¹ The premiere took place on 18 November 1978 at the Teatro Ponchielli in Cremona. The show's run was planned as a series of itinerant perfomances on behalf of La Scala, theatre company. It reached the periphery of Milan on 5 January 1979, with a performance at the sport palace of Novate Milanese, and was performed in the city centre on 6 April 1979, at the Teatro Lirico. For reasons we will explain in more detail, the show was never performed on the stage of La Scala itself.

² The available sources on Fo's adaptation do not include a video recording of the performance. They comprise mainly the materials collected in La storia di un soldato (Milan, 1979), including photos, introductory essays, commentary by the author and the script. The online archive (Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, available at http://archivio.francarame.it ) provides public access to a wealth of important documents such as previews, reviews, and a typescript of the show with a list of the musical insertions made by Fo, as well as administrative correspondence between Fo and La Scala.

³ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 24. This and all subsequent translations from Italian are our own, unless otherwise specified.

⁴ Excerpt from a review by ‘E. Mo’ (probably the famous Italian journalist and war correspondent Ettore Mo); cited in the press reviews compiled by Musica viva (January 1979), available at the Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, accessed 5 May 2012.

⁵ Excerpt from a review by ‘A. Bolognesi’; Musica viva (January 1979), Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, accessed 5 May 2012.

⁶ Marta Morazzoni, ‘L'Histoire du soldat di Dario Fo’; Lettere (January 1979), 43, Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, accessed 5 May 2012.

⁷ ‘“La storia del soldato” nelle mani dello stregone: il discusso spettacolo di Dario Fo’, review by ‘a.c.’; Il popolo (11 January 1979), Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, accessed 5 May 2012.

⁸ Renato Palazzi, ‘Fo entra alla Scala come regista: dalla Palazzina Liberty al “tempio della lirica”’; Corriere della sera, date unspecified, Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, accessed 26 March 2012.

⁹ Fo's shift from national broadcast to activism is clearly documented in Behan, Tom, Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre (London and Sterling, VA, 2000), 24–62Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The protest on 7 December 1968 is recounted in a recent glossy retrospective dedicated to Claudio Abbado: De Benedictis, Angela Ida and Ottomano, Vincenzina C., Claudio Abbado alla Scala (Milan, 2008), 75Google Scholar. The retrospective plays down many of the controversies surrounding Abbado's work at La Scala, and – significantly – makes not so much as a passing mention of Fo's adaptation of L'Histoire.

¹¹ Italy in the 1970s conceived of Stravinsky as an eminently progressive composer. Two of the country's foremost musicologists, Roman Vlad and Massimo Mila, praised the ‘universality’ of his style, especially as displayed in both L'Histoire du soldat and the Octet. See Mila, Massimo, ‘Concretezza e precisione di una fiaba’ (1957), in Mila, Compagno Stravinsky (Turin, 1983), 24–32Google Scholar; here 26: ‘if L'Histoire du soldat is no longer Russian, it is still profoundly popular, of a popularity that knows no frontiers and that closely resembles universality’. It is worth emphasising that the title of Mila's collection of essays translates, quite literally, as ‘Comrade Stravinsky’. Roman Vlad, on the other hand, quotes Alfredo Casella's observation on the Octet verbatim in his own book on the composer, by way of conclusion to his chapter about early neo-classicism. See Vlad, Roman, Stravinsky (1972), trans. Fuller, Frederick (Oxford, 1978), 84Google Scholar: ‘Casella was right in regarding the Octet for Wind Instruments as “the most perfect specimen produced by Stravnsky so far of the universal style”’.

¹² Fo himself wanted to counterbalance his apparent distance from political events in 1978 with a show that engaged directly with the contemporary political context and that was fully his own creation. To this purpose in early 1979 he rapidly wrote – possibly while La storia di un soldato was still being performed – a play entitled La tragedia di Aldo Moro. The play was, by the author's own admission, a resounding failure. As reasons for its lack of success, Fo named the play's inability to engage even the invited audiences to which he read the script, and the circumstances surrounding the Moro murder, which were revealed to be infinitely more complex than La tragedia portrayed them to be. All of the above information is gathered in Valentini, Chiara, La storia di Dario Fo (Milan, 1997), 186Google Scholar.

