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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
In little more than a year, between October 1892 and November 1893, the Italian operatic repertory acquired two ambitious and monumental works, similar in their choice of a national–historic subject and in their dramatic form: Alberto Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo and Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici. After a few revivals scattered over several decades, both disappeared from circulation, and recent productions have confirmed doubts about their stageworthiness, notwithstanding some convincing passages (particularly in Colombo) and the enormous investment of intellectual and historical reflection that had attended their birth. Ideological motivations determined the musico-dramatic structures of the two operas, and are closely related to the failure of their projects.
1 Some of Alberto and Raimondo Franchetti's many letters to the librettist, preserved in the Fondo Illica at the Biblioteca Passerini-Landi in Piacenza, will be cited below.Google Scholar
2 Since Boito wrote to Verdi on 16 March 1894 (with reference to Fior d'alpe) that ‘Franchetti, who navigated well with Christopher Columbus, has drowned in a teacup, or rather wanted to make a storm in a teacup and was shipwrecked’, Colombo may have been valued in Verdi's circle. The Verdi—Boito Correspondence, ed. Conati, Marcello and Medici, Mario, trans. Weaver, William (Chicago, 1994), 217.Google Scholar
3 I repeat this account of the Cristoforo Colombo versions to rectify some inaccuracies in Mallach, Alan, ‘Alberto Franchetti and Cristoforo Colombo’, Opera Quarterly, 9 (1992), 16–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 The autograph score, preserved in the Ricordi Archives in Milan, bears obvious signs of cuts and substitutions. The whereabouts of the deleted material, which would permit a reconstruction of the original version of the opera, is unknown.Google Scholar
5 See the letter by Franchetti, to Giulio Ricordi, 16 08 1892 (Archivio Ricordi, Milan).Google Scholar
6 See the letter by Franchetti, to Carlo Clausetti of 19 09 1922 (Archivio Ricordi, Milan).Google Scholar
7 Numerous letters by Franchetti in the Archivio Ricordi document the process of this final transformation.Google Scholar
8 This version of Franchetti's Colombo, not Christophe Colombe of Claudel-Milhaud, was the first opera on Columbus that ‘completely avoided the introduction of some love relationship into the plot of discovery or conquest’. Maehder, Jürgen, ‘The Representation of the “Discovery” on the Opera Stage’, in Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance, ed. Robertson, C. E. (Washington, D.C., 1992), 259.Google Scholar
9 For a more detailed discussion, see my ‘I Medici e Wagner’, in Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo. Atti del primo convegno Internazionale di studi su Ruggero Leoncavallo, ed. Maehder, Jürgen and Guiot, Lorenza (Milan, 1993), 149–62.Google Scholar
10 15–16 October 1893. Henceforth cited as the letter to Tonolla, from my transcription in ‘I Medici e Wagner’, 151–2.Google Scholar
11 Giosué Carducci, ‘Presso la tomba di Francesco Petrarca’ (1874), cited by Sapegno, Maria Serena, ‘Italia’, ‘Italiani’, in Letteratura italiana, ed. Rosa, Alberto Asor, V: Le Questioni (Turin, 1986), 169.Google Scholar On the use of ‘history as education to national consciousness’ in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Rosa, Alberto Asor, ‘La cultura (dall'Unità all'età giolittiana)’, in Storia d'ltalia, ed. Romano, R. and Vivanti, C., XI.1: Creazione e assestamento dello stato unitario (Turin, 1975), 821–999;Google ScholarBiondi, Albano, ‘Tempi e forme della storiografia’, letteratura italiana, III: Le forme del testo, 1075–1116;Google Scholar and, above all, Tobia, Bruno, ‘Una cultura per la nuova Italia’, in Storia d'ltalia, ed. Sabbatucci, G. and Vidotto, V., II (Rome and Bari, 1995), 427–552.Google Scholar
