‘Justice has been done!’. So declared L’Italia, the leading San Francisco-based Italian newspaper, in October 1897 at the news that Antonio Meucci (1808–1889) had been declared the true inventor of the telephone by the US Supreme Court.Footnote 1 The miserable life story of this Italian emigrant was well known to readers, the newspaper argued, and they could now call this ‘marvel of marvels’ the ‘Meucci telephone’, and a truly Italian invention.Footnote 2 Meucci had become a well-known figure among the Italian community across the USA during the final years of his life, and was widely feted as a technological pioneer. Several articles discussing Meucci’s work had been published in US newspapers from the 1860s onwards, and Meucci had attracted particular attention when he was called on as a witness and defendant in the Alexander Graham Bell vs Globe Telephone Company trial in 1885–87. Meucci gave a lengthy deposition describing his own development of an electrical telephone from the late 1840s onwards, including illustrations of his telephone models.Footnote 3 Unable to pay for a full patent in the early 1870s, however, Meucci bought a cheaper caveat that eventually expired. The designs of his telephone that were sold by his wife in the 1870s were also stored in the same workspace occupied by Bell, and this appears to have been one of several occasions in which Meucci’s ideas were taken by others. By the time of his deposition, Meucci was forced to rely largely on the charity of friends, even if the trial itself would bring him to national attention.Footnote 4
As it turned out, however, L’Italia was a little ahead of itself. Only in 2002 would the US Congress finally declare Meucci to be the inventor of the telephone – his life story summarized by them as ‘extraordinary and tragic’ – with a plaque later set up in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence by the local council, alongside Dante, Da Vinci, Galileo, Rossini and other Italian icons.Footnote 5 Meucci’s status as a disadvantaged Italian emigrant had nonetheless become a key thread in representations of his work from the late nineteenth century onwards. These ranged from his appearance in the final chapter of playwright and opera librettist Giuseppe Giacosa’s Impressioni d’America (1898); to a propaganda film by Enrico Guazzoni produced under Mussolini’s government in 1940; a range of Italian television biopics from the 1970s onwards; and even a reference in the Italian-American mafia drama The Sopranos in 1999, preceding the US government announcement by three years.Footnote 6 These representations collectively sought to highlight Meucci’s status as an overlooked Italian visionary, framing his oblivion from histories of the telephone as a characteristic erasure of the innovations of Italian emigrants. When the US Congress conceded the inventor’s priority in 2002, the rhetoric in the Italian-language press in fact offered striking continuities with that of emigrant publications a century earlier. It was ‘a victory, albeit late, for the generation of Italian immigrants who were often victims of prejudice, discrimination and scams’, Italy’s Corriere della sera summarized, with his fame among the Italian community finally being vindicated by recognition from Bell’s adopted homeland.Footnote 7
Despite this nationalist, diasporic and at times Fascist interest in Meucci’s work, however, the extent to which Meucci’s Italian cultural environment actively shaped his innovations has long been overlooked. This scholarly neglect of Meucci’s work was exacerbated by the fact that the telephone’s eventual introduction to Italian citizens in the 1880s came as an import from the USA rather than as a homegrown technology.Footnote 8 Recent academic interest in Meucci’s work - spearheaded by the electrical engineer Basilio Catania - has thus helped to bring greater attention to the history of communication technologies across the nineteenth century, while also highlighting Italy’s contribution to a broader acoustic modernity.Footnote 9 Yet, as I will argue in this article, Meucci’s story is also a profoundly musical one, in which his identity and social circle as an Italian emigrant were crucial.
Meucci’s first acoustic telephone was invented in Florence in 1834 while working as a machinist at the Teatro della Pergola. This device was designed to integrate aspects of stage productions more smoothly – the opera house and its infrastructure a crucial early site of invention. Meucci subsequently developed his first electrical telephone while working in Cuba as chief machinist at Havana’s Gran Teatro de Tacón, then among the largest and most technologically sophisticated theatres in the world. Following his relocation to Staten Island in 1850, Meucci continued to develop a wide range of inventions alongside his main work in a candle factory, while also falling into dire poverty following an accident. Opera (and music more generally) nonetheless remained a crucial part of his social and intellectual environment during these later years. The Milanese violinist Domenico Mariani, also previously employed at the Tacón, was a member of his New York household and a fellow witness in the Bell trial, while the Meucci residence on Staten Island was previously inhabited by his associate Max Maretzek – the impresario whose Italian opera company would be central to the circulation of staged opera across the USA throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Meucci’s deposition moreover points to a transnational network of Italian musicians, political thinkers, scientists and emigrants in his social circle, extending from Italy via Cuba to the USA and indicating that the opera theatre and the Italian émigré community surrounding it were key figures in his varied career.
This article accordingly explores the shifting relationships between Meucci’s experiments and his operatic connections across his transatlantic career, from Florence to Havana and eventually New York. Meucci’s movements between the theatre and the laboratory chime with much recent scholarship on connections between music and nineteenth-century science. This scholarship has collectively highlighted opera’s role in shaping scientific developments, as well as science’s presence on and behind the operatic stage.Footnote 10 In recent years, a device that has particularly attracted the attention of technologically minded musicologists is the théâtrophone: a service established during the 1880s and 1890s that enabled listeners to tune in to operatic broadcasts from outside the theatre.Footnote 11 The théâtrophone, Melissa van Drie has argued, encouraged ‘isolated listening’ focused on the inflections of a hidden individual voice, with contemporary writers likening the technology to an ‘acoustic microscope’.Footnote 12 Focusing on a significantly later period, other scholars have explored the telephone as a trope in a number of twentieth-century operas by Poulenc, Menotti, Bernstein and others, showing how the device’s appeal for composers and librettists by the 1950s lay in its ubiquity, as well as in the acoustic (and acousmatic) possibilities it offered.Footnote 13 My focus, however, is on Meucci’s relationship with both the telephone and opera in the years 1833–1889. As Marshall McLuhan observed in Understanding Media, the earliest modern uses of the word ‘telephone’ date not from the 1870s but from the early 1840s, when it was applied to a musical device that communicated sound through wooden rods.Footnote 14 As McLuhan suggested, Bell’s experiments with electrical communication and the telephone were linked to broader, longstanding efforts on the part of him and his father to erode distance in human interaction: from Alexander Graham Bell’s work with the deaf; to Melville Bell’s systems to ‘render speech visible’; and eventually the younger Bell’s work with acoustic telegraphy. Claude S. Fischer, meanwhile, has emphasized the diversity of uses to which the early telephone was put. Crucially, it frequently operated as a broadcasting device in its early decades, before becoming firmly established as a two-way communication technology with the advent of the radio.Footnote 15
Focusing on Meucci can, therefore, shed valuable further light on interactions between music and science during a period when distinctions between disciplinary spheres were less tightly drawn than later in the nineteenth century. This is, moreover, a period when Italy has often been seen as lagging behind France, Great Britain and Germany in terms of technological innovation.Footnote 16 More importantly for my purposes here, Meucci’s longstanding and transatlantic relationship with opera highlights the Italian opera house itself as a global site of technological innovation: one that – as Laura Vasilyeva has recently argued – should be taken seriously as a medium for the production and consumption of operatic activity. Theatres, as Vasilyeva has rightly observed, are not simply passive spaces, but ones whose forms, materials and conventions are inseparable from musical and cultural practices.Footnote 17 Meucci’s work was developed in the context of the rapid construction and renovation of Italian theatres in Italy and abroad: his experiments situated within a changing material environment rooted in the opera house. Indeed, Meucci’s transatlantic career in many ways challenges the idea of an Italian soundscape or sonic environment limited to the Italian peninsula, however much Meucci’s work does stake a claim for the teatro all’italiana as a specifically Italian acoustic phenomenon. Given the intersection of migration and opera in Meucci’s story, Italian sonic environments might in fact appear unusually mobile and reproducible spaces during this period: less an emblem of an Arcadian past than a lynchpin of sonic modernity. But Meucci’s career crucially also draws attention to acoustic concerns that crossed between the (Italian) theatre and the laboratory. The development of the telephone in the opera house, I want to suggest, was not merely fortuitous, but was instead linked to the complexity of the theatre as an acoustic environment at this time.
