had led students and scholars towards Italy.

As the music schools multiplied, there was a growing interest in chamber and symphonic music, mostly German; Germany, the country of technical excellence, was much admired by Italy in the 1870s, while political events caused a growing coldness towards France. In 1870 the critic Filippo Filippi published six reports in La perseveranza on the Wagner operas he had seen at Weimar; the following year at Bologna Angelo Mariani conducted Lohengrin, the first Wagner opera heard in Italy, which immediately aroused enthusiastic and polemical reactions throughout the country. A long-standing rivalry between Verdi and Wagner ensued. Essentially it was an extension of the traditional rivalry between opera and music drama, between voice and orchestra, between Italian and German music; unlike the otherwise similar dispute between Piccinni and Gluck, it was not carried on with 18th-century chivalry but, especially in the case of the rivalry between the two publishing houses Ricordi (Verdi’s publisher) and Lucca, with the insensitive hostility of modern business methods. The firm of Francesco Lucca, established in 1825, benefited greatly from the energies of Giovannina Strazza, wife of the founder. In opposition to Ricordi she too started (in 1847) a newspaper, L’Italia musicale; in an attempt to find an alternative to Verdi, she supported Mercadante, Pacini and other minor figures, including Salvi, Ricci and Petrella, and also zealously introduced into Italy the works of foreign composers, from Gounod, Halévy and Meyerbeer to Wagner.

Meanwhile, the more progressive of the generation of composers that followed Verdi and considered him outdated (though without specifically saying so), began to appear. The manifesto of this new movement, outlined by Boito in two articles that appeared in La perseveranza (1863–4), was summarized in four points: ‘the complete elimination of formula; the creation of form; the realization of the largest possible tonal and rhythmic development; the total embodiment of drama’. The practical realization of these aims was more tame, as was exemplified by Faccio’s Amleto (1865) and Boito’s Mefistofele (1868). Boito was a man of wide culture, the first Italian composer who was also an intellectual, and an adherent of the ‘Scapigliatura’, a forward-looking literary movement active in Milan. But in musical matters the ‘Scapigliati’ were Rossinians, while Boito’s modernism was largely intellectual; his covert antagonism to Verdi, therefore, changed quite naturally to sympathy and from 1881 to collaboration. Verdi, faced after 1860 with a transformation in Italian musical life, adopted two different attitudes – one a public resistance to innovation, the other a secret absorption of new ideas into his own operas, written at increasingly long intervals. After La traviata his choice of subjects, no longer confined to love, became much wider. Don Carlos, composed for Paris in 1867, is a more progressive work than either Amleto or Mefistofele, and its protagonist reflects more clearly than either of theirs the hectic excitement of the ‘Scapigliati’. Later the Messa da Requiem won over the Wagnerians, through Bülow. In his final operas, Otello and Falstaff, both on texts by Boito, Verdi banished all traces of closed form; in them he again confronted the basic myth of Romanticism, Shakespeare.

Verdi had no pupils and no real imitators. The opera composers who attempted, during the first years of Italian unity, to establish themselves in the small area left free by Verdi, all achieved one dazzling success that had no sequel. Filippo Marchetti’s Ruy Blas (1869) was produced at 60 theatres within two years; Il Guarany (1870), by the Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes, was admired by Verdi himself; after I goti (1873), Stefano Gobatti was for a short time hailed as ‘the new Verdi’; and Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (1876) was received, more justifiably, with exceptional enthusiasm that lasted longer. But none of these inaugurated a successful career for its composer, and all of them, despite a superficial similarity of dramatic content, differed from Verdi’s works in their ostentatious, neo-Romantic style or in their insistently picturesque detail. Even further from Verdi’s realism were those operas based on a different kind of plot: Antonio Bazzini’s Turanda (1867), coloured by the fairy-tale surrealism of Carlo Gozzi; Luigi Mancinelli’s Isora di Provenza (1884), produced at Bologna, the Wagnerian stronghold; and Loreley (1890) and La Wally (1892) by Alfredo Catalani, Bazzini’s pupil at Milan. In all these, and particularly Catalani’s, the spirit of northern fantasy crossed the Alps, and under the auspices of Wagnerian harmony it at last established a precarious foothold in Italian opera.

Wagner himself came to be better known; in 1883 the touring company managed by Angelo Neumann brought the Ring to Venice, Florence, Rome, Turin, Milan and Trieste. In 1888 the publishing house of Ricordi took over that of Lucca, and little by little the taste for novelty diminished. During the 1876–7 season Italian theatres still put on about 40 new operas, but public interest increasingly centred on successful works of the recent past, which were now the basis of the repertory. Innovation was regarded with scepticism, a sign of the decline of opera, at least in the sense of a common language uniting the musician and society, such as had prevailed at the beginning of the century. In the years immediately before the appearance of Puccini, the true face of the Italy of the time can be seen not in large-scale operas on historical subjects (which continued to appear, however) but in the salon song, a genre cultivated by refined singing teachers like Gaetano Palloni and Filippo Marchetti at Rome, Gaetano Braga at Milan, and the greatest of them all, Paolo Tosti, the darling of Roman aristocratic society until he settled in London in 1880. In his songs Tosti caught the flexible intimacy, the sentimental sheen characteristic of the age of King Umberto I behind its façade of pomp and grandeur (which inspired, for instance, the building of the Teatro Costanzi at Rome in 1880).

Italy, §I, 6: 19th century art music