¹³ Dario Fo, ‘Voglio il popolo a La Scala’, La stampa (20 February 1978), Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, accessed 20 April 2012.

¹⁴ The musical legacy of the Risorgimento in post-war Italy has been discussed by scholars before, although for the most part their work does not touch on the late 1970s and tends to take film – rather than contemporary opera or even stagings of opera – as the object of study. Among them are Crisp, Deborah and Hillman, Roger, ‘Verdi in Postwar Italian Cinema’, in Joe, Jeongwon and Teresa, Rose, eds., Between Opera and Cinema (London and New York, 2002), 155–77Google Scholar; Steinberg, Michael P. and Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, ‘Fascism and the Operatic Unconscious’, in Johnson, Victoria, Fulcher, Jane and Ertman, Thomas, eds., Opera from Monteverdi to Bourdieu (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar. Reaching back into the early twentieth century, Laura Basini's work on the building of Verdi's mythic stature in the immediate aftermath of his death is also important; see Basini, Laura, ‘Cults of Sacred Memory: Parma and the Verdi Centennial Celebrations of 1913’, this journal, 13/2 (July 2001), 141–61Google Scholar. Williams, Gavin's ‘Orating Verdi: Death and the Media ca. 1900’, this journal, 23/3 (November 2011), 119–43Google Scholar, is also a key contribution. Our focus in what follows is not so much on the figure of Verdi as on the Risorgimento as an item of collective memory – as an imagined precedent for the project of political unification that the Left perceived 1968 to have been.

¹⁵ The Palazzina was at the centre of many controversies between Fo's company and the Municipality, particularly when Fo, Franca Rame and their actors decided to occupy the building.

¹⁶ Palazzi, ‘Fo entra alla Scala come regista’.

¹⁷ Pasolini, Pier Paolo, L'Histoire du soldat, in Per il cinema, ed. Siti, Walter (Milan, 2001), 2502–3Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See Eco, Umberto, Apocalittici e integrati (Milan, 1965), 44Google Scholar: ‘Mass culture is not typical of a capitalist regime. It is born in a society in which the whole mass of citizens happens to participate equally in public life, in the consumption of goods and in the use of communication systems; it is inevitably born in any industrial society.… Mass culture is proper to a people's democracy such as Mao's China, where political debates take place on big comic placards; the whole artistic culture of the Soviet Union is a typical form of mass culture, and displays all its flaws, such as aesthetic conservatism, the levelling of aesthetic taste on the basis of average standards, the refusal of stylistic proposals that do not correspond to audience expectations, the paternalistic structure of the communication of values’.

¹⁹ In this respect, Eco resonates with Michel Foucault's thought on biopolitics. See, for example, Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Know (Berkeley, 2008)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, 51.

²¹ Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘L'articolo delle lucciole’, in Scritti corsari (Milan, 2003), 131Google Scholar.

²² Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, trans. Buttigieg, Joseph A. (New York, 2010), Vol. 3, 263Google Scholar.

²³ Viale, Guido, Il ’68: Tra rivoluzione e restaurazione (Rimini, 2008), 30Google Scholar. Emphasis is our own.

²⁴ Viale, Il ’68: Tra rivoluzione e restaurazione, 168.

²⁵ Negri, Antonio, Diary of an Escape (Cambridge, 2010), 135Google Scholar. Another especially striking use of ‘voice’ in order to describe political address comes when Negri writes: ‘What is the social, in the face of this parliament? Is it still a force which, in all its differences, is capable of making its voice heard? No, most certainly not. Here we no longer have channels of general communication. There is only the invasion which a few corporations make, every once in a while, in the spaces of the political, bringing some of their servants to guarantee their expression in politics. Fragmentation and segmentation’ (156).

²⁶ Claudio Abbado, quoted in De Benedictis and Ottomano, Claudio Abbado a La Scala, 64.

²⁷ Luigi Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore was premiered at La Scala under Abbado on 4 April 1975. The world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Donnerstag aus Licht was on 15 March 1981, followed by Samstag aus Licht on 25 May 1984. Luciano Berio's La vera storia was commissioned for La Scala's bicentenary in 1978 but received its world premiere four years later, on 9 March 1982; Franco Donatoni's Atem was first performed on 16 February 1985 as part of the series ‘Musica del nostro tempo’. All the above information and more is available in De Benedictis and Ottomano, Claudio Abbado a La Scala, 54–5.