In what follows, then, I pursue the relationship between Meucci, opera and the telephone from a number of different perspectives, both technological and musico-theatrical. This approach proceeds from the multi-dimensional sonic possibilities of the nineteenth-century opera house itself: a space in which voices and sounds resonated within, across and beyond the stage; and a space that proliferated globally to generate an international network of sonic environments. In this article I consider the three main periods of Meucci’s professional activity, exploring how opera and the telephone were intertwined at each stage; and I ask what role opera might play in the history of the telephone writ large. In Florence I consider the acoustic telephone’s role as a stage technology in light of theatrical renovations and changing repertoire, including new attitudes to sound projection and vocal expression on the operatic stage. In Havana I consider the electrical telephone against the new and wider application of the vocabulary of ‘electricity’ in musical criticism of this time, as well as experiments with operatic sound in the operas performed at the Tacón. Finally, in New York I explore the way the telephone was eventually used in Meucci’s own home, anticipating similar musical practices in the USA and Italy in later decades. As we will see, Meucci’s relationship with opera might be conceived as a series of shifting, increasingly abstract encounters: the telephone as a tool for producing opera; the telephone as an analogue to the changing operatic voice; the telephone’s electrical currents as a metaphor for (or equivalent to) musical energy more generally; the telephone as a material parallel of operatic practices; and the telephone as a medium for transmitting music. If opera was crucial to Meucci’s technological experimentation, I argue, its influence nonetheless worked across multiple planes; and this case study demands a similarly varied approach to understand how opera shaped the telephone, and vice versa, as the telephone itself gradually shifted from conceptual fantasy to material reality.
Florence: The Pergola and Theatrical Renovation
The basic outlines of Meucci’s career have been relatively well established. Born in Florence in 1808, Meucci enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze at the age of 15 for a period of six years. Meucci’s sketchy account of his early youth indicates he was trained in ‘drawing and mechanical engineering’, with the recent work of Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta on electricity featuring prominently alongside recent acoustic inventions such as the stethoscope; classes in drawing, music and declamation were also a basic part of the school’s curriculum.Footnote 18 The extent to which music featured as a testing ground at the Accademia is unclear, but it seems likely to have been central; as Robert T. Beyer has noted, music had been the basis for virtually all acoustic research during the eighteenth century and it continued to operate in this way for much of the nineteenth.Footnote 19 The establishment of the school in 1809 also participated in shaping the city’s identity as a site of scientific innovation long after its Renaissance peak, and emphasized links between artistic and scientific production that would prove crucial for Meucci himself.Footnote 20 Numerous developments established under Napoleon continued, from road works and legal frameworks to scientific classes at the Accademia, and communications broadly conceived were a significant focus for these efforts.Footnote 21 By the 1820s the city was also emerging as a cosmopolitan hub within the Italian peninsula, with the establishment of the literary journal Antologia bringing artistic news from abroad while reporting on local innovations.
Theatrical activity aided this sense of urban rebirth and helped to create the foundations for Meucci’s Florentine experiments. Commentators in the first two decades of the nineteenth century could be dismissive of theatrical standards at the Pergola: visiting Florence in 1817, for example, Stendhal had mocked the city’s theatrical scene with the conclusion that ‘everything is poor at the theatre in Florence: costumes, scenery, singers: it’s like a third-rate town in France’.Footnote 22 Yet the Pergola was also long recognized for its musical and architectural importance. Opened in 1656, it was the first theatre in Italy to be built in a horseshoe shape with tiered boxes rather than a Roman style arrangement; it was thus a key agent in developing opera into a public artform that configured space in a newly immersive and spectacular form.Footnote 23 Studies of Italian theatrical acoustics have highlighted the Pergola’s pioneering shape as a factor in determining conventions for ideal orchestral and vocal balance, particularly consistent vocal projection and expression.Footnote 24 As Nicola Prodi has observed, these conventions were only fully enjoyed by listeners at lower heights in such theatres – particularly in the Royal box – but this acoustic inconsistency also encouraged singers to prioritize tonal focus and the clear projection of vocal nuances to reach listeners in a theatre's upper areas.Footnote 25 In line with urban renovation elsewhere in Florence, extensive structural repairs were also undertaken at the Pergola in the early nineteenth century, with the roof and stage fixed under the guidance of architect Bartolomeo Silvestri.Footnote 26 Interior decorations were similarly refreshed while further refurbishments in 1826–28 brought a moveable lighting system and a painted curtain by Gaspero Martellini depicting the crowning of Petrarch, together with a new entrance to the orchestra.Footnote 27 Most strikingly, the first efforts at gas lighting were then undertaken in 1834, one of the earliest attempts on the Italian peninsula and a development that would be extensively used in the world premiere of Verdi’s Macbeth (1847). Institutional records reveal predictable wrangling over costs, and the opening of the Teatro Goldoni in 1817 brought into relief the need to improve conditions at the Pergola.Footnote 28 But the restoration period clearly brought a renewed attention to opera’s visuality as well as increased interest in the theatre’s acoustics. Meucci thus arrived at a moment of technological innovation: the theatre management (and Florentine duchy) were ready to invest resources to improve the theatre’s international reputation and make the theatre’s sights and sounds a symbol of the city’s modernity.Footnote 29
The transformation of the theatre’s fortunes in the 1820s was also due in significant part to the arrival of the impresario Alessandro Lanari, who would eventually employ and work with Meucci. As the head of a substantial costume-making enterprise, Lanari set the standard within the region for costuming and fabrics, reinforcing the attentiveness to visual splendour in the theatre’s architecture. Lanari’s Napoleonic nickname (the ‘Napoleon of impresarios’) also reflected a new attention to the mobility of operatic materials in the Restoration period, as sets and costumes travelled between theatres – and beyond Europe, including Cuba and North America – in tandem with the initial development of an operatic canon.Footnote 30 Meucci himself noted the mobility of his own activities while employed at the Pergola, activities that required visits to ‘Rome, Ancona, Foligno and Leghorn [Livorno], and other parts of Italy’.Footnote 31
