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Головна Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy
Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century ItalyAlessandra Campana
At the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera participated to the making of a modern spectator. The Ricordi stage manuals testify to the need to harness the effects of operatic performance, activating opera's capacity to cultivate a public. This book considers how four operas and one film deal with their public: one that in Boito's Mefistofele is entertained by special effects, or that in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is called upon as a political body to confront the specters of history. Also a public that in Verdi's Otello is subjected to the manipulation of contemporary acting, or one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut is urged to question the mechanism of spectatorship. Lastly, the silent film Rapsodia satanica, thanks to the craft and prestige of Pietro Mascagni's score, attempts to transform the new industrial medium into art, addressing its public's search for a bourgeois pan-European cultural identity, right at the outset of WWI.
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OPERA AND MODERN SPECTATORSHIP IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ITALY At the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera participated in the making of a modern spectator. The Ricordi stage manuals testify to the need to harness the effects of operatic performance, activating opera's capacity to cultivate a public. This book considers how four operas and one film deal with their public: one that in Boito's Mefistofele is entertained by special effects, or that in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is called upon as a political body to confront the specters of history; also a public that in Verdi's Otello is subjected to the manipulation of contemporary acting, or one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut is urged to question the mechanism of spectatorship. Lastly, the silent film Rapsodia satanica, thanks to the craft and prestige of Pietro Mascagni's score, attempts to transform the new industrial medium into art, addressing its public's search for a bourgeois pan-European cultural identity, right at the outset of the First World War. alessandra campana is Assistant Professor of Music at Tufts University. She studied at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," University of York, and Cornell University, and was a Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. Besides her work in opera studies, her research spans more broadly the interfaces of sound and vision in theatre, film, and video. Co-chair of the Opera Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, she is an Associate Editor of The Opera Quarterly. CA MBRI DGE S TU DIES IN OPERA Series editor: Arthur Groos, Cornell University Volumes for Cambridge Studies in Opera explore the cultural, political and social influences of the genre. As a cultural art form, opera is not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced, whether directly or in more subtle ways, by its social and political environment. In turn, opera leaves its mark on society and contributes to shaping the cultural climate. Studies to be included in the series will look at these various relationships including the politics and economics of opera, the operatic representation of women or the singers who portrayed them, the history of opera as theater, and the evolution of the opera house. Published titles Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna Edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner John Warrack Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture Camille Crittenden Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance Ian Woodfield Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halévy's La Juive Diana R. Hallman Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in Così fan tutte Edmund J. Goehring Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini Emanuele Senici Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 Downing A. Thomas The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity Alexandra Wilson The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 Susan Rutherford Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu Edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks Daniel H. Foster When Opera Meets Film Marcia J. Citron Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception Herbert Lindenberger Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life Benjamin Walton Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution Pierpaolo Polzonetti Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust Cormac Newark Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism David Charlton The Sounds of Paris in Verdi's La traviata Emilio Sala The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage Suzanne Aspden Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama Stefano Castelvecchi Verdi, Opera, Women Susan Rutherford Rounding Wagner's Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera Bryan Gilliam Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy Alessandra Campana Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century Karen Henson Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy Alessandra Campana University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University's mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107051898 © Alessandra Campana 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Campana, Alessandra. Opera and modern spectatorship in late nineteenth-century Italy / Alessandra Campana. pages cm. – (Cambridge studies in opera) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-05189-8 1. Opera – Italy – 19th century. I. Title. ml1733.4.c36 2014 792.509450 09034–dc23 2014019427 isbn 978-1-107-05189-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. For Cecilia, Francesca, and Jane CONTENTS List of figures page x List of music examples xii Preface and acknowledgments xiii 1. Staging manuals and the public 1 2. The "fleeting moment": Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele 15 3. Milan 1881: Simon Boccanegra and the specters of history 48 4. Acting in Otello: on the rhetoric of the medium 106 5. The real of opera: Puccini's Manon Lescaut 143 6. Faust again: the silent film Rapsodia satanica and Mascagni's score 172 Postlude 191 Select bibliography 194 Index 203 ix FIGURES 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 x Carlo Ferrario, sketch for the Prologue of Mefistofele (Milan, La Scala, 1881). Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan page 26 Gestural score for Margherita, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Mefistofele" (Milan: Ricordi, 1881). Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan 41 Final apotheosis in Excelsior (Milan, La Scala, 1881), L'illustrazione italiana 7 (February 13, 1881). Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts 71 Girolamo Magnani, sketch for Simon Boccanegra (Milan, La Scala, 1881), Act 3. Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan 76 Diagram for Act 3, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Simon Boccanegra" (Milan: Ricordi, 1881). Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan 76 Light show; front page of L'illustrazione italiana (May 29, 1881). Biblioteca di Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte, Rome 78 Girolamo Magnani, sketch for Simon Boccanegra (Milan, La Scala, 1881), Act 1, scene i. Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan 92 Copy of Girolamo Magnani, sketch for Simon Boccanegra (Milan, La Scala, 1881), Prologue. Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan 93 Diagram for Act 2, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Otello" (Milan: Ricordi, 1887), 35. Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan 114 Copy of Giovanni Zuccarelli, sketch for Otello (Rome, Costanzi Theatre, 1887), Act 2. Archivio Storico Ricordi © Ricordi & C. S.r.l. Milan 115 Plate for Act 1, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Manon Lescaut" (Milan: Ricordi, 1893) 148 Plate for Act 2, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Manon Lescaut" (Milan: Ricordi, 1893) 149 Plate for Act 3, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Manon Lescaut" (Milan: Ricordi, 1893) 151 Diagram for Act 4, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Manon Lescaut" (Milan: Ricordi, 1893) 153 Plate for Act 4, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Manon Lescaut" (Milan: Ricordi, 1893) 153 Diagram for Manon's arrival in Act 1, Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Manon Lescaut" (Milan: Ricordi, 1893) 155 List of figures 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Cover of the libretto of Rapsodia satanica (Rome, Cines, 1915) 174 At the piano; still from Rapsodia satanica, Part i 182 At the piano again; still from Rapsodia satanica, Part ii 185 Stills from Rapsodia satanica, Part ii, Finale 188 xi MUSIC EXAMPLES 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 xii Paolo's racconto (lines 1–2 and 5–6), Simon Boccanegra, Prologue page 56 Paolo's racconto (lines 11–14), Simon Boccanegra, Prologue 58 Amelia's racconto (stanza 3), Simon Boccanegra, Act 1, scene i 83 Simone-Amelia duet (opening section), Simon Boccanegra, Act 1, scene i 86 Simone-Amelia duet (middle section), Simon Boccanegra, Act 1, scene i 88 Simone-Amelia duet (ending), Simon Boccanegra, Act 1, scene i 90 From Council Chamber Scene, Simon Boccanegra, Act 1, scene ii 98 Jago's metamorphosis, Otello, Act 2, scene ii 118 Temptation Scene (lines 1–4), Otello, Act 2, scene iii 128 Temptation Scene (lines 5–9), Otello, Act 2, scene iii 129 Ending of Otello, Act 4 140 Manon's arrival, Manon Lescaut, Act 1 157 From Manon-Des Grieux duet, Manon Lescaut, Act 1 159 From Des Grieux's aria, Manon Lescaut, Act 1 160 Des Grieux awaits Manon, Manon Lescaut, Act 1 160 Mephistopheles' theme, Mascagni's score for Rapsodia satanica, Prologue 181 Quotation of Chopin, Ballade op. 23 no. 1, in Mascagni's Rapsodia satanica 183 Quotation of Chopin, Valse op. 34 no. 2, in Mascagni's Rapsodia satanica 186 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book claims that opera participated in the making of a modern public in postunification Italy. More broadly, the goal of these pages is to provide an alternative historical account of the aesthetics of opera, one that considers opera's construction of a mode of spectating. Recent contributions to opera studies have been particularly alert to the connections between opera and public life, especially in terms of cultural and political history, compositional processes, censorship and reception, and lately also performance and ideology. This book contributes to these threads of inquiry but also claims that by the end of the nineteenth century opera, especially in Italy, is accorded the status of an autonomous, reproducible cultural commodity that aspires to constitute its audience by regulating the way it addresses it. Crucially, Casa Ricordi's publication of a series of staging manuals during the second half of the century – the disposizioni sceniche – is symptomatic of this newly felt need to devise and then control more precisely the moment of performance and its subsequent iterations. Chapter 1 introduces the staging manuals by considering their status as texts in relation to the performance they strive to control and to the public they aim to address. This leads to an examination of the staging manuals as a phenomenon pertaining both to a specific cultural policy and to a more general aesthetic turn. This book studies the detailed instructions of the manuals as textual traces of the theatrical conventions and solutions that were adopted to address and interpellate the public at the turn of the twentieth century. The central chapters examine more in detail how four of these operas and their staging manuals deal with their public: a public that in Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele (1868–81) is openly confronted in its aesthetic assumptions but also entertained and mesmerized by spectacular special effects, or that, in the case of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra (1857–81), is called upon as a political body, in its ability to confront the specters of history. But it is also a public that in Verdi's Otello (1887) is subjected to the calculated emotional manipulation of contemporary acting theories and techniques, or one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut (1893) is urged to question the very mechanism that keeps spectators engaged with what happens on the stage, both visually and aurally. The last chapter is dedicated instead to a peculiar experiment involving a "diva film" and an opera composer: the silent film Rapsodia satanica (1914–17), interpreted by the famous actress Lyda Borelli, with an orchestral score by Pietro Mascagni. This extraordinary film represents an attempt at transforming the new industrial medium from mass entertainment into art, thanks to the consummate craft and the xiii xiv Preface and acknowledgments cultural prestige of an opera composer. It also represents the effort to address a national mass audience in its search for a bourgeois pan-European cultural identity, right at the outset of the Great War. This book therefore is also about how Italian opera in the last decades of the nineteenth century shaped and responded to the necessities and anxieties of modernity. The stage manuals testify to the emerging ambition to harness and channel the effects of live operatic performance, and to allow opera to address and cultivate a public. This ambition is surely an aesthetic one, but it also forcefully involves political and cultural formations, both those specific to post-unification Italy (such as the "making of the Italians"), as well as those more general to Europe at the turn of the century. It is at this juncture that this book creates a dialogue with cultural history as well as with other disciplines – film studies, theatre and performance studies – traditionally preoccupied with the issues at stake here, such as spectatorship, visuality, performance, theatricality and so forth. Each chapter therefore establishes its own critical scene, where theoretical concepts and historical themes interact with the textual traces left by these four operas and one film – libretto, score, staging manual, reviews. The curious case of Boito's Mefistofele is explored in Chapter 2 through a series of intersecting narratives: the story of the opera's disastrous reception and subsequent revision, Balzac's novella The Unrecognized Masterpiece, and Giorgio Agamben's account of the crucial shift in the aesthetics of modernity. I argue that the opera includes and envisions its notoriously tormented creation and reception. The innovative and spectacular apparatus devised by Boito engenders a spectator who is enchanted by the abundance of special effects but is ultimately encouraged to question the stakes of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 3 argues that the story of Simon Boccanegra, the pirate turned doge, marred by the relentless demands of the past, stages what can be termed a spectral historicity. This is discussed in the context of a burgeoning culture industry and its contemporary celebrations of an enlightened, technological modernity: from the light shows of the National Exhibition of Industry and Art in Milan, to the performance of the gran ballo Excelsior, to popular mid-century optical spectacles such as diorama and phantasmagoria. This chapter's critical scene at times shadows but does not engage directly with the Benjaminian arguments that are probably more familiar to the discourse of opera studies. This kind of theoretical "ghosting" is hardly casual and reflects instead this book's attempt to attend to the specificity of Italian culture at this time. Turning from stagecraft to acting theories, Chapter 4 focuses on the poietic and empathic force of acting. The minute descriptions of gestures in the staging manual for Otello respond to contemporary controversies about acting, such as the one that developed around Denis Diderot's Paradox of the Actor. In Verdi's opera the conflict between Otello and Jago thematizes acting along the lines of those controversies, as the juxtaposition of what Lacoue-Labarthe termed passive and active mimesis. Otello, the victim of Jago's calculations, is confined, on the one hand, to the transparent emotionality elaborated by great Romantic actors (such as Tommaso Salvini). On the Preface and acknowledgments other hand, he is the only character endowed with the capacity of empathetic reappropriation of his past. Thus the opera raises issues that challenge the ethics and aesthetics of theatrical mimesis. Nowhere is the mimetic potential of a character exploited as much as in Manon Lescaut, and in the way of a tour de force in subject-construction. Chapter 5 introduces the gaze as a theatrical device, and discusses the relation of the heroine to the set in conjunction with a number of twentieth-century critical texts which are concerned with identity and spectatorship: from Jean-Paul Sartre's notorious vignette of the voyeur to Jacques Lacan's theory of subjectification in the realm of vision, and film theory's elaboration of the concept of suture. From this perspective, what have traditionally been considered the opera's most problematic aspects – the lack of continuity among the acts and the odd bareness and stillness of the last act – emerge as its most modern features. In this sense Manon Lescaut explores the limits of nineteenth-century operatic spectatorship and, in the nowhere of the last act, it reveals voyeurism as the necessary trick behind the operatic machinery. By closing with another variation on the Faustian theme, the silent film Rapsodia satanica, forty years after Boito's Mefistofele, this book suggests that Faust's dilemma assumed a special significance also in Italian experiments with an art of modernity. Chapter 6 turns to the theory and historiography of music in early film, examining the role of an opera composer at work with the new production system of cinema. The experiment was firstly an economic enterprise but it also constituted a new test of the very capabilities of music as a medium: the opera composer Mascagni invents a new working method, but also a new function for music in order to accompany the powerful mute images of the actress and diva Lyda Borelli. This book has been long in the making, typically for a first research project but also unusually so – perhaps because it took a while to realize that research on the performance potentialities of texts was destined to translate into a performance of endlessly potential texts. Hence previous versions of these chapters have assumed the form of conference papers, proceedings and journal articles, at different degrees of distance from their current status. Chapter 3 includes segments previously published in "Il menzognero incanto: Sight and Insight in Simon Boccanegra," Studi verdiani 13 (January 2000), 59–87, and in "Amelia/Maria and the larve del passato," Cambridge Opera Journal 14/1–2 (March 2002), 211–27, which reached rather different conclusions. Similarly, part of Chapter 4 appeared as "'Intelligenti giuochi di fisionomia': Acting in Otello," in Verdi 2001. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, New York, New Haven, 24 gennaio–1o febbraio 2001, Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, and Marco Marica, eds. (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 879–901, developing another kind of argument, while Chapter 5 is based on my article "Look and Spectatorship in Manon Lescaut," The Opera Quarterly 24/1–2 (Spring 2008), 4–26. Translations in the text are my own, unless otherwise indicated. xv xvi Preface and acknowledgments The work for this book has accrued from the expertise, intellectual generosity and friendship of a large number of people. Prompts, ideas, reactions, discussions have traveled across the pond several times, encompassing a broad geographical as well as disciplinary network of colleagues and friends. Among those who directly dealt with these pages at some early stage are my maestri: first of all Pierluigi Petrobelli, with his ever inspiring passion and imagination, and more recently David Rosen, who with an incomparable mix of subversive humor and intelligent craftsmanship has shared his interests and discoveries and taught me the tools of the trade. Several families of scholars also contributed to this project: the Music Department at Cornell University, the SCR at New College, University of Oxford, the fantastic group of editors of The Opera Quarterly, the Opera Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Music Department at Tufts University. Among these I wish to thank Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart for their indefatigable support; Art Groos and Bonnie Buettner for their affectionate wisdom, professionalism and good humor; Mauro Calcagno, Gabriela Cruz, Gundula Kreuzer, Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Emanuele Senici, and Jessica Waldoff for their friendship and invariably insightful cross-cultural feedback; David Levin, Michael Steinberg, and Suzanne Steward-Steinberg for their ability to create occasions for friendly and serious dialogue and for their sophisticated way of writing and thinking with and through opera; Michelle Duncan and Christopher Morris for their passion for ideas, creativity, and willingness to collaborate; Anne Shreffler and Sindhu Revuluri for their collegiality and openness; Jeff Smith and Lea Jacobs, as well as Roberta Marvin and Rick Altman, for their availability for cross-disciplinary exchanges and for discussing with me versions of Chapter 6. The final phase of the work would not have been possible without the team at Cambridge University Press (Vicki Cooper, Fleur Jones, and Christina Sarigiannidou), the help of Justin Mueller and William Kenlon (bibliography and musical examples), and above all without my dear colleagues Joe Auner and Jane Bernstein and their incomparable intuition, knowledge, and infectious capacity to bring out the best. A special thank you to my loved ones, near and far: Thomas Peattie, benevolent reader and most inspiring partner in ever new listening adventures; Giancarlo, Giulio, Alvaro, Natalia, Mattia, Leo, Davide, and above all Cecilia and Francesca, the "fixt foot" of my compass. The labor and enthusiasms that went into this book are dedicated to the women in my life, in Rome and in Boston. 1 Staging manuals and the public The audience is not so much a mere congregation of people as a body of thought and desire. It does not exist before the play but is initiated or precipitated by it; it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed. The audience is what happens when, performing the signs and passwords of a play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response. That is a matter of subjectivity but also of historical process.1 OPERA MEDIATIZED As a starting point for this exploration I propose that historically the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. It was the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive existing representations as "live." . . . Far from being encroached upon, contaminated, or threatened by mediation, live performance is always already inscribed with traces of the possibility of technical mediation (i.e., mediatization) that defines it as live.2 If read in relation to today's widespread dissemination of opera via digital technology (from video streaming to HD live broadcast, and the already obsolete DVD), Auslander's reflection has the undoubted merit of freeing these fruitions from the stain of preempted aesthetic experiences, of mere second-hand thrills for opera collectors. More than that, in my view, it forces opera scholars and viewers to look back at live performance not (only) as an original experience of presence but as an effect of digital audio-visual technologies that leave multiple traces on the performance – from the camera-ready acting and set design, to singing techniques and sound design. And yet, Auslander's repeated appeals for the emancipation of the mediatized from the "live" might be carried further. His argument programmatically coalesces mediatization with technology of reproduction, as if the former was instantiated only by recording devices. Conversely, the realm of the "live," no matter how tainted by "technical mediation," is defined by opposition to reproduction technology, and thus in its pristine promise of directness, of pure experiential presence. This book starts from the assumption that there is no such thing as unmediatedness on the stage, and even less on the opera stage.3 At a most basic level, for instance, it is well known that 1 2 3 Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore, 1990), 25. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn. (London, 2008), 56. Thus the reclamation of unmediated live performance cannot be but a statement of poetics, a manifesto of a certain kind of theatre or performance art, an historically and culturally specific experiment aimed at effacing the semiotics of the stage. The obvious example is the theatre of resistance and subversion advocated by Peggy Phelan and discussed by Auslander immediately after the passage quoted above. 1 2 Opera and Modern Spectatorship opera theatres for over four hundred years have been consistently predisposed to adopt new techniques and technologies, on and off stage (stage machineries and lighting devices, theatre acoustics and orchestra sound, to name a few). More than that, medium in opera can be historicized as a function acquired by many of opera's forms and devices (for instance singing technique and perspective painting, or even the cabaletta and da capo form). However, rather than settling for the generalizing claim that opera is always already "technically mediated," even before or without being enmeshed with reproduction technologies, this book more specifically argues that a group of works produced in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century bring to the fore the very issue of the medium of opera. In relation to this specific historical juncture therefore opera is mediatized insofar as the adoption of ambitious techniques and devices, both theatrical and musical, coincides with a reflection on their communicative and aesthetic powers.4 The sample discussed here of four operas and a silent film manifests similar concerns for their medial status and consequently for their capacity to engage with the audience and to participate in a broader movement of industrialization of culture. They foreground by different means the attempt to redefine their own capacity to affect by calling into question the interaction of music and acting, viewing and narrative unity, stagecraft and seeing the invisible, or the performative power of music (by an opera composer) when associated with an imagetrack. Symptomatic of these concerns for medium is the contemporary output of staging manuals, the disposizioni sceniche, booklets of instructions for the mise-en-scène printed by the publishing house Ricordi during the second half of the nineteenth century.5 The following pages outline the way in which these documents are 4 5 See Peggy Phelan, "The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction," in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London, 1996). Relevant to the present claim is a discussion of mediation in the context of theatre studies: Roger Copeland, "The Presence of Mediation," The Drama Review 34/4 (1990), 28–44; now reprinted in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literature and Cultural Studies, Philip Auslander, ed., vol. iv (London, 2003), 306–22. In recent research in communication and media studies the term "mediatization" has been amply defined. One of the most influential theorizations is that of Friedrich Krotz, who speaks of mediatization "as a historical ongoing, long-term process in which more and more media emerge and are institutionalized. Mediatization describes the process whereby communication refers to media and uses media so that media in the long run increasingly become relevant for the social construction of everyday life, society, and culture as a whole"; Friedrich Krotz, "Mediatization: A Concept with which to Grasp Media and Societal Change," in Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences, Knut Lundby, ed. (New York, 2009), 21–40, here 24. For a list of most of the existing disposizioni see Michaela Peterseil, "Die 'Disposizioni sceniche' des Verlags Ricordi: ihre Publikation und Ihr Zielpublikum," Studi verdiani 12 (1997), 133–55. The series was inaugurated in 1856 by Verdi's Giovanna de Guzman (a censored version of Les Vêpres siciliennes), and seven of the existing disposizioni sceniche are for Verdi's operas: Un ballo in maschera, 1859; La forza del destino, 1863; Don Carlo, 1867 and 1886; Aida, 1873; Simon Boccanegra, 1883; Otello, 1888. These sources were rediscovered in the late 1960s by David Rosen; see David Rosen, "The Staging of Verdi's Operas: An Introduction to the Ricordi Disposizioni sceniche," in International Musicological Society, Report of the Twelfth Congress, Berkeley, 1977, Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade, eds. (Kassel, 1981), 444–53; and Staging manuals and the public connected to larger changes in the production of culture, changes related to a new role of the publisher who acts as intermediary between the composer and the public. Similarly to the Parisian livrets de mise en scène, a long-running and larger series of instruction booklets printed in Paris, the disposizioni sceniche were meant to be rented or sold by the publisher to opera houses together with the score and the orchestral parts, thereby providing guidelines for the operas' subsequent stagings.6 They consist, in general, of a combination of diagrams and verbal descriptions, the former to illustrate the organization of stage space, position of props, wings and backdrops, and the movement of the actors. The more or less extensive verbal commentaries explain the diagrams, specifying the temporal order of events, coordinating the actors' entrances, exits, and gestures, as well as mapping the time of the stage action onto the time of the music by explicit references to the score, or more often, to the sung text. Occasionally, these sections directly address the singers with instructions about their character's emotions and motivations, and how to render them through gesture, facial expression, and tone of voice. The status of these manuals is therefore rather complex: placed between the traditional operatic text (score and libretto) and its performance, they are both descriptions of a performance and prescriptions for subsequent ones. Accordingly these texts have been discussed for their way of delimiting the opera text – for example in relation to critical editions – and questioned for their authority over contemporary stagings – thus for their usefulness to generate stage renditions of the operas.7 It is their appearance and above all the commercial enterprise of compiling and printing these booklets that in my view deserve attention, in that they signal the mutated conditions of opera production and performance within a more complex cultural market. As intermediaries between the author(s) and subsequent performances, these manuals allow opera to approximate an autonomous product, a reproducible 6 7 David Rosen, "La disposizione scenica per il Ballo in maschera di Verdi. Studio critico," in "Un ballo in maschera" di Giuseppe Verdi, David Rosen and Marinella Pigozzi, eds. (Milan, 2002). For a survey of the French stage manuals, see H. Robert Cohen and Marie-Odile Gigou, Cent Ans de mise en scène lyrique en France (env. 1830–1930) (New York, 1986); H. Robert Cohen, "A Survey of French Sources for the Staging of Verdi's Operas: Livrets de mise en scène, Annotated Scores and Annotated Libretti in Two Parisian Collections," Studi verdiani 3 (1985), 11–44; livrets in facsimile are published in two volumes edited by H. Robert Cohen: The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières (Stuyvesant, 1990) and The Original Staging Manuals for Ten Parisian Operatic Premières, 1824–1843 (Stuyvesant, 1998). For a discussion of the textual status of the French stage manuals, see Roger Parker, "Reading the Livrets, or the Chimera of 'Authentic' Staging," in Leonora's Last Act (Princeton, 1997), 126–48. See the essays collected in the volume Verdi in Performance, and especially: James Hepokoski's "Staging Verdi's Operas: The Single, 'Correct' Performance," and David Rosen, "On Staging that Matters," in Verdi in Performance, Alison Latham and Roger Parker, eds. (Oxford, 2001). Some of the manuals have been reprinted by Ricordi with the addition of critical commentaries: Verdi's Otello, James Hepokoski and Mercedes Viale Ferrero, eds. (Milan, 1990); Simon Boccanegra, Marcello Conati and Natalia Grilli, eds. (Milan, 1993); and Un ballo in maschera, David Rosen and Marinella Pigozzi, eds. (Milan, 2002); and Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele, William Ashbrook and Gerardo Guccini, eds. (Milan, 1998). See also Philip Gossett, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006), 450–61. 3 4 Opera and Modern Spectatorship commodity. Thus on the one hand they supplement the opera texts with a guide for reenactment that is validated by the composer and by the rest of the creative team – that is to say, they add the stamp of conformity to authorial vision in the way of surplus value. On the other hand, the manuals supposedly allow for these opera texts to become independent of the author(s), to travel on their own while still carrying the composer's imprint. For instance, the title pages of the disposizioni sceniche for Verdi operas published in the 1880s (Simon Boccanegra, Otello) immediately after the title and composer's name specify that they are "compiled and arranged by Giulio Ricordi according to the staging of La Scala theatre" – that is, a staging overseen by the composer.8 The publisher was the one to take responsibility for the notation, transmission, and dissemination of the authorial project, shaping the cultural and commercial enterprise in terms of originality of poetic vision. By supplementing the scores and librettos with these instruction booklets Casa Ricordi presented on the market an all-inclusive product branded with its own promise of authenticity: scores and parts could travel far and wide and still deliver the effect of proximity to their creator, the effect of coming from a single artistic agency. By the 1880s, through the leadership of Tito Ricordi and then of his son Giulio, Casa Ricordi had acquired extraordinary influence over the European opera market and the Italian publishing industry, and it had become a powerful operator in the shaping of culture politics for the new nation. In an essay from 1983, still one of the few devoted to the history of Ricordi, the musicologist Francesco Degrada ended his survey by remarking how in the course of the century Ricordi had taken over a role of intermediary between the composers and the system of production: The beneficiaries were above all the renowned and well-established authors, for whom the publisher assumed more and more the role as a fiduciary in the management and dissemination of their works, both nationally and internationally. That was the case for Bellini, Donizetti, and above all Verdi, who published his whole opus with Ricordi (with the exception of Attila, I Masnadieri, and Il Corsaro published by Lucca) . . . The function of impresarios and theatre managers, starting approximately between 1850 and 1860, would be reduced to the simple groundwork and local arrangements. Instead it was the publisher who, together with the authors, was in charge of the more complex cultural and economic policy. Besides the preparation of the orchestral and vocal scores, of the parts and of all kinds of adaptations and transcriptions, which favored an approximate but diffused fruition of the operas, their policy presumed a more ambitious cultural project, in