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13 See the typescript Appunti van delle [sic] autobiografici di R, Leoncavallo, Archivio Sonzogno, Milan, p. 79. Cited from the copy at the Biblioteca Cantonale di Locarno, Fondo Ruggero Leoncavallo.Google Scholar
14 Carducci, Giosue, ‘Delle poesie toscane di messer Angelo Poliziano. Discorso’, preface to La stanza, l'Orfeo e le rime (Florence, 1863).Google ScholarCited from his Opere, XX (Bologna, 1909), 392–3. The vision of a progressive decline in Italian civilisation, including literature, from the Middle Ages on because of the loss of political liberty was a commonplace, sanctioned by the authoritative Storia della letteratura italiana (1870) of Francesco De Sanctis (according to René Wellek ‘the most beautiful literary history ever written’). Carducci, however, disparaged De Sanctis's work as philosophical speculation lacking a sound philological basis.Google Scholar
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16 There is a Danza Indiana in Act III of Colombo, but after a few bars the monologue of Queen Anacoana is superimposed on it.Google Scholar
17 On the diffusion and cultural function of grand opéra in Italy, both imported and indigenous, see Salvetti, Guido, ‘La Scapigliatura milanese e il teatro d'opera’, in Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento. Studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila (Turin, 1977), 567–604;Google ScholarMorelli, Giovanni, ‘Suicidio e Pazza Gioia: Ponchielli e la poetica nell'Opera Italiana neo-nazional-popolare’, in Amilcane Ponchielli 1834–1886. Saggi e ricerche nel 150° anniversario delta nascita (Casalmorano, 1984), 171–231;Google ScholarSeta, Fabrizio Delia, ‘L'immagine di Meyerbeer nella critica italiana dell'Ottocento e l'idea di “dramma musicale”’, in L'opera tra Venecia e Parigi, ed. Muraro, Maria Teresa (Florence, 1988), 29–48;Google ScholarSeta, Delia, Italia e Francia nell'Ottocento (Turin, 1993), 277rff.;Google ScholarRoccatagliati, Alessandro, ‘Opera, opera-ballo e “grand opera”: commistioni stilistiche e recezione critica nell'Italia teatrale di secondo Ottocento (1860–1870)’, in Opera e libretto, 2 (Florence, 1993), 283–349.Google Scholar
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19 Italia e Francia, 280.Google Scholar
20 Letter to Giulio Ricordi, 10 10 1892. Cited from Abbiati, Franco, Verdi (Milan, 1959), IV, 464.Google Scholar
21 Letter to Tonolk (see n. 10).Google Scholar
22 The conversation is referred to in the Appunti vari (see n. 13), p.24. However, serious doubts have been raised about the reliability of this source, for example, by Budden, Julian, ‘Primi rapporti fra Leoncavallo e la casa Ricordi: dieci missive finora sconosciute’, in Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo (see n. 9), 49–60.Google Scholar
23 Undated letter, possibly spring 1892.Google Scholar
24 See Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘The Twofold Truth in Wagner's Aesthetics: Nietzsche's Fragment “On Music and Words”’, in his Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 19–39.Google Scholar
25 See Corazzol, Adriana Guarnieri, Tristano, mio Tristano. Gli scrittori italiani e it caso Wagner (Bologna, 1988).Google Scholar
26 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, Il Fuoco, in Prose di Romany, 2nd edn, II (Verona, 1964), 650–1 and 658.Google Scholar
27 See Gerhard, Anselm, Die Verstädterung der Oper. Paris und das Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 Ibid., 223.