²⁸ The cultural weight and significance of Darmstadt in the aftermath of World War II, and the importance of the Marshall Plan in its institution, have been recently discussed by Taruskin, Richard in his New Oxford History of Music (Oxford and New York, 2005), Vol. 5, chapter 1Google Scholar.

²⁹ For an excellent analysis of the dramaturgical structure of Berio's opera in relation to Verdi's Il trovatore, see Osmond-Smith, David, ‘Nella festa tutto? Structure and Dramaturgy in Luciano Berio's La vera storia’, this journal, 9/3 (1997), 281–94Google Scholar.

³⁰ De Benedictis and Ottomano, Abbado a La Scala, 66.

³¹ Ibid., 66.

³² La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979); in English as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 5Google Scholar.

³³ Mazzini, Giuseppe, Filosofia della musica (1836) (Rome, 2011), 40Google Scholar. Available at http://www.liberliber.it/mediateca/libri/m/mazzini/filosofia_della_musica/pdf/mazzini_filosofia_della_musica.pdf, consulted 5 May 2012.

³⁴ Middleton, Richard, Voicing the Popular (New York and London, 2006), 5–6Google Scholar.

³⁵ Fo, Dario, programme note for La storia di un soldato (Milan, 1978), 31Google Scholar.

³⁶ Moravia, Alberto, ‘The “Vulgarity” of Giuseppe Verdi’, in Man as an End: A Defence of Humanism. Literary, Social and Political Essays (Santa Barbara, 1976), 251Google Scholar.

³⁷ The political significance of the Risorgimento chorus is a controversial topic to this day, as demonstrated by the differing positions of leading scholars such as Roger Parker and Philip Gossett on the degree of political participation that was elicited by such music. See Parker, Roger, Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma, 1997)Google Scholar, and Gossett, Philip, ‘“Edizioni distrutte” and the Significance of Operatic Choruses during the Risorgimento’, in Johnson, , Fulcher, and Ertman, , eds., Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, 181–242Google Scholar.

³⁸ Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, 263.

³⁹ The debate between Roger Parker and Philip Gossett on the political role of the Risorgimento chorus has already been mentioned in note 37. One could also add work by Marcello Sorce Keller on the infiltration of Verdian tunes into the folk song traditions of certain parts of Italy. See Keller, Marcello Sorce, ‘“Gesunkenes Kulturgut” and Neapolitan Songs: Verdi, Donizetti and the Folk and Popular Traditions’, in Pompilio, Angelo, ed., Proceedings of the International Musicological Society (Turin, 1990), Vol. 3, 401–5Google Scholar. Sorce Keller notes that this infiltration affects almost exclusively areas with a strong literary tradition. A more extensive treatment of the historical impact of Verdian opera is found in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli's majestic History of Italian Opera, and more specifically in the sixth volume, entitled Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth (Chicago, 2003), esp. Chapters 5 and 6, written by Roberto Leydi and Giovanni Morelli respectively.

⁴⁰ Smart, Mary Ann, ‘Verdi, Italian Romanticism and the Risorgimento’, in Balthazar, Scott, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Verdi (Cambridge, 2004), 29–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ Osmond-Smith, ‘Nella festa tutto? Structure and Dramaturgy in Luciano Berio's La vera storia’, 282. Osmond-Smith does not develop the relationship to the Risorgimento in his article; his focus is more closely concerned with analysis. However, his article remains to this day the only one to mention the question of the Risorgimento in relationship to the production of the avant-garde at La Scala in the Abbado years.

⁴² See Richard Taruskin, ‘Mavra’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O009950, accessed 2 March 2012).