dialogue with contemporary culture, . . . involving the response to and formation of taste, by exercising a constant pressure on the opinion and the power of the 8 "Compilata e regolata secondo la messa in scena del Teatro alla Scala da Giulio Ricordi"; while for Mefistofele the title changes to "according to the instructions of the author" and for Don Carlo "According to the mise en scène of the Imperial Opera theatre in Paris." Staging manuals and the public public, both locally and nationally, for the recognition of the social and cultural primacy of music.9 Casa Ricordi was probably the first music publisher in Italy to take over the job that once belonged to the impresario but was not the only one. In the last decade of the century its competitor Edoardo Sonzogno succeeded in obtaining control over La Scala for a few seasons, restored and ran another opera theatre in Milan, the Canobbiana, and eventually settled on the Costanzi Theatre in Rome.10 As John Rosselli pointed out in several studies, this encroachment of the publisher on matters of commissions, seasons, casting, and staging is directly connected to the increasing tendency to stage repertoire operas, which translated into a higher demand for the rental of scores and parts.11 It must be pointed out, moreover, that both Ricordi's and Sonzogno's operations included the press: both owned and directed prominent periodicals, including, for Sonzogno, the daily Il secolo, the highest-circulation newspaper in Italy during those years.12 Music publishers' ability to regulate the opera industry depended on an integrated production system that, in addition to the press, was still founded on the ownership, printing, and management of the scores. At this time Ricordi in particular was lobbying for copyright regulations appropriate to the new administrative and geopolitical structure of the nation. In April 1882, in Milan, a group of prominent artists, journalists, musicians and writers established the terms of these regulations in the statute of the first national society for the tutelage of creative and intellectual labor (SIA, the Italian Society of Authors, later renamed SIAE, Italian Society of Authors and Publishers).13 While creative and artistic production had already been recognized as intellectual property in the modern sense for almost a century, thus solidifying the author's legal 9 10 11 12 13 Francesco Degrada, "Il segno e il suono: storia di un editore e del suo mondo," in Musica musicisti editoria: 175 anni di Casa Ricordi 1808–1983 (Milan, 1983). On Casa Ricordi's economic history see the recent study by Stefano Baia Curioni, Mercanti d'opera: storie di Casa Ricordi (Milan, 2011). On Sonzogno see in particular Silvia Valisa's ongoing research, and her recent essay "Casa Editrice Sonzogno: mediazione culturale, circuiti del sapere ed innovazione tecnologica nell'Italia unificata (1861–1887)," in The Printed Media in Fin-de-Siècle Italy: Publishers, Writers, and Readers, Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns, eds. (London, 2011), 90–106. For a more novelistic if informed account of music publishing at the end of the century, see Alan Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera from Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Boston, 2007), 208–24. John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi (Cambridge, 1984), 175. Ricordi owned La gazzetta musicale di Milano, one of the oldest periodicals dedicated to music. Moreover, in 1889 the Milanese publisher opened the Officine Grafiche, a lithographic laboratory for the composition and printing of posters and playbills. Since the late 1860s Sonzogno, besides the successful daily Il secolo, had launched a number of illustrated magazines devoted to the popularization of literature and the arts, such as L'illustrazione universale, Il teatro illustrato, La musica popolare, Il romanziere illustrato, L'emporio pittoresco. On this see Valisa, "Casa Editrice Sonzogno," 93–7. See www.siae.it/Siae.asp?click_level=0100.0200&link_page=Siae_Storia.htm; for a detailed chronicle see Irene Piazzoni, Spettacolo, istituzioni e società nell'Italia postunitaria (1860–1882) (Rome, 2001), 372 and ff. 5 6 Opera and Modern Spectatorship and social status, the function of the author was also changing, shared more and more with the publisher, and not only in the context of the opera industry. A famous example is the case of Edmondo De Amicis's novel for young readers Cuore, published by Treves in Milan in 1886. In a study of the processes that formed the Italian culture industry after unification, Fausto Colombo points out how it was the publisher Emilio Treves who contributed to the shaping of the novel into a mass-cultural event.14 Treves coordinated a marketing campaign on the pages of his magazines (L'illustrazione italiana was one of them) just before the book was published, with previews, critical recognition, and teasers. Then, on the date of the publication, contractually established for October 15, the beginning of the school year, he flooded bookstores throughout Italy with copies of the novel. During the ensuing weeks he published reviews and commentaries on the pages of his periodicals, and, a year later, the novel's first parody. In 1886–7 alone, De Amicis's Cuore reached forty editions; no wonder its sentimental Catholicism and middle-brow morality affected several subsequent generations of Italians.15 This kind of concerted control of the market is well known to historians of Italian opera: it is reminiscent of the media operation devised by Ricordi around Verdi and Boito's Otello in 1887, or even, a few years later, of Ricordi's and Sonzogno's efforts to create and brand an heir to Verdi by promoting and managing the careers of Puccini and Mascagni. Thus the limited interest manifested by traditional historiography of Italian nineteenthcentury opera towards print industry and cultural policy is an effect of its continued focus on the composers, with Giulio Ricordi and Eduardo Sonzogno as fundamental but nonetheless background figures. The industrial aspect of Ricordi's policy is instead the main concern of an 1881 essay by the critic Filippo Filippi. Writing on music and musical institutions in Milan in a book published for the National Exhibition of Industry and Art of the same year, Filippi describes the workings of the Ricordi establishment in terms of control over the product, thus connecting publishing to staging: Today the directives determining the fate of a production, the hiring of an artist, or the fortunes of a score originate from the Ricordi factory led by Commendator Giulio, a man of great intelligence and iron will. Owner of almost all the operas by Verdi and by other renowned composers, he does not let any theatre, either of a capital or provincial city, rent them unless he first approves their means of execution in every detail; that is: singers, chorus, orchestra and staging. It is the logic of summum jus summa injuria applied on a large scale to the vast art world of our times. It is easy to imagine how this influence or better interference of the publisher . . . might annoy several people, and those who have to suffer it call it an 14 15 Fausto Colombo, La cultura sottile: media e industria culturale in Italia dall'Ottocento agli anni novanta (Milan, 2009), 71–4. On this see for example Franco Cambi, Collodi, De Amicis, Rodari: tre immagini d'infanzia (Bari, 1985), 79–116. On De Amicis's relevance for the political history of Italian identity, see the sophisticated study by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago, 2007). Staging manuals and the public intolerable tyranny and a violation of the most sacrosanct of properties, the intellectual one . . . And yet, it is a fact that every time the publisher has imposed his will and, more than that, he has taken charge of overseeing the rehearsals and the so called mise-en-scène of an important opera, we had perfect musical executions and splendid stagings. In Milan, where Ricordi takes care of this himself with meticulous care, we have had exemplary productions of Verdi's and Ponchielli's last operas, very different from those that ignorant and stingy impresarios imposed on us, under the system of licenses.16 Filippi's career started within the Ricordi firm: he was hired in the 1850s by Tito as a correspondent from Venice and then as a columnist and editor of Milan's Gazzetta musicale. By 1881, however, he was one of the most powerful and influential names in Italian journalism, director of a weekly art magazine and music critic for the daily La perseveranza. And yet his description of Ricordi's policy as summum jus summa injuria ("supreme justice, supreme injustice"), as critical as it may sound, is hardly a manifestation of dissent. His report ends up justifying the lamented monopoly as a minor matter when compared to the advantages: better mise-en-scènes, in the interest of the producer/ author, rather than in favor of the short-term economic advantages of an impresario. Therefore the appearance of the staging manuals in Italy, especially the longer and more complex ones compiled by Giulio Ricordi in the 1880s, coincides with broader and crucial changes in the production of culture, changes that media historians have recently identified as marking the beginning of an Italian culture industry. Responding to the need to control and textualize performance, the compilation and printing of the manuals foreground and redefine the medium of opera. This late nineteenth-century episode of mediatization assumes the outline of a two-pronged process. On the one hand, it includes the author as the validation of opera's artistic aspirations. The stage manuals, by representing the composer's and librettist's vision of the performance, enable the publisher to distribute a complete package and control the end-product for a broader market. Consequently, on the other hand, opera mediatized by way of the manuals aims at reaching the status of a cultural commodity that can be reactivated regularly and predictably at every performance, even at a spatial and temporal remove from the creators. The manuals then endow an opera with autonomy from the author(s) precisely by including an "author effect" into the staging. Connected to all this is of course an acute regard for the audience, or what contemporary commentaries repeatedly refer to as "the public." FACING THE PUBLIC On March 6, 1881, La gazzetta musicale, the prestigious Milanese weekly published by Casa Ricordi, reported on the new production of Der Freischütz opening at La Scala the 16 Filippo Filippi, "La musica a Milano," in Milano 1881 (Milan, 1881). 7 8 Opera and Modern Spectatorship night before.17 The reviewer, Salvatore Farina, who first heard the opera in the same theatre in the spring of 1872, begins by exalting its continued capacity to move and enchant: Weber's masterpiece has once again inspired in us that sense of wonder with which it had impressed us several years ago. In thinking of the long time that had gone by between the two productions we naively commented: "this archer does not age at all." Introduced for the first time when it was already more than fifty years old, it still looked like a spring chicken; today it is sixty years old, and does not show a wrinkle. Everything that was imagined, developed and expanded since then on the stage can be found already in embryo in this really prodigious opera.18 For the reviewer it is not so much the status of the work and of the composer and their cultural capital that sanctions the opera's modernity and continued relevance. Instead it is the opera's own continuous capacity to "inspire a sense of wonder," its aesthetic potential, that confirms its place in the repertoire. And yet, this apologia is followed by a sudden shift, both in tone and in focus: We are forced to add with some regret that the public at La Scala in these carnival days is not in the disposition to enjoy the serene beauty of an opera of this sort; on the contrary, during the opening night we noticed a restlessness, a carelessness typical of spectators caught between parties and dinners. Not daring to protest against the music, also because it had been applauded already several times before, they gave way to their uncontainable desire for laughter during the episode with the specters and with the spoken dialogue of Samiel and Kaspar counting the bullets. Thus while commenting on all those trappings (which by the way were not funny at all because presented with proper stagecraft) they missed that marvelous episode of descriptive music that is the scene of the bullets.19 Rather than dwelling on the performance, Farina juxtaposes his own considerations of the opera's timelessness with the reactions of the public, reactions that could attest to the opposite. The Wolf's Glen Scene was incapable of working its magic and the apparitions were presumably seen as risible and ineffective, despite the music. Reasons for this disbelief are found at first in the carnival atmosphere, but then, in another twist to the prose, in the very character of the Italians: We Italians are a skeptical people; we have little faith in the fantastic and we easily laugh at the northern legends. Nothing bad with that, but nothing good either. In certain circumstances we can be serious and open the mind to tales and legends when these are conjoined with art. The fantastic subject of Freischütz should not detract in the least from the extraordinary value of a music that is all melody, grace, elegance, and artistry.20 17 La gazzetta musicale di Milano 36/10 (March 6, 1881), 95–6. 