This essay takes as its point of departure the so-called ‘Verdi A’, 432Hz. From the late 1860s through to the 1880s, the opera composer was intensely preoccupied with the question of tuning, weighing in several times on the matter of where A should sit. Verdi was concerned for the strain that high tunings should place on singers’ voices. He advocated on multiple occasions for global acceptance of an A well below 440, and sent Arrigo Boito to argue in favour of A=432 at the Congresso dei Musicisti Italiani, held in Milan on 16–21 June 1881. In the 1880s, Italy remained one of the only nations in Europe that had not adopted equal temperament wholesale for fixed-tone instruments; as in the case of its spoken languages during this same period, and the locations of its A, temperament varied by region, with the southern part of the peninsula clinging to meantones. This article argues that ‘Verdi tuning’ represents the end point of a number of longer shifts in the conceptualization of musical sound, particularly in the Italian context: from temperament to tuning (accordatura); from relative conceptions of musical pitch to an absolute one; from local and regional variations towards a standardized system; from an older notion of all-encompassing nature to a presumed separation between nature and culture. Tracing this history through the Italian long nineteenth century will involve concentrating on what this article calls music-adjacent sound: that is, interrogative play with musical pitch; sound experiments from musical materials and operatic voices; instrument tuning by ear; listening for overtones; legislating preferred ratios and (eventually) frequencies for musical use; and constructing a theory of music that draws together these means of sounding. Music-adjacent sound is where the conditions for music-making were and still are established. This article argues that an attention to these sonic and nearly musical moments can demonstrate how listening and the musical imagination were cultivated outside the boundaries of any work or performance.

This article traces the Italian reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet’s Pygmalion (1770), ultimately arguing that the influence of early melodrama (and not the better-remembered Viennese reform) was behind the emergence of a style of speech-like singing and gestural mirroring in Italian opera in the decades immediately around 1800. Rousseauian melodrama was one of a few related projects subsuming the spoken word within the domain of music during the 1770s and 1780s; another was Joshua Steele’s Prosodia rationalis, which proposed a system of modified music notation in order to preserve and transmit the spoken word. This article suggests (contra most recent historians of melodrama) that such projects were inflected by a kind of twilight classicism, in which the revived object was made to show signs of decay. The revivalist strain in the first melodrama was particularly important for its Italian reception. Rousseau’s ideal of an ancient, onomatopoeic language collapsing meaning and medium was naturalised into the rhetoric of Italian opera reform during the 1770s and 1780s by the Jesuit theorists Antonio Eximeno and Stefano Arteaga. By way of a coda, this article traces the emergence of a ‘melodramatic’ style of Italian opera, first in all-sung adaptations of Pygmalion, thence into Venetian opera of the 1790s more broadly, and finally into Donizetti’s techniques of gestural mirroring and what was called the ‘canto filosofico’ of Bellini’s early operas.

Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West, premièred in New York, 1910, represents what we might call a photographic turn in the later Puccini. For one, its mise-en-scène was given textual status equivalent to that of libreto and music. The opera's first costumes and sets were crafted for the Metropolitan Opera House from stills of the source play, The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco. What is more, the circulation of photographs and eventually a staging livret ensured that La fanciulla looked the same in every iteration. In this model, authorship and performance become acts of remediation between layers of machine-generated souvenirs. Both The Girl and La fanciulla bear the marks of their mediated nature: The Girl suggests a fragile third dimension through the use of panoramas and scrims; during its famous Act I sunset La fanciulla moves from a realist sound-world towards a fantasy one, the latter marked by disembodied humming from a tenor chorus and even a new instrument, the fonica, designed by Puccini to be sounded by electricity. This essay suggests that the purported resistance of Puccinian opera to revisionist staging has its roots in critiques of realism's ‘statistical’ universe, and the perceptual modes held to be available to mass-consumed art.

This article investigates the theme of statuary animation within pantomime and language reform, particularly in Milan between the 1760s and the 1790s. Its focal point is a little-known work created by Florentine choreographer Gasparo Angiolini for the new Teatro alla Scala in 1782: his didactic ‘philosophical ballet’ La vendetta spiritosa, based on the Traité des sensations by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (in Venice the work was given as La vendetta ingegnosa o La statua di Condilliac [sic]). During the last decades of his career, informed by French linguistic theory and by Milanese writers such as the Verri brothers and Cesare Beccaria, Angiolini aimed to create an unmediated music-gestural language that could overcome linguistic and even political boundaries. The project had significant implications for the use of representative sound, both in music and in language. I examine the development of the impulse towards gestural mimesis and through-composition within scores for the danza parlante, including by Angiolini himself.