This period, moreover, brought significant musical changes. Immediately following the restoration, Florence had been one of many Italian cities to be caught up in the Rossinian furore, with the composer’s works dominating the stages of the city’s theatres.Footnote 32 Lanari first arrived in 1823, and in his first seasons offered a further selection of Rossini’s Italian works together with highly successful productions of Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto (1824) and Margherita D’Anjou (1820) – the spectacular elements of these productions regularly noted.Footnote 33 Contemporary reviews of Il crociato especially praised Meyerbeer’s stereophonic effects: the placing of two offstage bands in different parts of the theatre created a ‘suitable din from the orchestra’, a noise that chimed with a growing focus on sheer sonic force as an expressive mode in the wake of Rossini’s Italian success.Footnote 34 Following a break in his activities in Florence, Lanari then returned to the Pergola in 1830, bringing Rossini’s Parisian works alongside operas by Bellini, Donizetti, Mercadante, Pacini and Ricci. The aesthetics associated with these later Italian operas have long been discussed by scholars in terms of Italian Romanticism: above all, a concern for individual psychological realism, a more experimental approach to formal structures, and a move away from classical sources to modern subject matter. Yet one aspect that clearly connected Meyerbeer’s Italian works, Rossini’s Parisian operas, and the new Italian operas of the 1830s was a tendency for striking audio-visual tableaux. Guillaume Tell (1829) was soon celebrated for its storm scenes, while operas such as Pacini’s L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825) and Bellini’s Norma (1831) offered ample opportunities for visual climaxes – Pompei requiring both rapid set changes and the use of Bengal fire to evoke the final catastrophe.Footnote 35
The heightened expectations surrounding visual effects at the Pergola are particularly obvious from commentary on Pacini’s opera in 1832. Pompei, a work that was quickly identified as caught between older and newer aesthetics, was bluntly criticized by the Gazzetta di Firenze for a ‘miserable libretto’ that focused too much on human action among the Roman population at the expense of spectacular display. The situation was, the newspaper concluded, ‘a subject suited to descriptive poetry rather than drama’, and the true protagonists of the story should be the natural elements. The final eruption of Vesuvius was delivered with ‘the greatest possible illusion’, the paper argued, but ‘we know that, in contrast to what happens in Nature, phenomena such as these make little difference on the stage’.Footnote 36 Technical standards were already judged to be high, then (at least by local observers); but striking visual effects were becoming a local priority in a way they had not been a decade or two earlier, even if Pompei was considered a misfire. In November 1836, the Pergola would also give the world premiere of Luigi Gordigiani’s Fausto, the first Italian musical adaptation of Goethe’s play.Footnote 37 Gordigiani’s opera was again not a public success, but it sought to capitalize on new tastes for the supernatural with the final scene of Act Two depicting fleeting visions of Valentino, Teresa and the aged Faust.Footnote 38 Unsurprisingly, grand opera fared more positively with critics. The Pergola hosted the second production of Guillaume Tell in Italy (in 1831), after a production Lanari had arranged in Lucca; and only a few years later Florence would become the epicentre of Italian Meyerbeer performances, staging the Italian premieres of all Meyerbeer’s French works between 1840 and 1852.Footnote 39 Yet already in the 1830s, moments such as these were becoming focal points of local pride (and shame): the Pergola a potent symbol of Florence’s urban progress through moments of dazzling theatrical illusion, for which smooth delivery was a priority.
Meucci’s own employment at the Pergola started in 1833 and lasted until late 1835. His activities at the Pergola covered a variety of spheres, with Meucci describing his position as prop master and machinist (attrezzista e macchinista), and as second machinist to first machinist Artemio Canovetti. It was the acoustic telephone he developed in 1834 that clearly marked the beginning of his acoustic experiments, however, and that became his legacy at the theatre. Building upon the speaking tubes used on ships (which Meucci referenced in his deposition), the telephone enabled covert communication between stagehands at stage level and those in the control room immediately above. It did so by extending a metallic cable over twenty metres between the two floors, through which instructions could be quickly given. Meucci thus facilitated the movement of stage scenery while removing any visual or aural disturbance to the performance, such as sometimes previously occurred through the use of lanterns for indicating set changes (see Figure 1).Footnote 40 This acoustic telephone clearly operated very differently from later electrical telephones, even if, like them, it enabled private communication that could here serve to further the idea of an integrated theatrical spectacle. The commercial (and military) associations of the speaking tube are also telling, given the large numbers of stagehands deployed by the theatre. The installation of the telephone overall indicated a new sensitivity to the concealment of backstage labour: it supported the discrete coordination of workers to create visual and sonic spectacle, and enhanced the immersive aspects of the Pergola’s existing infrastructure.
Figure 1. The acoustic telephone and a plaque for Antonio Meucci at the Teatro della Pergola. Photograph: Filippo Manzini.
As an acoustic device, the telephone’s application was clearly restricted in scope. While it connected stage and backstage more effectively, it could never provide a model for long-range communication. What is more, neither the Pergola’s own holdings nor the local press have revealed contemporary discussion of Meucci’s experiments, indicating that these technological developments were ultimately conceived as useful rather than attention-seeking in their own right, and of a theatrical prestige far below the curtain, lighting, frescoes and chandeliers.Footnote 41 The acoustic telephone ultimately functioned as a means to conceal labour, in other words, rather than as an object that demanded attention itself.Footnote 42 The sole pair of surviving letters from Meucci to Lanari in July 1834 indeed concern negotiations over costumes rather than elaborate theatrical effects, even as they reveal a friendly intimacy between the pair.Footnote 43 At the same time, Meucci’s deposition offers a unique source for understanding his career, but it was given under particular legal circumstances and was never intended to provide a philosophical statement of his ideas regarding sound transmission.Footnote 44
Yet it is also clear that the acoustic telephone responded to a need, and that the works performed (and in some cases premiered) during the seasons of Meucci’s tenure would have offered ample opportunities for putting the new device into practice. These works included Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Parisina, Torquato Tasso, Rosmonda d’Inghilterra and Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo; Bellini’s La straniera, Norma, and La sonnambula; Luigi Ricci’s Chiara di Rosemberg; Rossini’s Guillaume Tell; and several Italian works by Meyerbeer.Footnote 45 In the absence of surviving documentation, one can only speculate about the precise moments when Meucci’s telephone was used in these initial years. Several spectacular finales would have offered obvious opportunities, however, even as the telephone may well also have been used for more mundane transitions between scenes. The finales of Guillaume Tell and Norma would both have benefited from swift stage transitions: the final chorus in Guillaume Tell offers a striking audio-visual tableau – the storm disappearing to reveal a view of the Swiss Alps, as the chorus sing in praise of liberty – while Norma concludes with the funeral pyre lit for Norma and Pollione, a pyrotechnic finale with choral support. Non-operatic works, meanwhile, included Antonio Monticini’s ballet La negromanzia in contrasto, ossia Il tamburo magico (1834), an orientalist adaptation of Carlo Gozzi set in the court of the sorceress Geonca. The magic drum of the title protects the knight Filiberto, and finally prompts the release of the benevolent wizard Baraballa. Baraballa robs Geonca of her power and her court transforms into a Chinese garden - the spectacular conventions of eighteenth-century theatre now made more immersive through a nineteenth-century technology, a transition Meucci’s telephone would have achieved with greater precision.