18 Ibid., 95. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. Staging manuals and the public In the space of a mere three paragraphs Der Freischütz has become the catalyst for a definition of national character. The Milanese public is taken as representative of Italians, provoked by the opera to manifest disbelief and lack of interest, that were in turn interpreted as a national trait (and perhaps a sign of narrow-minded provincialism). The reviewer, as representative of Casa Ricordi, is therefore ready to exhort the public (hence the Italians) to take seriously the music, no matter how foreign. These concerns are hardly exceptional, and they are similarly voiced for example by another review of the same production in Il mondo artistico, a smaller weekly magazine devoted to the arts. The journalist here opens with a complaint: How mutable is the taste and the mood of the public! When Freyschütz [sic] was performed several years ago at La Scala, the public was much less knowledgeable and educated than today to appreciate this classic, severe music, and it was reasonable to doubt that they could be capable or willing to enter that ideal musical world, at once tranquil and sublime. Those predictions turned out to be false, because instead the La Scala public was so charmed and mesmerized by the musical atmosphere of Freyschütz, was pervaded to such an extent by a sweet peacefulness of true and eternal beauty, that, with no need to know about history or chronologies, they perceived that Weber was everybody's forefather and that in the field of fantastic, poetic music, music inspired by a profound sentiment for nature, Weber was the one who had uttered the Fiat lux. This year, at a reprise of the opera, it was reasonable to think or at least to hope that the public, remembering those first good impressions, and more familiar with certain music, would have seen again with pleasure Weber's masterpiece. But it was not to be. In the theatre on the night of the first performance a gloomy atmosphere of discontent, of prejudice and even of mockery, took over the spectators. Freyschütz was heard in an absentminded and restless way, and those who pretend to dictate the outcome of a performance kept saying that the music was impossible, boring, and the score should have been left on the shelves. Not even the relatively good execution, certainly not inferior to that of carnival 1872, helped to stop the negativity of those gentlemen.21 Lamenting the unpredictability of the audience's behavior was an old trope, and here it hardly masks the type of attention paid to the spectators: a masterful gaze observing and evaluating their reactions against the artistic value of the opera. Like the previous article, this one also ends with a reassuring note, approvingly reporting that subsequent performances received a better reception. The similarities of these texts give rise to two sets of observations. First of all, both reviewers take upon themselves the role of witnessing the interaction of Freischütz and its audience. In their dismayed descriptions the event of the premiere becomes the 21 Il mondo artistico: giornale di musica dei teatri e delle belle arti 15/10 (March 9, 1881). The rest of the review describes the opera by references to Berlioz's famous commentary on Der Freischütz, in words that very closely echo an essay that Filippo Filippi had published in his book a few years earlier: Musica e musicisti, critiche, biografie, ed escursioni (Milan, 1876), 100–17. Thus the article, signed simply with "F.," might be by Filippi, the director of the journal, rather than by its editor Alessandro Fano. 9 10 Opera and Modern Spectatorship contingent interaction of two interdependent performances, of two reenactments: that of the opera and that of the audience. Weber's opera, which of course arrives at the stage of La Scala with complex cultural baggage, has the power to elicit a response, and it is the performance of this response that constitutes the group of spectators as an audience, or better as a public, as in the Italian term "pubblico."22 This public is then even taken as representative of the whole nation, whereby the manifestations of merry disbelief become a performance of Italianness. Secondly, both journalists appear to write as if from the position of a side box: their analytical gaze is cast as much on the public as on the stage. Not for a moment compromised by identification or empathy with the spectators, the reviews appear to maintain purposefully a professional voice that is duly and carefully separate from that of the public. As historians prying into the theatrical contingencies of more than a century ago we might be tempted to see these reviews as a trace left by that audience. But these writings do not voice the public, they judge it: they measure the audience's capacity to manifest understanding and engagement in view of what is expected of a public – that is, the rightful representative of a nation. By the 1880s a review of a performance of Der Freischütz also came with complex baggage. The opera had already acquired the status of a locus classicus of transnational operatic encounters, and as such had been used by other illustrious commentators as a litmus test to evaluate the audience. Hector Berlioz published an essay in the Journal des débats a week after the premiere of a new production at the Opéra in June 1841 of a Freyschütz in French with his own recitatives. His essay not only champions the opera and in particular the music, but makes sure that the Parisian audience is instructed on how to react, in order to avoid the fiasco of twenty years earlier.23 Berlioz's influence is still readable in the two Milanese reviews of forty years later, not only for the promotion of Weber's work as a timeless classic, but especially for the attention devoted to the audience's interaction with this German opera. Berlioz starts with an encouraging note that congratulates the Parisian audience, which was able at last to make sense of and appreciate the opera's beauty. His description of notable passages in the score then preempts any possible criticism by insisting on the obvious and unquestionable beauty and efficacy of the work. 22 23 The privileging of the term "public" is also consistent with the definition of Christopher Balme in his study of how theatre institutions shape the public sphere: "While 'spectators' and 'audiences' refer to individual or collective bodies inside the building or actively attending the performance . . . the terms 'public' and even more broadly 'the public sphere' refer to a potential audience or perhaps not even that . . . The public is a potential audience to be realized rather than an actualized one." Christopher B. Balme, "Playbills and the Theatrical Public Sphere," in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait, eds. (Iowa City, 2010), 37–62, here 40–1. Journal des débats, June 16, 1841; the article was then included in his collection of essays À travers chants (1862) in a shorter version with the title Le Freyschütz de Weber. Staging manuals and the public That same year Richard Wagner, also in Paris, on the occasion of the new production of Weber's opera published not one but two essays, one in French and another in German.24 If Berlioz's goal, like that of the Milanese journalists, was to orient the audience's taste in favor of the transalpine masterpiece, Wagner's texts exude a defensive, overdetermined effort at cultural reclamation. His article for the Gazette musicale, published some two weeks before the premiere, was accompanied by an editorial note specifying that the journal had decided to include the piece even though it opposed the views of another article published earlier "because it is good to hear both sides, and it seemed to us that our readers would see with pleasure the Freischütz considered uniquely for its German character."25 But the defense of the opera's national traits is far more than a cultural translation. After a colorfully minute presentation of the Freischütz legend and of its deep roots in the German folk, the essay addresses directly the French public and outright challenges their capability to understand, no matter how accurate the performance. What started as a lesson in German culture for foreigners turns midway into a scornful declaration of radical, unbridgeable difference.26 The second essay, for the Dresden Abend-Zeitung of July of the same year, is addressed instead to the "glorious German fatherland," and explains the previous piece for the Gazette as motivated by the need "to vindicate our national property in advance," since the production was purportedly doomed to failure and misunderstanding. Here too the writer distances himself both from the performance – a disfigurement of the work in which he cannot and will not believe – and from the public – whose behavior and reactions he can neither share nor understand. The work, reified into cultural heritage, is placed in the position of mediator between complex intersecting expectations and responses. The event of the theatre performance acquires the contours of a tense encounter during which not only the work's aesthetic value is measured, but also the reverse: the audience is measured as it deals with the aesthetic demands of the opera, under the watchful eye of such a severe witness. 24 25 26 The articles were then collected thirty years later in his Complete Prose Works as "Der Freischütz: In Front of the Parisian Audience" and "Der Freischütz: Bericht nach Deutchland." See Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays, William Ashton Ellis, trans. (Lincoln, 1994), 167–204. On these texts as evidence of Wagner's elaboration of a dramaturgy of absorption, see David J. Levin, "A Picture-Perfect Man? Senta, Absorption, and Wagnerian Theatricality," The Opera Quarterly 21/3 (2005), 486–95, esp. 489. On the reception of Freischütz in light of nineteenth-century definitions of German national identity see: Stephen Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington, 2003), and Michael Tusa, "Cosmopolitanism and the National Opera: Weber's Der Freischutz," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36/3 (Winter, 2006), 483–506. See translator's note in Wagner, Pilgrimage to Beethoven, 168. "Yet, if it were really to step before you in its pureness and simplicity . . . would you then acquire a genuine understanding of the Freischütz? Would it rise in you that consentaneous volley of applause which the Muette de Portici evoked from us? Ah! I much doubt it." Ibid., 181. 