⁴³ The point is driven home with notable force: ‘A work created with a spirit in which the emotive basis is the nuance is soon deformed in all directions; it soon becomes amorphous, its future is anarchic and its executants become its interpreters’; Igor Stravinsky, ‘Some Ideas about my Octuor’, in White, Eric Walter, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), 574–7, here 576Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Both Fo's description and the ensuing definition are taken from Taviano, Stefania, Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre (Aldershot, 2005), 97Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Jenkins, Ronald Scott, Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Artful Laughter (New York, 2001), 54Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ ‘Nascerà a Lodi il soldato di Fo’, interview with Dario Fo in Libertà (14 October 1978), author unspecified; Archivio Dario Fo Franca Rame, accessed 26 March 2012. In the archive, no newspaper title is specified, but the scanned article has been stamped by the archivist with the name Ernesto Prati and an address in Piacenza. Since Prati was the founder of Libertà, and that newspaper is printed in Piacenza, it follows that the article was originally published in Libertà.

⁴⁷ The idea that the role of the soldier is not fixed is stated by Fo in the published version of the script: ‘The role of the soldier is played by a different actor each time, so as to emphasise that this is not the story of a single individual, but the story of the human collective of the “disenfranchised” or, better still, the story of a class, the largest class, which is that of the exploited, of the proletariat’; see Fo, La storia di un soldato, 44. The frequency with which the actor playing the soldier is switched is difficult to assess from the script and photographs alone, since Fo does not always indicate when a change occurs. He does, though, provide detailed instructions in the script for one single scene, and there the actor changes virtually with every line, creating what must have been a very disorientating effect; see Fo, La storia di un soldato, 41–3.

⁴⁸ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 34–5.

⁴⁹ The typescript of La storia di un soldato in the Archivio Franca Rame Dario Fo contains annotations concerning the musical inserts in every scene; rehearsal numbers match those of the 1952 re-scored version of the Octet published by Boosey and Hawkes (B. and H. 17231). It is difficult to ascertain what knowledge Fo had of Stravinsky's essay on the Octet. We do know that the section of La Scala's programme note devoted to music makes extensive references to Stravinsky's essay: see Luigi Ferrari, programme note for La storia di un soldato, 12–13. In the section of the programme note he himself wrote, Fo claims that he not only listened to a great deal of Stravinsky but also read much by him and about him in preparation for the adaptation of L'Histoire: see Fo, programme note for La storia di un soldato, 30. However, Fo makes no specific reference to Stravinsky's essay on the Octet here or elsewhere in the programme note, or in the press coverage for La storia di un soldato.

⁵⁰ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 35–9. The movements of the mimes are in part described by Fo himself on p. 35, and in part visible in the pictures taken of this particular scene, reproduced on pp. 36–9.

⁵¹ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 35.

⁵² Fo, La storia di un soldato, 49.

⁵³ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 50.

⁵⁴ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 60.

⁵⁵ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 82.

⁵⁶ Fo, La storia di un soldato, 85.

⁵⁷ This detail appears in the New York Review of Books, in an exchange about Thomas Sheenan's review of several texts by Negri and the socialist Sabino Acquaviva, published on 16 August 1979, barely four months after Negri's arrest in relation to the Moro murder. The various replies that Sheenan's piece received were published in the issue of 17 April 1980, along with a response from the author.

⁵⁸ Negri, Antonio, L'anomalia selvaggia: saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza (Milan, 1981)Google Scholar; in English as The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis, 1991).

⁵⁹ Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 69.

⁶⁰ Slavoj Žižek, ‘Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’, available at www.lacan.com, accessed on 5 May 2012.

⁶¹ Battaglini, Raffaella and Negri, Antonio, Settanta (Rome, 2007), 76–100Google Scholar.

⁶² Fo mentioned possible productions of Verdi's I Lombardi alla prima crociata or La battaglia di Legnano; see Palazzi, ‘Fo entra alla Scala come regista’.

⁶³ Performances of L'Histoire at La Scala before and after Fo's adaptation include: Strehler's staging, which premiered at La Piccola Scala on 25 May 1957; Sandro Sequi's staging, which premiered on 9 October 1970 and was filed as ‘opera’, although this may be to do with De Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro, with which it shared the bill; Jérôme Savary's staging, which premiered at La Scala on 8 June 1982 and was filed as ‘prose’; and a version for marionette theatre by Ugo Gregoretti, which premiered on 21 February 1989. All the above information is available at La Scala's online archives, www.archiviolascala.org, accessed on 13 May 2012.