Meucci’s acoustic telephone, then, was one of several architectural developments at the Pergola in these years, and it was notable precisely for its role in strengthening theatrical illusion. This desire to conceal backstage labour was hardly new: several of the renovations undertaken at the Pergola in the 1810s and 1820s (such as the new orchestral entrance) were partly intended to minimize disruptions to performances. But the works presented at the Pergola during the 1830s increasingly incorporated complex coups de théâtre depending on large numbers of stagehands, who risked intruding on the theatrical illusion. The acoustic telephone in fact remained in occasional use at the Pergola until the mid-1960s, when heavy flooding prompted the elevation of the stage and major refurbishment of the theatre’s machinery.Footnote 46
Florence: The Pergola and Sonic Revolution
Meucci’s development of the acoustic telephone thus points to the opera house’s importance as a multidimensional acoustic space, in which the Pergola’s repertory invited – even demanded – a more sophisticated set of technologies for coordinating sound and image. As the list of operas being presented at the Pergola suggests, however, Meucci’s telephone was not the only significant acoustic (and vocal) innovation taking place at the theatre in the early 1830s.Footnote 47 Some of the most influential developments were also taking place directly on stage, via the newly forceful forms of vocal production being explored by a new generation of singers – singers with whom Meucci had direct contact, and singers who (as we shall see) in some cases also later worked alongside Meucci in Havana. Accusations of noisiness had long plagued the reception of Rossini’s operas. Yet these complaints were typically directed at the orchestra, the fioritura of Rossini’s roles in his Italian operas requiring agility still to be prioritized over sheer force.Footnote 48 Around 1830, as numerous scholars have explored, things gradually began to change: voices were increasingly imagined as innately belonging to the individual, and new compositional styles associated with Bellini, Mercadante and Donizetti required a more muscular approach. No single moment can be said to be a decisive turning point in this process, the effects of which would be felt across the nineteenth century and beyond. Within Florence, however, the local premiere of Guillaume Tell in 1831 offers one significant moment. The performance in Lucca a month earlier is where Gilbert Duprez reportedly first exhibited the top C sung in full voice, long considered a pivotal event in the emergence of modern operatic vocality (conceived in terms of both vocal technique and individual, gendered expression).Footnote 49 Public fascination at La Pergola, where Duprez appeared again as Arnold, was certainly intense. ‘We were already aware of the distinguished bravura of Cosselli (Guglielmo)’, Teatri, arti e letteratura declared, ‘but the universal craving was to hear Duprez. The master of everything that music or the scene demands, he delivered the notes of the wretched man with such truth as to touch one’.Footnote 50
John Rosselli has suggested that earlier tenors may occasionally have experimented with this vocal technique, and it is unclear whether Duprez’s run of performances in Florence as Arnold uniformly repeated the innovations of Lucca.Footnote 51 But his appearances in Guillaume Tell were in any case only one of many instances at the Pergola throughout the 1830s in which this new singing style provoked attention, before Duprez unveiled his do di petto at the Paris Opéra in 1837. The premiere of Parisina in 1833 (featuring a role composed for him) was considered a triumph, albeit one that provoked significant controversy in the Gazzetta di Firenze over the force displayed:
Parisina was performed in this theatre by brave artists, with a great deal of effort and generally with matching success. And if at certain moments it seemed that effort turned into straining, we’re inclined to attribute that to the excessive passions and enormous moods which must be expressed or sustained. At times they shouted rather than singing; but it was the situation that demanded this shouting, and thus it happened that a singing actress – famous for her ability in feeling and expressing her part – fell into this error. It was one of those errors that are the sign of a power in full flight.
New operatic subject matter called for new compositional modes to match the lurid source material: in this case Byron’s Gothic poem Parisina (1816), with its story of murder and adultery in a medieval setting. Donizetti’s vocal writing encouraged singers to test their voices to their limits, while revealing new depths of interior expression. Public reaction, however, was certainly divided:
On this subject we witnessed some bizarre discussions at the theatre. The scream thundered from the stage. Good! They shouted here; Bad! They murmured there, in the stalls. Then, following one of those pieces which are sung alone within a crowd of people, so the debate continued among the opposing factions: This they call singing from the soul! – This they call shouting from the heart! – These said: In certain dreadful situations, the shout is the most sublime form of singing. – These others replied: Shouting is always shouting, and never singing. – But, replied the first, in nature when a man’s soul is wounded, he cries out; and so it is in the Fine Arts, the imitator of nature … – If they are Fine Arts, replied the others, they should not imitate the deformities of nature; you will agree that in nature man does some things about which it is more beautiful to remain silent.Footnote 52
The performances of Duprez, Caroline Ungher and Domenico Cosselli were indicative of this new vocal style, in which singing could become screaming, and sound carried to an unpleasant degree (especially in the superior boxes) – a problem exacerbated by the modest scale of the Pergola’s seventeenth-century auditorium. Other star singers who performed at the Pergola during the early 1830s included Giulietta Grisi, Luigi Lablache and Domenico Donzelli: key figures in this wider, gradual reconceptualization of the voice, with Donzelli probably serving as a model for Duprez in his development of a baritonal ‘voix sombrée’. In his own later singing manual, Duprez discussed conventions for singing the rising C major scale that also concludes Arnold’s Act Four aria, arguing that top Bs, Cs and Ds might be sung in chest voice but that such an ability was still rare.Footnote 53 It remains certain, however, that the innovations taking place in Florence during this period anticipated their wider international dissemination in the late 1830s and 1840s: both a more aggressive approach to the voice (that allowed for greater carrying power) and a fascination with vocal mechanics. Voices, simply put, became louder – their powers of projection understood as a turning point in the history of sound.Footnote 54
Two conceptually related forms of vocal ‘projection’ were therefore emerging at the Pergola during Meucci’s tenure. Meucci’s acoustic telephone acted to coordinate the audio-visual spectacle; and it was developed at precisely the same time as a wider shift in vocal technique that was itself predicated on ideas of powerful projection. Put differently, sound operated both as a binding force within the operatic spectacle and as a powerful aesthetic force that could traverse expanses of space across the theatre to a new degree. This connection between telephonic and operatic ‘broadcasting’ was not (yet) direct in this initial moment – the two modes instead kept deliberately separate. Philosophical connections between the operatic voice and broadcasting technologies would become explicit only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when these technologies began to be developed on a national scale: the powerful voices of opera were eventually perceived as fundamental to early Italian telephone and radio broadcasting, serving as an obvious symbol of italianità, while participating in a longer cultural discourse that viewed the Italian operatic voice as a means of disseminating national linguistic practices.Footnote 55 But already during Meucci’s Florentine tenure, operatic and telephonic practices reveal a conceptual alignment by exploring the possibility of throwing the voice across space using the body or the tube to focus and convey the sound. Voices concealed and voices boldly displayed were united by projecting through space in novel ways: the opera house developing new means to configure the relationship between performers, listeners and backstage labourers at the dawn of Italian Romanticism.
Havana: Telephone Fantasies
The acoustic telephone was Meucci’s main achievement during his brief time at the Pergola. But Meucci’s own career soon took a westward swerve, the relationship between opera and telephone traced thus far assuming a significantly different form. Meucci’s involvement with revolutionary activity led to a brief period of imprisonment and prompted his departure for Cuba at the invitation of visiting Spanish-Cuban impresario Don Francisco Martí y Torrens. This impresario eventually brought over a team of more than 80 singers, orchestral musicians, technicians and tailors with him from Italy to Havana, in a move that would participate in transforming the broader history of opera in the Americas. By the late 1830s Havana had a small but prominent Italian population that had already helped to sustain public support for opera in the city; and in the following years Italian architects, painters and musicians were all commissioned to develop public monuments. The Tacón was also far from unique as a space of technological invention in Cuba at this time. As numerous historians have underlined, Cuba’s ‘sugar industrial revolution’ was driven by a range of importations of and developments in foreign technology, making it something of a testcase for the relationship between slavery and the development of industrial capitalism as well as colonial innovation.Footnote 56 The growing wealth of plantation owners was a driving factor in the construction and scale of the theatre, which would be larger than both Madrid’s Teatro Real (construction begun 1818; opened 1850) and Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu (opened 1837; reopened 1847).