11 12 Opera and Modern Spectatorship Back in Italy, Arrigo Boito formulated even more clearly this reversal of agency, whereby it is the opera that evaluates the public. In an article published before the Milanese production of Freischütz of 1872, entitled "Il Freischütz davanti al pubblico della Scala" ("The Freischütz in front of La Scala's public"), Boito starts by quoting in his Italian translation the first paragraph of Wagner's second essay ("O my glorious German fatherland, How could I not love thee . . . ") and from there he pursues the Wagnerian task of educating the spectators on the story and its significance for German cultural identity.27 But Boito is quick to swerve into a number of erudite references that move from Weber to Goethe and then to Victor Hugo, equating, perhaps ironically, a German brand of misty forests with a Romantic imaginary shared across national boundaries. Concerned about the impact of this "naive tale" that inserts the "dark and fearful" Wolf's Glen Scene within "a serene atmosphere redolent of the fresh scent of the woods," he emphasizes its familiarity, tracing connections with Rossini and Meyerbeer, with William Tell and Faust. His conclusion then is that the success of the opera will depend solely on the public's willingness to be charmed by and absorbed in the world envisaged by the author. Fresh from the resounding fiasco of his Mefistofele of only four years earlier, he pleads with the La Scala public to yield to the aesthetic demands of the opera. Boito's acute awareness of the stakes of the encounter between the audience and the work in the theatre will be discussed more in detail in the next chapter, in the context of the daring aesthetic venture that was Mefistofele. Here I simply want to point out how Freischütz has left a paper trail containing traces of the public. The present discussion of Freischütz's reviews is motivated not by the sense that they are illustrative of more general trends. On the contrary, the opera came to constitute for the press a special case, framed as a canonized foreign classic – to be accepted despite or because of its foreignness – over the course of forty years, both in Milan and in Paris, both by professional journalists and by illustrious composers/polemicists. The press insists on the audience's response, and therefore outlines the modality of the aesthetic encounter between opera and public. The public is neither the empirical multitude of diverse individuals in the theatre any given night, nor an abstract, faceless target predetermined by the production. Instead it here emerges as a combination of actual and potential opera-goers: it is a plural interlocutor that is in part addressed, or better interpellated by the opera in performance, and in part an interpreter, free to react or resist according to individual taste. These reviews, then, temporarily serve to trace a path across intricate matters of historical inquiry, such as the contingent relation between a performance and its spectators. They foreground how performance and public are taken as interdependent: 27 Published as well in the Ricordi magazine La gazzetta musicale (March 17, 1872), and reprinted in Arrigo Boito, Tutti gli scritti, Piero Nardi, ed. (Milan, 1942), 1214–18. Boito's writings on this are also explored in the next chapter. Staging manuals and the public it is the aesthetic experience of opera that constitutes a public, but the public in turn is the only guarantor of an opera's topical power to affect. What is specific to this historical juncture is the way opera production embraces this inter-relatedness. The task of simultaneously interpreting and educating the public's taste becomes part of the system of production. Fausto Colombo has brilliantly observed how the Italian entertainment industry at the turn of the century was regulated by a peculiar artisanal model, characterized by the development of a field of competences common to supply and demand. For Colombo the industrial artisan is epitomized by publishers of popular literature and comic strips, but the model is appropriate to what we know of Casa Ricordi at this time: "all these publishers use their specific cultural and media expertise as a thermometer to measure the taste of the public, and they make an effort to stay within their own field."28 The consequence of this commonality of interests is the peculiar type of relationship between production and consumption: the public is neither evaluated statistically in the way of an anonymous mass of consumers whose demand has to be met, nor instructed, patronizingly, in the appreciation of a product of high culture. The relation between the competences of the production and of the fruition is what foregrounds the judgment of the public as a form of assessment of the quality of these products. A successful product always signifies the existence of certain cultural demands and taste, which the product satisfies. But the reasons why it can satisfy them are related to an "empathetic" relationship between production and its public . . . This trend often rejects market analysis and instead trusts the possibility of a common feel among creator, producer and public regarding the potential of the specialized medium. If the public does not appreciate something, it is acknowledged, at times grudgingly, but it is not enough to devalue the product; rather, what is questioned is its timeliness and current compatibility. Otherwise in some cases, the production insists until it manages to create this compatibility.29 What I find particularly interesting in these observations are two sets of issues. First of all Colombo's analysis, based on a larger sample of cultural products over the course of a century, conceptualizes the discourse about the public in relation to these specific historical circumstances. The public emerges as the point of intersection of multiple strategies of address: it is listened to, interpreted, judged and at times prodded by the production process. This kind of inclusion and listening is translated into medial concerns, which redefine what is effective (the staging manuals are occasioned by this concern for opera to become an effective medium). Secondly, the introduction of an affective connection such as empathy not only strikes as cogent to what we know of the work of the Ricordi firm, but opens the way to more complex considerations on the aesthetics of opera, which might question well-established historiographical 28 Colombo, La cultura sottile, 27. 29 Ibid., 35. 13 14 Opera and Modern Spectatorship assumptions regarding the politics of opera between the Risorgimento and Fascism. An industry of culture and entertainment that gauges its output in terms of shared taste and "common feel" is also an industry alert to issues of cultural and social identity and which cannot rely on pre-established once-and-for-all ideological conformities. That is, as I explore more in detail in each of the following chapters, ideology is mediated by aesthetics. In this book the term "spectatorship" is used to refer to this complex of contingent and potential audience, and for the preoccupation that opera is effective as a cultural product that can both satisfy and educate the public. This introductory chapter has purposefully abstained from providing a review of definitions of the concept of spectatorship and defers to each of the ensuing chapters the work of delineating spectatorship as the variable relation between opera and public. Rather than stenciling an abstract model over different cases, spectatorship here is a matter of continual renegotiations. Spectatorship, to put it otherwise, is a way to name the performative instance of each opera as it "faces" the public, or, as in Boito's Wagnerian review, as it is placed "in front of the public." What is left of this encounter are traces: in texts that include scores and librettos with the addition of their staging manuals, with their aspiration to contain the authorial project up to the moment when opera and spectators meet. 2 The "fleeting moment" Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele Mefistofele represents a courageous effort to renovate mid-century Italian opera according to eminently modern aspirations. Arrigo Boito conceived the adaptation of Goethe's Faust as a challenge to expand the horizons of the foremost Italian cultural product by merging it with the masterpiece of German culture, and, in the process, to reconfigure the genre of opera, confronting the sacrosanct tradition of the fathers. Boito's ambitions were far too radical to be limited to abstract matters of poetics, promulgated by literati from their desks. Mefistofele's greatest effrontery consisted in its attempt to manipulate the very theatrical core of opera and to find new ways to address its spectators. In the brusque and grandiloquent tones of a manifesto, the twenty-year-old Boito on a gap year in Paris had already declared in 1862 that the relation between artist and public ought to be one of antagonism and resistance: Why, in that case, be bold and dare! Bind yourself to me, begin life anew: You soon will see what I can do. No man has ever known a spectacle so rare.1 I love the struggle of the audience with the artist, whenever it is determined by the high question of the beautiful, whenever it has to do with the progress and future of an art form. Then genius, even in the midst of shouting and laughing, has a sublime task, because the struggle of genius with the audience is the struggle of truth against strength, of right against number, of the new against the old – grand, necessary, inevitable struggle.2 This energy and belligerence progressively faded out of his writings over the years, seemingly reprised fifty years later with ominously greater ideological conviction in the manifestos of the Futurists. And yet, especially in the feverish years preparing Mefistofele, Boito was among those who pioneered the figure of the young progressive Italian intellectual: with his group of friends the "Scapigliati," who shared at most a common concern for the future of Italian art, he gave voice to a genuine if short avant-the-avantgarde episode in Italian culture. 1 2 Goethe, Faust, Part One, David Luke, trans. (Oxford, 1987), verses 1671–4. "Amo la lotta del pubblico coll'artista, quando è l'alta quistione del bello che la muove, quando c'è di mezzo il progresso e l'avvenire d'un'arte. Allora il genio, anche fra gli urli e le risa, ha una sublime parte da compiere, perché la lotta del genio col pubblico è la lotta del vero col forte, del diritto col numero, del nuovo col vecchio, grandiosa, necessaria, inevitabile lotta," in La perseveranza (March 2, 1862); quoted in Boito, Tutti gli scritti, 1078. 