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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
The historiography of Italian opera is particularly well suited to illustrate some problems in the general field of music history and musicology. On the one hand, there is little doubt that Italian opera belongs to the canon, not to say the museum, of learned western music; indeed, today's opera houses surpass concert halls in projecting the ‘museum character’ in which musical tradition seems ‘frozen’. On the other hand, it is also true that only in recent years has international musicology accepted Italian opera as unquestionably deserving of attention. The reasons for this delay are clear enough. Some were easily overcome, connected to the very history of our discipline: since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the musical language of Italian operatic composers diverged from the mainstream Austro-German tradition; the dramaturgy of Italian opera was difficult to understand in a cultural context moulded by Wagnerian theory and practice (in part also by Shakespeare, Schiller, etc.). Other factors, however, are more deeply embedded, and continue to have an effect even in intellectual conditions very different from those of traditional musicology. These include: the manner in which extra-artistic factors determine the operatic work; the various creative competencies that take part in operatic production; the considerable importance accorded to performers, particularly singers; the possibility that parts of an opera may be moved from one work to another, or from one author to another; the fact that in die history of Italian operatic conventions, shared codes and repetition of formulas often prevailed over the search for novelty.
1 This paper is an expanded version of my contribution to the round table on ‘Historiography’ at the 16th Congress of the International Musicological Society, held in London in August 1997. Like most panellists, I took as a starting point Harold Powers' ‘Musical Historiography from an Other Perspective’, to be published in The Journal of Musicology, which takes as a point of reference Goehr, Lydia's The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar
2 Dahlhaus, Carl, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1980);Google Scholar English trans. Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 8.Google Scholar
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5 Gossett, Philip, ‘Dahlhaus and the Ideal Type’, 19th-Century Music, 12/1 (1989), 49–56,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and also the present writer's ‘Affetto e azione. Sulla teoria del melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento’, in Atti del XIV Congresso della Società internationale di musicologia (Bologna, 27 agosto-1° settembre 1987) – Trasmissione e recezione delle forme di cultura musicale, 3, Free Papers (Turin, 1990), 395–400.Google Scholar Although Dahlhaus had no special competence in Italian language and culture, he never stopped elaborating and modifying his views of Italian opera. See his ‘Drammaturgia dell'opera italiana’, in Bianconi, Lorenzo and Pestelli, Giorgio, eds., Storia dell'opera italiana, 6, Teorie e tecniche. Immagini et fantasmi (Turin, 1988), 79–162;Google Scholarand ‘What is a Musical Drama?’, this journal, 1 (1989), 95–111.Google Scholar
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8 The most important is ‘ “La solita forma” and “The uses of Convention” ’, in Nuove prospettive della ricerca verdiana. Atti del convegno internazionale in occasione delta prima del ‘Rigoletto’ in edizione critica, Vienna, 12/13 marzo 1983 (Parma and Milan, 1987), 75–109Google Scholar (also in Acta Musicologica, 49 [1987], 65–90). On p. 76 of this fundamental study we read: ‘Our approach to analysis is generally both prospective and Germanic: we look at works as we hear them, and we think of each as a predecessor of all that follows, ultimately of us: furthermore, we approach them with perceptions trained on the analysis and criticism of instrumental music from North of the Alps’.
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12 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-century Music (see n. 2), 9–10. This opposition was already considered by a father of ‘classical’ aesthetics, for whom, however, it was the basis for an extremely elevated value judgement: ‘Thus when it is said, for instance, that Rossini makes things easy for the singers, this is only partly correct. Indeed, he makes it really difficult for them by so often referring them to the activity of their own musical genius. If this really is genius, the resulting work of art has a quite peculiar attraction, because we have present before us not merely a work of art but the actual production of one.’ Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics, trans. Knox, T. M. (Oxford, 1975), II, 957.Google Scholar
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21 A report of the round table, with a ‘synoptic version's and Walker's paper, can be found in Heartz, Daniel and Wade, Bonnie, eds., I.M.S. Report of the Twelfth Congress Berkeley 1977 (Kassel, 1981), 680–711;Google Scholar the complete version is in Early Music History, 4 (1981), 209–96.Google Scholar Complementary to this study is the same authors' ‘Dalla “Finta pazza” alia “Veremonda”: storie di Febiarmonici’, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 10 (1975), 379–454.Google Scholar The topic was extended to the eighteenth century in the round table ‘Condizione sociale e intellettuale del musicista di teatro ai tempi di Vivaldi’, in a report published in , Bianconi and Morelli, Giovanni, eds., Antonio Vivaldi. Teatro musicale, cultura e società (Florence, 1982), 368–578.Google Scholar
22 Bianconi, Lorenzo, ‘Perche la storia dell'opera italiana’, Musica/Realta, 17 (08 1985), 29–48.Google Scholar Bianconi has also discussed these problems in ‘Storia dell'opera e storia d'ltalia’, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 9 (1974), 3–17;Google Scholar and in The Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Bryant, David (Cambridge, 1987), 45–104.Google Scholar
23 Turin, 1987-. The series is being translated into German (Laaber, 1990-), French (Liège, 1992-) and English (Chicago, 1998-).Google Scholar Two important reviews are by Holmes, William C. in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 44 (1991), 120–8,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and by Murata, Margaret in II saggiatore musicale, 1 (1994), 227–38.Google Scholar
24 In October 1994 a study seminar took place at the Fondazione Levi of Venice on ‘La storiografia dell'opera italiana’, the central theme of which was: how to bring the Storia dell'opera italiana to an end? The present considerations rise from a rethinking of the papers and discussion heard on that occasion.Google Scholar
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26 See, among others, , Koselleck and Stempel, W.-D., eds., Geschichte - Ereignis und Erzählung, Poetik und Hermeneutik 5 (Munich, 1973);Google ScholarVeyne, Paul, Comment on écrit I'histoire (Paris 1971);Google ScholarTopolski, Jerzy, Narrare la storia. Nuovi prindpi di metodologia storica (Milan, 1997).Google Scholar In the musicological field the problem of the history as narrative has been discussed by Treider, Leo, ‘What Kind of Story is History?’, in his Music and the Historical Imagination, (Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1986), 157–75.Google Scholar
27 de Brito, Manuel Carlos, in the preliminary paper to the round table on historiography (see n. 1, and Acta Musicologica, 69 [1997“, 22).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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33 See for example Corti, Maria, Principi della comunicavgone letteraria (Milan, 1976), 1ff.Google Scholar
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46 An example in this direction, which concerns a repertory closely connected to the idea of modernity, is Gerhard, Anselm, Die Verstddterung der Oper. Paris und das Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1992);Google Scholartrans. Whittall, Mary as The Urbanisation of Opera. Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, forthcoming).Google Scholar
47 As biological metaphors are often argued about in historical discussion, it is worth recalling that the rationale of modern (neo-Darwinian) evolutionarism excludes every kind of finality in nature; yet it accepts that the sum total of casual mutations predisposes the course of the following events. The appearance of the first hominidae does not ‘aim’ towards the necessary appearance of homo sapiens, yet it makes it much more probable. The analogy, however, stops there; indeed, it is a distinctive feature of the human species to have a sense of future, hence to foresee the possibility of change, and also, partly, to direct it.Google Scholar
48 The birth and growth of the modern concept of progress, constantly at the centre of Koselleck's analyses, are widely scrutinised in , Koselleck and Meier, Christian, Fortschritt, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1975). A similar semantic analysis of the concepts of progress, evolution, novelty and so on in the musical literature of the Modern Age would be highly desirable.Google Scholar