Upon arriving in Cuba in December 1835, Meucci first worked at the Teatro Principal (opened 1803, and under the management of Martí y Torrens) for three years before starting work at the newly constructed Tacón (opened 1838), a theatre that would eventually have violinist and conductor Luigi Arditi among its musical staff, with Lanari also later contracting singers for seasons in Havana.Footnote 57 Seasons from the late 1830s onwards were initially led by Italian composer Lauro Rossi (1810–1885) and comprised many of the more successful recent Italian operas – including Norma, Lucia di Lammermoor, Il pirata, and Il crociato in Egitto, and works by Rossini – with singers from leading theatres in Italy, Spain and France.Footnote 58 Living above his workspace at the theatre, Meucci would be closely involved with its activities (as machinist and decorator) during the five-month annual seasons, while enjoying significant time for scientific experimentation when the company went on its regular tours to the USA.Footnote 59 Evidence of Meucci’s important position within the theatre is given both by press reports praising his contributions and by several benefit galas that were held in his honour.Footnote 60 Domenico Mariani’s deposition similarly highlighted the status of the Meucci family in Havana, noting that ‘at every benefit of the singers, from the first to the fifth year [1846–51], the prima donnas … used to present Mrs Meucci with diamonds and other jewellery. The men gave, besides, money also. They were Salvi, Marini, Badiali, Ferri and others, that used to make presents to both husband and wife.’Footnote 61 As the historian Richard Roselló Socorro has observed in his own study of Meucci’s activities in Cuba, Meucci would also invest much energy in an electroplating company that produced swords and other pieces of stage scenery, as well as items for the army.Footnote 62
By the mid-1840s Meucci had begun exploring the therapeutic possibilities of electricity, experimenting with electro-shock treatments to heal a variety of ailments. According to his deposition, he had begun reading a wide range of contemporary scientists – Becqurel, Jacobi and Mesmer, among others – from 1842–1844 as he developed an interest in electricity and galvanism, and had the necessary equipment shipped from England.Footnote 63 It was in the course of one experiment in 1849 that he discovered the ability of electricity to transmit speech: specifically, the pained cry of a black patient (almost certainly an employee of the opera house), which was carried down from the ‘metallic tongue’ in his mouth via a copper wire to Meucci two rooms away. ‘The moment that the sick person introduced the little tongue between his lips, he received a discharge and a shock, and yelled’, Meucci would recount; ‘I obtained, in the same moment, in my ear, a sound’.Footnote 64 This, Meucci later claimed, was the origin of his electric telephone: the beginning of a series of experiments that culminated in him being able to transmit sound across significant distance with increasing precision, the ‘murmur … an inarticulate sound’ produced in 1849 (after insulating the funnels with pasteboard) gradually becoming intelligible speech.Footnote 65 In the following years this prototype would become increasingly sophisticated, as the designs that Meucci presented during his deposition indicated (see Figure 2). The telephone would also be put to a variety of different uses. Yet the fundamental principles were discovered at this moment in Havana in 1849, as the inventor experimented in the backstage area of the Cuban opera house.
Figure 2. An illustration of Meucci’s telephone. The American Bell Telephone Co. et al. vs. The Globe Telephone Co. et al: USCC SDNY Equity case H-3681; ‘Deposition for the defendant Antonio Meucci’. National Archives at Philadelphia.
Telling where exactly opera and the broader history of sound might fit into such a development is far from straightforward. In the case of Meucci’s Florentine acoustic technology, the device’s stage use fits in comfortably enough with new material histories of opera, even if efforts to uncover a more detailed use history of the device during the later nineteenth century have been fruitless – only at the point when the technology became defunct, one might conclude, did it begin to be worthy of consideration and historical commemoration. And by placing the Pergola telephone in parallel with sound production elsewhere in the theatre, both voices and the acoustic telephone can be considered under the broader umbrella of changing sound technologies within a new Romantic aesthetics, albeit by operating in significantly different ways. Operatic voices thrilled (and disturbed) through their visceral force and individuality; while the acoustic telephone deliberately concealed a projected voice to enable other kinds of sublime effect. But what might one conclude from the fresh juxtaposition of opera and technology in Cuba, where Meucci continued to refine the theatre’s technical capabilities – including using electricity to create lightning effects onstage – while exploring the capacity of electricity to project the voice openly in a way tantalizingly similar to opera, yet first discovered by accident?
In the most compelling discussion of Meucci’s career to date, literary scholar Rachel Price has pondered similar questions.Footnote 66 Rather than focusing specifically on changing ideas and practices of the operatic voice, she considers Meucci’s Cuban experiments against the history of colonialism and ventriloquism in Havana, as well as the telephone’s philosophical relationship with opera. In terms of the former, Price underlines the fact that several of Meucci’s experimental subjects, including the first telephone speaker, were former slaves (although many of Meucci’s subjects were also free white men, including Meucci himself); she connects this with a wider history of attempts to electrify and animate bodies considered dead or subhuman. Price also draws on Michel Poizat’s psychoanalytical theorization of the voice to draw a contrast between operatic and telephonic conceptions of sound. While both involve a body transmitting sound elsewhere, the operatic voice ultimately aspires towards the scream, she argues, whereas Meucci’s telephone experiments instead began with a medicalized scream of pain and became the vehicle for sound transmission. Binding these two spheres together is electricity as both material substance and imaginative trope (ideas drawing here on Ellen Lockhart’s work on electricity and the diva). Electricity might carry sound, but it was also a way of conceptualizing operatic performance and aesthetic power during the early nineteenth century.Footnote 67
The slippage between materiality and metaphor is important here. Jeffrey Sconce has argued that the ‘electrical sublime’ became one of the dominant cultural fantasies of the Western world by the mid-nineteenth century: a belief that electricity could bridge divides between humans and technology, spirit and matter, art and science.Footnote 68 Music, more broadly, was also newly conceived in similar electrical terms at this time: a forceful and ultimately material current that could connect audience members, and that might be transmitted by charismatic performers.Footnote 69 The Italian physicist Luigi Magrini thus argued in 1842 that music and electricity were effectively the same substance (or ‘sympathetic vibration’), while lamenting that recent Italian musical developments were forcing singers to shout over the orchestra and fight against a crash of percussion better suited to a military band.Footnote 70 The discourse of electricity around celebrity female singers traced by Lockhart reflected both the changing status of performers within Romantic aesthetics and gendered understandings of human ‘charge’, with Giuditta Pasta widely discussed in terms of her captivating physical presence and command of gesture.Footnote 71 In France, orchestral conductors would similarly be conceived as purveyors of electrical force by the 1850s, with Berlioz theorizing the conductor’s work as generating a circuit of electrical energy between baton, orchestra and audience, a conception always undergirded by a combination of wonder and menace.Footnote 72 While electricity was not a new finding, then, Galvani’s discovery of electrical animation nonetheless encouraged new understandings of music as a profoundly physical, ultimately electrical force. This idea shaped the language of musical criticism and became central to Romantic aesthetics, making scientific discoveries crucial to ways of imagining music at this time.
Might the operatic voice itself be understood in these terms? Was the voice an especially potent purveyor of electrical charge – particularly given the changing practices and ideologies of vocal technique? For Magrini, in a move clearly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, music was a fundamental part of human nature that emerged from the voice, and the risk of contemporary music (after Rossini) was that it became ‘artificial’: its noisiness and complexity prevented it from stimulating the listener as intended.Footnote 73 And after Duprez unveiled his do di petto in Paris in 1837, the vocabulary used was more typically of eruptions, sounds bursting forth from his chest with revolutionary force (the choice of Guillaume Tell was presumably no accident). What is significant, however, is the perception that an acoustic barrier had been breached: that rather than being covered by the orchestra, the newly powerful voix sombrée allowed the voice to cut through the theatre’s space in new ways. Berlioz would thus interpret the noisy orchestration and the vocal force required in works by Rossini (and others) as attempts to bring electrical force to audiences in expanding performance spaces, linking volume to electrical charge: ‘one must vibrate with the instruments and voices and because of them in order to have genuine musical sensations’.Footnote 74 Rather than simply an abstract, philosophical relationship between opera and the telephone, then, the affinity between Meucci’s electric telephone and the theatre might better be understood as a historically contingent effort to produce sound in new ways: projecting a voice with electrical power.