15 16 Opera and Modern Spectatorship This chapter studies Mefistofele as a cultural project, preoccupied with the future of art and of opera in particular, that envisioned a different kind of exchange between the stage and the auditorium, between the artist and the public. Mefistofele was also a notoriously flawed project, elaborated over the course of more than a decade: the La Scala premiere in 1868 was a resonant fiasco, from which the opera re-emerged largely revised in 1875 in Bologna, and then, after a few more trials, it was finally sanctioned as a success back at La Scala in 1881. This long story of failures and laborious adjustments is in fact the story of the pre-announced and "necessary, inevitable struggle" of the audience with the artist. Indeed, the opera's modernity lies in its double inscription of this "struggle," both at the level of dramatic content, as an adaptation of Faust, and at the level of its performance and reception. Mefistofele reframes Goethe's epic drama in terms of spectatorship. This chapter therefore will start from here: from a retelling of the story of the opera and of how it acquired the status of a failed, unrecognized masterpiece. RUINED COPIES Although still performed in opera theatres, often as a showpiece for baritones, Mefistofele has never received much attention in critical discourse on nineteenth-century opera and is often dismissed as a curiosity, the odd product of a fin-de-siècle contorted mind.3 The few critical studies that take the opera seriously tend to concentrate on its troubled reception and subsequent re-composition, thus linking the work with the story of its composition and performance, and consequently with the artistic biography of Boito. The "story of Mefistofele," originated from a large number of reviews and reactions to the opera's performance in 1868, is transmitted as a collection of facts that narrate how the audience was incapable of understanding its unprecedented originality, and how therefore the author had to tame its novelty in order to make the work acceptable. Interestingly, this link between the work and its story has remained substantially undisputed. It may be worth taking a closer look at this narrative, which, far from being an innocent compilation of events, has the dynamics and import of mythmaking.4 3 4 For instance David Kimbell describes Mefistofele as "a work of real, if not often persuasive originality," ultimately unconvincing because the music is "more 'interesting' than beautiful, more curious than expressive or powerful"; Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1991), 573–5. According to William Ashbrook, with the exception of the Prison Scene in Act 3, "much of the work seems a pageant," and "today Mefistofele survives to the extent that the star basses find the kitschy role a congenial vehicle"; "The Nineteenth Century: Italy," in The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, Roger Parker, ed. (Oxford, 1994), 198. Most accounts stem from Piero Nardi's riveting reconstruction of the events on the basis of numerous contemporary reviews and testimonies; Piero Nardi, Vita di Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1944), 249–95. See also: Guido Salvetti, "La Scapigliatura milanese e il teatro d'opera," in Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento, Giorgio Pestelli, ed. (Turin, 1977), 567–604; Jay Nicolaisen, "The First Mefistofele," 19th-Century Music 1/3 (Spring 1978), 221–32; Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 1871–1893 (Ann Arbor, 1977; rpt. 1980), 125–50; William Ashbrook, "Boito and the 1868 Mefistofele Libretto as a Reform Text," in Reading Opera, Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele The 1868 performance was more than just a failure. A rich collection of chronicles describes how the opera's premiere was preceded by Boito's provocative declarations of poetic intent, advocating substantial renovations of the genre, figured as an abandonment of the old "formula" for a new and more authentic "forma."5 The libretto circulated weeks prior to the premiere, stirring up expectations among the Milanese public for a new opera that would confront a subject matter as weighty as Goethe's Faust, and scandalizing those who defended operatic conventions.6 After numerous rehearsals and several delays, the premiere took place on March 5, 1868, in an atmosphere of excitement and feverish anticipation.7 Boito himself conducted the performance, unperturbedly leading the cast, the chorus, and the orchestra through more than five hours of hissing, laughing, booing, and sparse applause. Most commentators nowadays find reasons for the clamorous negative response in the performance's numerous shortcomings: Boito was an inexperienced conductor, the singers were not up to the task, and, the worst miscalculation, the opera was too long. These circumstances, however, are not unusual in the history of the genre, and would hardly suffice to explain the impact the premiere has had on the opera's critical history. In fact, both past and present accounts convey the sense that the opera's failure was the inevitable fate of a radically progressive work, and the necessary outcome of Boito's utopian project. Not only did the provocative declarations of intent of the young Scapigliato antagonize a large part of the Milanese audience even before the performance, but the opera itself, with its programmatic avoidance of traditional "formulae" and its "foreign" subject matter, was predestined to fail. The first Mefistofele, in other words, 5 6 7 Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, eds. (Princeton, 1988), 268–87; Alison Terbell Nikitopoulos, "Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele: Poetry, Music, and Revisions" (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1994); Gerardo Guccini, "I due Mefistofele di Boito: drammaturgie e figurazioni," in "Mefistofele" di Arrigo Boito, William Ashbrook and Gerardo Guccini, eds. (Milan, 1998), 147–266; Rosa Solinas, "The Devil You Know," in "Arrigo Boito: The Legacy of Scapigliatura" (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1999), 131–73. The difference between "forma" and "formula" was first explained in an article published in La perseveranza (September 13, 1863), quoted and translated in Ashbrook, "Boito and the 1868 Mefistofele Libretto," 274. A further bold pronouncement was published the following year in Figaro, where Boito declared that: "the opera 'of the present' must . . . arrive at I. The complete obliteration of formula. II. The creation of form"; in Arrigo Boito, Tutti gli scritti, 1107–8; quoted in translation in Ashbrook, "Boito and the 1868 Mefistofele Libretto," 273. As a contemporary critic observed: "if you wish to know how much I am favorable to Mefistofele as a poem, imagine how hostile must be the admirers of the grand'aria di sortita, the apostles of the cavatina, the fanatics of the cabaletta"; Michele Uda in Il pungolo (February 15, 1868), quoted in Nardi, Vita di Arrigo Boito, 253. On other reactions to the libretto see also Solinas, "Arrigo Boito," 136–40, and especially Ashbrook, "Boito and the 1868 Mefistofele," 268–87. The Gazzetta di Milano (March 5, 1868) reported: "Outside the theatre the anxiety was no less intense than inside the theatre. In many houses and some cafés people received news about the performance after every act; an hour after midnight the telegraph was still in motion, and until four in the morning people talked in cafés and in the streets about the great fall of Mefistofele"; Nardi, Vita di Arrigo Boito, 275. 17 18 Opera and Modern Spectatorship foundered on the audience's unwillingness or incapacity to comprehend and appreciate its novelty, a novelty that, in turn, was endorsed by such reactions. Boito's often reported smile as a reaction to the whistling and booing at the end of the performance adds to the account a sense that the failure was calculated and expected. Motivated either by pride or by insolence, Boito's "smile of sorts" becomes evidence of the composer's satisfaction at a public outrage that ultimately confirmed the opera's uncompromising originality.8 Thus, it could well be argued that the failure of the 1868 Mefistofele represented for Boito a full success. Not only did the Scapigliatura advocate an art substantially independent of public understanding and appreciation, but it also specifically manifested antagonism towards bourgeois opera spectators.9 Boito himself, as indicated by the passage from his Parisian review quoted above, had already assumed a similarly bellicose stance towards the audience. If read in these terms, the failure of the 1868 Mefistofele can only be the sign of the "grand, necessary, inevitable struggle" of genius, and a validation of the worth and "truth" of artistic endeavor. Consequently, the puzzle this opera poses is why and how it was then transformed into a success. Most accounts describe a process of revision that led to the opera's acceptance as radical compromise, whereby the composer adapted the original to the taste and expectations of the audience. Boito, this time seeking the success he had snobbishly refused only a few years earlier, resolved to cut numerous sections that had been criticized, develop those that had obtained applause, and add a few numbers of sure effect.10 Crucially, this operation is presented as an act of repentance: he entered his revisions directly onto the pages of the original autograph orchestral score, thus materially overwriting the scandalous text of 1868 in a way that was irrevocable.11 That is why we are left with only sparse traces of what the first version might have been, and why most recent critical literature on Mefistofele shares the goal of rescuing the faded 1868 text from oblivion: even when the original is 8 9 10 11 Boito's smile is reported by Carlo Tenca in a letter to the Countess Clara Maffei: "A friend and colleague who was at the premiere of Mefistofele told me that he was struck by Boito's demeanor and by the smile of sorts with which he received the audience's disapproval. [My friend] judged Boito severely, not knowing him; but the fact is that the audience's judgment cannot have any influence on his creativity because he cannot understand art any differently"; quoted in Nardi, Vita di Arrigo Boito, 276. See Salvetti, "La Scapigliatura milanese," 602; the most insightful inquiry into Boito's Scapigliatura poetics and (anti)Wagnerian leanings remains Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Musica e letteratura in Italia fra Ottocento e Novecento (Milan, 2000), esp. 51–69. Solinas explains the oddity of Boito's capitulation to success by reading it consistently with the opera's plot: she suggests that Boito's revision was motivated less by compliance with public taste than by devilish (Mephistophelian) impudence: the second version was not so much an adaptation to conventions as a subtle disguising of its original provocative message; Solinas, "Arrigo Boito," 171. Exemplary in this regard is D'Arcais's 1877 review in Nuova antologia, which patronizingly praises the author for recognizing his guilt and making amends to the audience; Francesco D'Arcais, "Il Mefistofele di Arrigo Boito," Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2nd series, 5 (1877), 190–204. Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele not the primary object of study, Mefistofele is generally considered the revision of a lost work.12 While it is hardly the only opera in nineteenth-century Italy that had a troubled reception and was then accordingly revised, Mefistofele's peculiarity resides (then and now) precisely in this indissoluble link between the text and the story of its reception. The score has acquired the status of a pseudo-text, or better, of a palimpsest that we try to read "through," searching for the traces of that former text and its promise of originality and novelty. As Giovanni Morelli acutely observed, both of Boito's operas, Mefistofele and Nerone, convey the sense of an ideal not reached or fulfilled. They are: two simulacra aspiring to the status of "ruined" copies of the originals; a couple of copies, original copies as much as one wants, but also exceedingly adulterated. In the artistic biography of the maestro the copies replace . . . the true originals, for the text of [Mefistofele's] first version (the true one) emphatically sank in the calculated and utterly catastrophic fiasco of the premiere, and the posthumous text [of Nerone], shown to the world too late, is also essentially unfinished and completely and emphatically swallowed up in the vortex of incompleteness.13 Significantly, it is precisely by way of this peculiar status of "ruined copies" that Boito's operas become emblems of artistic creation: Boito's two operas, which, one way or another, "are not there," are, however, two monuments, two exemplary cases of two clear typologies of a genre that was important for the Romantics of the first and second generation: the "failed opera" / imaginary opera / "legendary opera." On the one hand, in fact, we have, in all its nobility, a martyr-opera, lost like an Ifigenia in Aulide: a young sacrificial victim immolated on the altar of the incomprehensible modernity of a precarious aesthetic "enterprise." . . . And on the other hand we have, even more noble perhaps, an opera lost because it has remained – in a perennial and senile way – unfinished.14 The number of valuable studies of what the 1868 opera might have been surely attests that Mefistofele is a typically "ruined copy" (and also "failed opera" / imaginary 12 13 14 I allude here to the list of sources stemming from Nardi's first account and quoted in n. 2 above, whose revisionist approach is quite clearly suggested by the titles. Apparently, however, there have been earlier exceptions: in his 1977 study of Italian opera, Nicolaisen writes that, due to Nardi's assertion that Boito destroyed the original score, earlier studies (not identified) had of necessity ignored the first version and limited their scope only to the 1875 revision (Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 126; his view is later backed also by Solinas, "Arrigo Boito," 150). Moreover, by way of more accurate analysis of the autograph score in conjunction with additional sources, Nicolaisen is able to discern which portions of the opera as we know it derive from the 1868 original, and to claim that "contrary to what has been believed for more than a century, then, it would appear that large sections of the original Mefistofele do exist" (Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 127). Giovanni Morelli, "Qualcosa sul Nerone," in Arrigo Boito, Giovanni Morelli, ed. (Florence, 1994), 519. Ibid., 520. 