29 See Döhring, Sieghart, ‘Meyerbeer — Grand opéra als Ideendrama’, Lendemains, 31–2 (1983), 11–21.Google Scholar
30 Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Die Historie als Oper. Gattungsgeschichte und Werkinterpretation’, in his Vom Musikdrama Zur Literaturoper (Munich and Mainz, 1989), 58.Google Scholar
31 Emerson, Caryl, ‘La storia in scena. II tema di Boris e il pensiero storico di Karamzin, Pushkin e Musorgskij’, programme note for Boris Godunov, Venice, Teatro la Fenice (1994), 87.Google Scholar
32 The term is taken from Ashbrook, William, ‘Alcuni aspetti di Ruggero Leoncavallo librettista’, in Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo, 148. Among other rare examples of this tendency, Media Evo Latino should at least be mentioned, a trilogy by Ettore Panizza (later famous as a conductor) to a text by Illica and performed at Genoa during the 1900 autumn season. Illica (I cite from the Ricordi libretto) wanted ‘to reunite an entire epoch — the Middle Ages — in its three most characteristic [historical] moments’. The opera consists of three acts, the first in Italy during the age of the Crusades (c. 1050), the second in France during the age of the Courts of Love (c. 1250), and the third in Spain during the age of Torquemada (c. 1450). These stages mark a line of inexorable decadence, from the ‘mysticism of the Crusades’ to the ‘savagery of religious trials’. Media Evo Latino had a very limited stage life.Google Scholar
33 Letter to Illica of 1 09 1889.Google Scholar
34 Corazzol, Adriana Guarnieri, ‘Opera and Verismo: Regressive Points of View and the Artifice of Alienation’, this journal, 5 (1993), 43–4.Google Scholar
35 See my L'opera come racconto. Modi natrativi nel teatro musicale dell'Ottocento (Venice, 1994), chapters 3–4.Google Scholar
36 On the status of ‘stage music’ as ‘voice of the character’ and its intersection with the parameter of ‘register’, see L'opera come racconto, chapter 2.Google Scholar
37 The numbers presented as such (with appropriate titles) in the score are printed in bold italics in the table. In all other cases the outlines of closed numbers are immediately recognisable, even if not marked. The majority of these numbers are preceded by a brief introductory ‘scena’ not indicated in the Table. I have included the term ‘scena’ only for large and structurally autonomous episodes.Google Scholar
38 The rispetto is a typical Tuscan variant of a popular lyric form, widespread from the beginning of the fifteenth century. However, the metrical form chosen by Leoncavallo (AABBCCDD) is that of a genre close to it, the strambotto, while the rispetto usually has alternating rhymes with or without a final rhymed couplet. See Elwert, W. Th., Versificazone italiana dalle origini ai nostrigioni (Florence, 1989), 148.Google Scholar
39 The metrical form used by Leoncavallo (a5BA) is actually that of the stomello, widespread from the fifteenth century on. Cf. Elwert, Versificazione, 150–51. The error in nomenclature is puzzling, given that Carducci also wrote stornelli, but beyond his generic literary infatuation one should recall that Leoncavallo's philology course at the University of Bologna was very brief.Google Scholar
40 The reference to Tannhäuser is obvious. Lorenzo, challenged by two popular singers, improvises here on an interesting kind of ornate declamation: the text is actually taken from ‘La Nencia di Barberino’ by Lorenzo de' Medici, but the metrical treatment is anything but veristic, as Leoncavallo extracts an octave and a half from non-consecutive verses (I.1–8, X. 1–4) and treats them as if they were three strophic quatrains.
41 A ballad by Angelo Poliziano, one of the most celebrated pieces in the history of Italian poetry.Google Scholar
42 Letter to Illica, 3 01 1890.Google Scholar
43 Caroso, Fabrizio, Selva Amorosa (Venice, 1600);Google Scholar published by Chilesotti, Oscar, one of the pioneers of Italian musicology, in Darze del secolo XVI, Biblioteca di Rarità Musicali, 1 (Milan, 1883). The dance is reproduced in my ‘I Medici e Wagner’ (see n. 9 ), 159. Respighi subsequendy used the same collection for his Antiche arie e danze per liuto, though without citing it, pretending instead to have consulted the original tabulature.Google Scholar
44 To Giulio Ricordi, 21 08 1894, in Abbiati, , Verdi, IV, 551–2.Google Scholar
45 See Dahlhaus, Carl, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas (Cambridge, 1979), 88–9.Google Scholar
46 See Groos, Arthur, ‘Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger’, 19th-century Music, 16 (1992), 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