Operatic criticism in Cuba during Meucci’s residence does not reveal tantalizing rhetorical similarities between the voice and electrical activity of the scale that Lockhart has uncovered around Pasta and her electrifying presence; even if Cuban musical criticism was clearly shaped by broader critical trends in musical Romanticism. The soprano Fortunata Tedesco was quickly acclaimed as the local prima donna, for example, with her appearances later that season in Pacini’s Saffo (1840) described as displaying ‘all of the mastery and truth that we could desire … her movements, her mannerisms, her physiognomy, the inflections of her voice, everything revealed her situation’.Footnote 75 For his part, the bass Ignazio Marini was similarly lauded, his performances in Attila in November 1848 hailed by La Gaceta de la Habana for their vocal and expressive power: ‘We still hear the hoarse cry of the savage who falls to the ground, crushed by the weight of his remorse’.Footnote 76 But the precise physical impact of their dramatic portrayals, in this and many other later performances, was otherwise unspecified; and not until the Havana company arrived in the USA would this electrical language appear to be regularly applied.Footnote 77
One productive approach, however, might be to expand one’s purview from the voices that resounded in Meucci’s theatres to the actual sounds they were singing. In many respects this is a tale of continuity, as the repertory that Meucci encountered at the Pergola was also widely performed in Havana. But a major change was the arrival of Verdi’s operas in the mid-1840s. Havana was the site of the first American performances of many of Verdi’s early works, with Max Maretzek going on to give the US premieres of several Verdi operas, including Luisa Miller and Il trovatore.Footnote 78 Much of the discourse that surrounded Donizetti would continue for Verdi in Italy, with numerous critics complaining about the demands imposed upon on the voice and about the operas’ noisiness. In a series of articles published in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano in 1846, for example, Florentine composer and critic Ermanno Picchi again drew upon the language of electricity, declaring that ‘it is precisely the effect of music to be compared to that of electrical fluid: instant, universal’, before lamenting the decline of operatic composition from the age of Rossini, Pacini, Meyerbeer, Bellini and Donizetti to the present, when Verdi alone achieved some success and operatic composition was dominated by the striving for noisy ‘effects’: all arias concluded with shrieked high notes and the bang of the drum.Footnote 79 Serving up sensory shocks to an unthinking, sensation-hunting public, opera in the Verdian age left little room for reflection or poetry, instead treating the public rather like one of Meucci’s patients, primed for a series of violent electrical shocks.
One of several striking things to observe in Verdi’s early Cuban reception is a relative absence of anxieties in this regard, with fewer points of comparison in terms of previous performers being an obvious factor, and the significantly larger size of the theatre (3000 seats) making it more effectively scaled to music of this force. Neither Nabucco (1842) nor Ernani (1844) nor Attila (1846) provoked much controversy in the Diario de la Marina, Havana’s major newspaper. Critics instead focused on the music’s freshness and energy, while praising the technological flair shown in moments such as Attila’s dawn scene.Footnote 80 The Verdian fever that swept through Havana during this period is similarly remarkable, with the 1846–47 winter season at the Tacón dominated by the composer’s works. Of the season’s 58 performances, 15 were of Ernani, 12 I Lombardi alla prima crociata, 10 I due Foscari, 5 Pacini’s Saffo, 4 Linda di Chamonix, 3 Corrado d’Altamura (Ricci), 4 Moïse et Pharaon (Rossini) and 5 were mixed galas.Footnote 81 What remains certain is that Verdi’s operas were the operatic backdrop to Meucci’s electrical experiments. Meucci’s dream of communicating across distance via electricity (once discovered) was set against music of a distinctly martial quality that was praised in Cuba and Italy alike for its energy and force – qualities that propelled it through time as much as theatrical space with quasi-electrical impulse – with the rhetoric of ‘powerful effects’ recuring in the early Cuban reception of Verdi’s works and generating its own local forcefield.Footnote 82
One might be tempted simply to leave the connections between Verdian opera and the early electrical telephone hanging there: the two aligned by a broad but vague sense of electrical charge that somehow reflected their historical moment. There is by now a familiar scholarly vocabulary of ‘resonances’ and ‘parallels’ to justify such a move, usually couched in terms of a wider cultural paradigm shift, and with the precise dynamics between music and society often left undefined. At its heart, this approach invites the risk of what Carolyn Abbate has dubbed ‘musicological enchainment’: a crude technological determinism in which musical activity and wider phenomena are too easily linked, and discrete cultural phenomena are smoothly bound together by music’s semantic slipperiness.Footnote 83 The account of his Cuban career that Meucci offered during the 1885 court case does not give an inspirational role to opera, even if it is clear that the operatic context was a necessary precondition for his own experiments, and that his intellectual environment was profoundly linked to operatic culture. Yet any exploration of the telephone-opera nexus in Cuba, I would argue, might also usefully turn to the fragments of the proto-telephonic that can be found in these early Verdi operas, and place musical experiments alongside scientific ones. Within Wagner studies, for example, the Herald’s call for help on Elsa’s behalf in Act One of Lohengrin (1850) via four trumpets has become a canonical reference point for technological interpretations from Friedrich Kittler onwards, be it the radio, telephone or even the nervous system.Footnote 84 Wagner is here, characteristically, credited with a prescient depiction of later acoustic inventions.
Interpretations of this kind risk precisely the ‘musicological enchainment’ which Abbate has critiqued, relying on music’s semantic promiscuity to fold it into wider historical narratives. But if such an approach is worth pursuing – and it is one many scholars find hard to resist – Verdian works provide equally potent and plentiful examples that can offer an Italian perspective on acoustic experimentation. The use of offstage sound in opera was clearly not new, but from the 1830s onwards acousmatic sound was deployed in significantly more ambitious ways.Footnote 85 This reflected the musical opportunities that changing vocal and instrumental techniques offered composers at this time, as well as a widespread taste for the supernatural that would also shape the reception of all acousmatic technologies across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 86 In the case of Verdi’s early works, depictions of individuals or groups that pay attention to a fateful distant sound are rife: one needs only think of the final scene of Nabucco – the crowd hearing Nabucco’s arrival in the distance – or the bugle call that dominates Ernani, its sounds denoting death for the title character. And moving into the 1850s, what better examples could there be of ‘telephonic listening’ than the Duke of Mantua’s faraway voice at the climax of Rigoletto (1851), or Alfredo’s interjection during Violetta’s Act One cabaletta in La traviata (1853), in which she hears his voice supernaturally calling in the distance?
Moments such as these can hardly claim the status of direct, unambiguous influence on Meucci or on wider technological history, nor of being impacted by Meucci’s own work. Instead, they reflect the increasingly sophisticated approaches to stage space and acoustics explored by Verdi at this time: approaches that encouraged and exploited new forms of sound production as well as the expanding size of performance spaces. This, in turn, was part of a wider, Italian, acoustic-cultural shift that generated new modes of sonic production: a shift that also involved developments in the power of orchestral instruments and emerging ideas of theatrical realism, alongside the expanding range of repertory that singers were required to perform.Footnote 87 What Verdian parallels can nevertheless suggest is that one of the possibilities of nineteenth-century Italian opera was to evoke a series of acoustic experiences for composers and listeners that had not yet been named nor fully invented. Opera could serve as an imaginative laboratory as well as a scientific one: exploiting powerful musical forces to stage new acoustic forms.
