Abstract
Reviewed by: Francis Maes, Ghent University, Belgium
Italian opera of the first half of the nineteenth century represents an intellectual no-man’s land for two reasons. In terms of musical development, opera remained remarkably immune to change. Attention to the voice as the main signifier kept innovation in content and dramaturgy at bay. In terms of its historical relevance, opera did not appear to connect to the developments that would culminate in the process of political unification. It seems as if Italy was silently waiting for a composer like Verdi, who would awaken the sleeping beauty and turn it into a political force. Although the sources do not easily confirm the assumption that the operatic field must have been involved in the political process to some extent, Mary Ann Smart chooses to go against the grain of historians who would prefer to tear the myth of Italian opera as a political art form to shreds. She prefers to follow her intuition that something must have been in the air before the outbreak of Verdian energy.
In this enterprise, the historian’s main task is to make silent or veiled sources speak. Musicology as a discipline is finely attuned to this task, because discovering cultural meaning in non-verbal forms of communication is part of its raison d’être. Mary Ann Smart develops a sophisticated methodology of historical listening, which aims to decipher not only music, but also the unspoken in criticism, journalism, salon conversation and dance. She reconnects her assumptions to the musical works in question, trying to get closer to what contemporary listeners might have heard in them and how their experience differed from modern listeners’ expectations. She demonstrates convincingly that Italians did develop a critical discourse that would connect aesthetic experience to real-life societal challenges, but that it rarely took opera as a point of departure. The intense critical debate on the ballets of Salvatore Viganò is a case in point, which makes Smart surmise that he must have been an equivalent of the Beethoven that Italian music was lacking.
The fashion of operas on the intrigues at the Tudor court is a rewarding case to question the genre’s political potential. Without the inflammatory effect one might expect from politically sensitive subject matter, the Tudor operas demonstrate a gradual shift from the allegorical representation of sovereignty to more modern notions of selfhood and government.
Operatic discourse among the politically active Italian emigrants in Paris was somewhat more focused on political measures, but even in their case Mary Ann Smart needs to read much between the lines. She argues for taking Mazzini’s Filosofia della musica as more than another plea for operatic reform and to read it as a veiled political tract. She demonstrates to what extent Mazzini projects his expectation for initiating political change onto musical style in his discussion of Donizetti’s Byronic opera Marino Faliero.
The disparity between criticism in opera and in other art forms remained even when artists began to engage with the theme of Italian national destiny. Discussions of the historical paintings by Francesco Hayez were politically engaged, whereas the criticism of Verdi’s I Lombardi alla primo crociato – an opera in which Italians played the lead role, in contrast to the biblical fantasy in Nabucco – rarely made a connection between the subject matter and contemporary political issues. It is important to note that the debate on Hayez was carried out in the same, censored Milanese press as the reviews of Verdi’s opera. Verdi would only manage to break the spell on the politicization of opera in the late 1850s. Mary Ann Smart argues that the change must be attributed in the first place to the mere dramatic and musical power of Verdi’s operas. The sociability of attending opera performances gradually gave way to new modes of experiencing the focused dramas in Verdi’s early operas. Verdi’s art paved the way to political relevance on the strength of its aesthetic presence.
Waiting for Verdi offers a multifaceted reading of a wide array of source material. It transcends its musicological focus and offers detailed information for cultural historians dealing with Risorgimento culture. A little concern might be the question of how far the book is equipped to reach a diversified readership. In its attention to musical detail, fulfilling the implicit obligation of the musicological field to ground cultural conclusions in musical analysis, it might alienate general historians from its main argument. The fact that the findings are hardly based on firm evidence and rely more on diversified modes of reading and listening could make the translation of its main arguments into the broader picture of Risorgimento culture a somewhat daunting task.