New York: Broadcasting the Operatic Voice
In the spring of 1850, Meucci made his final relocation, arriving in New York. In this move his revolutionary past also came magnificently back to him as he shared a house with Giuseppe Garibaldi on Staten Island in 1851–53, eventually becoming known within New York as Garibaldi’s closest USA-based friend. ‘Having met my friend General Garibaldi and Lorenzo Salvi, the General suggested to come and settle with me in some house in the country’, Meucci recalled, ‘at last at Staten Island, where we found one house at Clifton, Third Landing, where Max Maretzek used to live. I rented said house, in which place was General Garibaldi, in company with Salvi, as Mr Max Maretzek was leaving with his opera company for Havana’.Footnote 88 The tenor Lorenzo Salvi – who sang principal roles in the world premieres of Verdi’s Oberto conte di San Bonifacio (1839) and Un giorno di regno (1840), as well as several works by Donizetti, Mercadante and Nicolai before singing several seasons at the Tacón – was another resident of the house, and he would purchase a plot of land together with Meucci to help the latter start his candle factory.Footnote 89 Domenico Mariani’s deposition further indicates that he regularly stayed in the house for extended periods in the early 1850s: ‘I was always there every summer [1851–54]: in winter I worked with the Opera Company, in summer I lived with him’.Footnote 90
Meucci continued to develop his ideas further in a domestic context throughout the 1850s and he soon reproduced several of his Havana models with the aid of his wife Ester, experimenting with a range of animal and metallic materials. In 1860 he also sought to promote his invention in Italy, reputedly explaining his invention to the New York newspaper L’eco d’Italia and entrusting both a telephone model and a copy of the article to his associate Enrico Bendelari.Footnote 91 The article describing this invention was destroyed by the time of Meucci’s deposition, but Meucci himself summarized it as claiming that he had ‘invented the way to transmit the human word by means of electricity or an electric conductor … one [instrument] to transmit the word and the other [instrument] to receive it’.Footnote 92 An article published in Genova’s Il commercio on 1 December 1865 similarly acknowledged Meucci’s claim to have invented the telephone, framing it in directly nationalist terms.Footnote 93 As Meucci argued in his cross examination, he approached several Italian diasporic newspapers in New York during the 1870s to promote his experiments (once he had filed for a caveat), indicating the strength of his local networks.Footnote 94 He also became involved with other professional projects, including a brewery after the candle factory failed. Yet throughout this period he also lost his significant savings in poor investments and in pursuing his experiments, and was eventually forced to rely on friends after being badly injured in a shipping accident in 1871.
Direct professional connections between Meucci’s scientific work and the opera house therefore also begin to loosen, despite the strong presence of a musical community within his home. By the time of his deposition he would describe his profession simply as an ‘electrician’.Footnote 95 But the telephone also became a basic part of his domestic set up in the 1850s and 1860s, as his wife was rendered largely immobile by illness and the telephone became a regular means of communication between his workshop and her bedroom (see Figure 3). ‘From the battery, in this time about 1854 or 1855, I brought [copper wires] to the third floor through the exterior of the house; and from the window, through two screws, they entered the room called the Garibaldi room, where my wife … [used to] ring a bell in the basement’.Footnote 96 For Meucci the telephone also seems to have held obvious potential as a musical device, well before the théâtrophone was publicly presented in Paris in 1881. In his deposition Meucci recounts the frequent use of the telephone among visitors to the house: ‘among others, I remember Cunningham, Mariani, Matilde Ciucci, Benedetti, Conti, Egloff and Bertolino’, with Meucci’s friends enjoying using the device to convey information and conduct conversations.Footnote 97 On at least one occasion, the French tenor Matthias Egloff also used it to perform ‘La Marseillaise’ to listeners in a different part of the house.Footnote 98 The choice of a revolutionary anthem is telling, of course, given the composition of Meucci’s social circle, and it arguably foreshadows later uses of the device for secretive political ends.Footnote 99 But more straightforwardly, it indicates how easily the telephone could move from being a means of discretely organizing musical activity to a mode of musical consumption: less a theatrical tool than a means of broadcasting music itself.
Figure 3. An illustration of Meucci’s domestic telephone. The American Bell Telephone Co. et al. vs. The Globe Telephone Co. et al: USCC SDNY Equity case H-3681; ‘Deposition for the defendant Antonio Meucci’. National Archives at Philadelphia.
In this respect, Meucci was anticipating a trend that would soon become common within Italy and abroad, one that sheds further light on the particularities of Italian engagement with new acoustic media. The use of the telephone as a means of transmitting music was quickly developed within Italy once the technology became widely available, albeit with little consistent application.Footnote 100 Media historian Gabriele Balbi has pointed to several early experiments with the telephone within Italy as a way of broadcasting music, before the commercialization of the théâtrophone in the 1890s, but after Italian reports on similar early experiments in the USA.Footnote 101 On 28 February 1878 a transmission took place from the telegraph office in Tivoli to the Palazzo Quirinale in Rome, for an audience including the king and queen, the minister of public works and Ernesto D’Amico (director of the Italian telegraph network), marking the beginnings of the Italian telephone network. Following a performance of the national anthem, several musical excerpts were performed, including the tenor’s aria from Il trovatore (a character who, tellingly, first appears singing offstage). Press discussions were limited to technical journals, but the overall experiment was felt to have gone successfully; throughout the 1880s Italian telephone companies would occasionally pursue further experiments of this kind by broadcasting special performances to subscribers.Footnote 102
Public interest in sustained use of the telephone in this way seems to have been relatively limited, however, in a way that foreshadows the relatively moderate Italian market for phonograph recordings in the early twentieth century. Music inevitably became a test case for the clarity of the communicated sound – as it soon would be for the phonograph – and early experiences of listening to music via the telephone anticipated the later discomfort in multiple ways. As Balbi observes, an effort to establish more regular broadcasts in 1887 was generally coolly received, with the journal Il telegrafista complaining both about the physical awkwardness of the setup and the peculiarity of the audiovisual experience.Footnote 103 In Italy, the use of telephone broadcasting would not fully take off until the 1910s, when Luigi Ranieri developed the Araldo Telefonico as a broadcasting medium (closely modelled on the Hungarian Hírmondó telephone broadcasting service), signing contracts with a number of theatres and café concerts including the Teatro Costanzi.Footnote 104 But the eventual development of radio broadcasting would make this practice redundant, the telephone becoming almost exclusively a medium for conversations rather than for broadcasting and entertainment.
Within the opera house, meanwhile, a range of telephones and other electrical devices would continue to be adopted for a variety of ends, in ways that are further revealing of Italian cultural habits. By the 1870s, stage technologies using electricity had started to become an increasingly familiar part of the opera house infrastructure internationally: the electrical metronome first presented in Paris in 1855 allowed conductors to coordinate their activities with backstage musicians, in ways that invite comparison with Meucci’s acoustic telephone.Footnote 105 As Inge van Rij has argued, the telegram functioned throughout the mid-nineteenth century as an acousmatic technology in a musical context, separating sound from source and binding together different aspects of a musical performance. In a specifically Italian context, the conductor Angelo Mariani noted to Giulio Ricordi in 1863 that he had already been using a telegraph for four years to communicate between the orchestra and the stage.Footnote 106 Given Mariani’s centrality to the emergence of the modern baton conductor within Italy, his use of the telegraph raises the possibility of the wider adoption of these practices on the Italian peninsula.Footnote 107 More generally, it also enriches our understanding of the development within Italy of the concept of the orchestral conductor as the distributor of electrical energy across the orchestral forces – a trope that would become common within Italy by the 1870s. Mariani, the first Italian baton conductor, was regularly described in electrical terms, with Il mondo artistico lamenting his passing in 1873 with the recollection of how ‘an electric current passed between Mariani and each instrumentalist’ during performances: ‘all the instruments lived one and the same life’.Footnote 108 Opera houses also became obvious places to be connected via an emerging telephone network. In 1882 the Pergola would install a telephone in the theatre and begin a subscription via the Società Telefonica per l’Italia Centrale, at the very moment when the théâtrophone began to be explored for use in French theatres.Footnote 109
For Meucci, however, the telephone in the 1870s here reached its final and most musicologically familiar form: moving from stage technology, to metaphorical parallel, to a mode of consuming music. If the opera house had once been a natural site for Meucci’s experiments, in spatial terms by the later nineteenth century the two parted ways, with Meucci’s work becoming more advanced and the telephone eventually becoming a means primarily of hearing language and music rather than of making or imagining it. In many respects, then, Meucci’s career outlines a by-now familiar narrative of disciplinary separation across the course of the nineteenth century, as knowledge became more specialized and spheres of thought more tightly separated. Where Meucci can help nuance this narrative, I would argue, is firstly in the continuity that he and his work provide across different spheres. Meucci can remind us both of the role telephones have continued to play in various aspects of stage production and management until the present day, and of the continued popularity of acousmatic modes of consuming operatic music – not least via radio. Meucci’s telephone experiments can usefully enrich these conversations precisely because of the wide range of relationships they set up with music, in ways that can both reinforce narratives of disciplinary separation across the course of the nineteenth century, and encourage more lateral approaches to relationships between music and technology.
At the same time, Meucci’s embeddedness in the live operatic world is an invitation to consider the ways musical practice can prefigure, model, and re-enact various acoustic technologies. What is at stake here is the question of whether music itself might be considered a meaningful precondition for technological experimentation, every bit as much as the broader networks of social, economic and political activity that historians of technology have pursued in recent decades. If Meucci’s acoustic and electrical telephones had significantly different uses and material possibilities, they were united by shared fantasies of bridging communicative distance – ones shared by Duprez, Salvi and others. These practices collectively belong to broader histories of the voice, as well as of technologies; and they suggest that ‘broadcasting’ the individual voice (in all its particularity) was a crucial cultural concern from the early nineteenth century onwards, that eventually became entwined with ideas of the ‘electrical sublime’. If we place Meucci’s experiments in dialogue with the operatic works that dominated his professional time, meanwhile, we can also nuance the technological determinism that has informed much recent scholarly work on music and technology. Music may not offer direct causes for technological inventions, and Meucci’s complex relationship with opera poses important questions about the connections and causal chains one might draw between musical and technological activities. But music can nonetheless form a meaningful part of the imaginative environment that makes such inventions possible.
The final development stage in the changing relationship between opera and telephone – the telephone as operatic plot element – would, inevitably, take place only after Meucci’s death. Paralleling the development of Meucci’s telephone in his own house, these operatic works would often focus on domestic spaces and strengthen the established cultural connection between telephones, electricity and susceptible female listeners.Footnote 110 Within an Italian context, Ruggero Leoncavallo’s operetta La reginetta delle rose (1912) featured a ‘duettino del telefono’ between two characters with a refrain imitating its ring, while his largely lost follow-up Are You There? (1913) centred upon a London telephone exchange, even if it seems to have made little musical capital out of the new sound technology. Jean Cocteau’s play La Voix Humaine (1930) also sparked something of a mid-twentieth-century vogue for telephone operas, in addition to Francis Poulenc’s adaptation in 1958. Gian Carlo Menotti’s comedy The Telephone (1947) features a telephone-addicted heroine whose sweetheart cannot find a convenient time to propose; he eventually does so from a phone booth, in a comic inversion of the telephone’s deathly associations in Cocteau. While these operas theatrically foregrounded the telephone, their musical methods for doing so were frequently rooted in operatic conventions and earlier acousmatic tropes. Long before the telephone was placed on the operatic stage, in other words, composers – including Verdi – had experimented with powerful telephonic effects; and these musical experiments could precede scientific ones.
There is no Meucci opera – at least yet. But examples from film come close and can suggest how potent the connection between the telephone’s projection and that of the operatic voice has continued to be. A mini-series from the 1970s would cast tenor Giuseppe di Stefano as Lorenzo Salvi, with generous use of the tenor’s recording of Lucia di Lammermoor with Maria Callas, as well as the character singing extracts from nothing less than ‘La Marseillaise’. Here, most boldly if historically freely, the opera house environment is presented as the direct inspiration for Meucci’s early work with the telephone. The tenor is present alongside Meucci when the electrical telephone is accidentally discovered, and Di Stefano’s powerful voice is comically juxtaposed with the unexpected transmission of the voice via electricity (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Giuseppe di Stefano in Antonio Meucci cittadino toscano contro il monopolio Bell (1970).
Where does this leave the role of the broader Italian theatrical and cultural environment raised at the outset of this article? Certainly, Meucci’s relationship with the theatre is a reminder that nineteenth-century Italy was a centre for acoustic (and artistic) invention across all dimensions of the opera house: from the voices that resounded in theatres, to the spaces in which they were heard, the backstage technologies that supported them, and the musical works that they performed. Few nineteenth-century environments were more innovative in their approach to sound than Italian theatres, which proliferated across the globe and generated a series of collective norms for how things could or should sound. Meucci’s obscurity and eventual break with the theatre world are a cautionary tale for those tempted to locate technological traces too easily in musical materials. If echoes are to be found, networks of influence and affiliation must also be constructed, comparisons not merely evoked but explained. But Meucci’s decades-long involvement with opera does also offer an invitation to think differently about the acoustic experiences the theatre could create in this period, when opera still reigned supreme as an audio-visual experience, and the modern telephone still awaited its material birth. The telephone as idea and the telephone as material practice, one might conclude, ultimately operated in dynamic interchange. Both materiality and abstraction, one might add, are at the heart of the telephone fantasy: the real presence of the human voice experienced up close, yet at a supernatural distance. There could be few better places for this ‘marvel of marvels’ to emerge, then, than the nineteenth-century opera house. Both the opera theatre and the laboratory were material producers of otherworldly wonder. And as Italian opera theatres spread globally throughout the nineteenth century – from Florence to Havana, New York and beyond – they affirmed their own importance to a deeply interconnected urban modernity. They were at once a site of aesthetic absorption, and a medium for the circulation of voice: within, and far beyond, any individual theatre.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was undertaken during a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship held at King’s College London (2019-2023), and was initially presented at the ‘Sounding (Out) Nineteenth-Century Italy’ symposium in Cambridge in January 2020. I would like to thank Marco Ladd, Ellen Lockhart, Emanuele Senici, Francesca Vella, Benjamin Walton, Flora Willson and the journal’s peer reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this article.
Ditlev Rindom is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Music and Theatre at Sapienza University of Rome. He studied at Oxford, the Royal Northern College of Music and Cambridge (PhD, 2019), and was subsequently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King’s College London; he has also held a Visiting Fellowship at Yale University (2018). He has published articles in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 19th-Century Music and the Cambridge Opera Journal, and his monograph on Italian operatic circulation between Italy and the Americas 1870–1918 is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. His critical edition of Puccini’s La rondine (1917) for Ricordi was premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in April 2024 under Riccardo Chailly, in a new production to mark Puccini’s centenary.
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