19 20 Opera and Modern Spectatorship opera / "legendary opera"). But it is the "legendary" aspect I want to emphasize: the work, comprising both the palimpsest and the story of its reception, adopts the rhetoric of a myth, the myth of the artist and his struggle to come to terms with the two extremes of art and life. Mefistofele has become the manifestation and material record of the artist's "effort," of his striving for a higher ideal of art. That the work necessarily includes its author (as an incarnation of the artist) is suggested by how the literature devoted to Mefistofele searches untiringly through the vast corpus of Boito's letters, reviews, and literary and poetic writings for evidence and explanations, reading the opera in light of the author's intricate web of declarations of intent and literary output. Biography and criticism are so inextricably conjoined that the opera ultimately appears to be about Boito.15 The allegorical plot from Goethe's Faust obviously provides fertile ground for a reading that oscillates between myth and biography. If Mefistofele's criticism incorporates the author and his creative process it is also because the opera itself does so, by way both of its dramatic content and of its status as "ruined copy." In other words, the opera's musico-dramatic content and the story of its creation and reception have become linked by a logic of necessity, so that an account that deals with the artist's endeavor and its difficult relation with the audience duplicates the story already told by the opera. I believe that Mefistofele invites us to inquire into this myth of artistic creation, beyond, as Morelli proposed, its re-inscription in a notion of Romanticism. The artist's ideal endeavor seems to hide a constant and crucial preoccupation with another myth of sorts: that of the audience and its inscrutable response. UNRECOGNIZED MASTERPIECES Mefistofele and its story can in fact be read as an exemplary "fable of modern art," one that echoes another famous nineteenth-century account of artistic creation: Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu.16 First published in 1831 and then revised over the course of more than a decade, Balzac's novella has become a paradigmatic tale of modern artistic creation, later embraced as a manifesto by Cézanne and Picasso, among others.17 The story concerns an elderly painter, Frenhofer, and the woman's portrait he has been painting for over ten years. He believes it to be a masterpiece, an incomparable fusion of ideal beauty and truthfulness to life, and, above all, a successful effort to overcome the 15 16 17 The only dissenting voice is represented by Nicolaisen, who laments the biographism generally informing the opera's critical evaluation, and calls for an assessment based on "the music alone." Italian Opera in Transition, 136–7. Honoré de Balzac, "Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu," in La Comédie humaine, vol. ix, M. Bouteron, ed. (Paris, 1950). Of the vast bibliography on this see especially Dore Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art (New York, 1980), and Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (London, 2001). Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele material constraints of art and bring into being the living materialization of his imagination. He jealously conceals it from everyone, until two younger painters and admirers are eventually allowed to see the work. The crux of the story lies in the ensuing scene, at the moment when the masterpiece is offered to the sight of the two spectators. What Frenhofer thinks is a portrait of a living creature, more beautiful than any real woman, appears instead to his fellow painters as an indecipherable "wall of paint." The only form they can discern, emerging in a corner of that chaos, is the tip of a foot, forgotten by the master in his destructive process of creation. The moment they claim to see nothing, Frenhofer, as if awakened from a dream, apprehends their look, and sees what they see. He sits down in despair and laments his failure. He dies during the night, after having set fire to his paintings. Both stories revolve around a fundamental conflict of perspectives, the artist's and the audience's, and around the traumatic moment when their radical divergence is discovered. On the night of March 5, 1868, Boito, like Frenhofer, sees the spectators of La Scala "seeing nothing" in the product of his work of almost a decade. Contrary to Frenhofer, however, it seems that Boito sees also the audience's recognition of the "tip of the foot," and, starting from there, "re-paints" his opera. In a study on the aesthetics of modernity, Giorgio Agamben views the conflict represented in Balzac's tale as one of the manifestations of a new aesthetics and an important change in the status of a work of art.18 For Agamben, at that crucial moment when the two painters declare that they see nothing, Frenhofer, by apprehending their look, momentarily places himself in the role of spectator, and the canvas acquires another "side": Frenhofer becomes double. He moves from the point of view of the artist to that of the spectator, from the interested promesse de bonheur to disinterested aesthetics. In this transition, the integrity of his work dissolves. For it is not only Frenhofer that becomes double, but his work as well; just as in some combinations of geometric figures, which, if observed for a long time, acquire a different arrangement, from which one cannot return to the previous one except by closing one's eyes, so his work alternately presents two sides that cannot be put together into a unity. The side that faces the artist is the living reality in which he reads his promise of happiness; but the other side, which faces the spectator, is an assemblage of lifeless elements that can only mirror itself in the aesthetic judgment's reflection of it.19 This is the division enacted by the art of modernity, when the spectator's contemplation "without interest" (as Kantian aesthetics would advocate) clashes with the artist's painfully "interested" creative investment. Agamben traces this division to the oft-cited critique leveled by Nietzsche at Kant's aesthetics, for having limited the definition of the beautiful solely to the side of the 18 Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, Georgia Albert, trans. (Stanford, 1999). 19 Ibid., 11. 21 22 Opera and Modern Spectatorship spectator. To Kant's concept of the beautiful as disinterested pleasure ("that is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest"), Nietzsche opposes Stendhal's definition of the beautiful as "promesse de bonheur" – that is, the beautiful from the point of view of the "interested" artist.20 Nietzsche then foresaw what was to be the radical reversal in the conception of art at the turn of the twentieth century: art abandons the perspective of the spectator's apprehension and is invested with the creator's existential values. Reflection on art thus shifts to a perspective centered on the artist who, like Frenhofer (and Pygmalion), seeks his own happiness, or, even more strongly, "an unlimited growth and strengthening of the vital values," "the living reality of his thought and his imagination."21 For Agamben, this shift is reflected in the same definition of aesthetics, which also becomes "double." Aesthetics then not only would be the determination of the work of art starting from the . . . sensible apprehension of the spectator, but also would include from the beginning an examination of the work of art as the opus of a particular operari (working), the artistic operari.22 Mefistofele and its story encapsulate this aesthetic turn at the moment of the split of visions. The text of the opera as we now know it represents the traumatic division between the artist's and the spectator's points of view, but also contains them both. In its status as "ruined copy" it contains both the original creative work of the artist – with its "promise of happiness" – and its surrender to the spectator's search for "disinterested beauty." Whereas Frenhofer's canvas ends up losing its integrity, irrevocably split into two sides that cannot be reconciled into a unity, Mefistofele is the product of the artist's effort to recuperate such integrity. An attempt to distinguish what belongs to the revolutionary original conception from what is instead a concession to audience taste would not only become trapped in the circularity of its own premises, but would also end up missing precisely the opera's uncompromising novelty – a novelty that cannot be narrowed down to what can be discerned through the palimpsest, since, as many have recognized, Boito's revisions left untouched a large part of the early score, and the opera still represents a unique attempt to reform "formulae" of nineteenth-century Italian opera.23 Similarly, an assessment narrowed down to the score's formal structuring would seem to suffer from its own limitations. However, if we expand the scope from the score to include matters of theatricality, employment of stage technology, acting, and so forth, it becomes quite obvious that Mefistofele is a complex and visionary project that involves music with a 20 21 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (New York, 1989), 112–13. Agamben, The Man without Content, 9. 22 Ibid., 12. For a tentative reconstruction of the 1868 score and a comparison with the 1875 versions see Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 127–34. Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele deft employment of mise-en-scène and staging. And it is the staging manual that most patently attests to the bold originality of the opera. The disposizione scenica, compiled by Boito and by Giulio Ricordi, organizes to the minutest detail the integration of music, words, gestures, and stage effects.24 Boito's attempt to invent new "forms," therefore, also has to be reconsidered in terms of spectacular apparatus: a newly devised apparatus that functions as a mediator between the "interested" artist and the audience, in the effort to expand the experiential horizon of opera well beyond its conventional confines, under the aegis of Goethe. MODERN EPICS Boito's adaptation of Goethe's Faust is arranged into four acts, preceded by the Prologue in Heaven, and closed with an epilogue. Similarly to Faust, Part i (Acts 1–3) deals with Faust's experience of "Il Reale," while the shorter Part ii (Act 4 and Epilogue) with "L'Ideale." As is often remarked, by transposing both parts of Goethe's tragedy Boito's adaptation greatly exceeds the scope of its famous operatic precedent, Gounod and Carré's Faust.25 If Gounod's version is a modest but wise attempt to extract from the model what was already conducive to operatic treatment, then Boito's might be accorded the unwarranted ambition not only to translate and condense the German tragedy into Italian libretto-poetry, but also to fit even the famously unperformable Part ii within the limits of a stage. This ambition is more than mere madness or naivety. Boito's adaptation does not simply appropriate material from a prestigious classic; rather, it attempts to capture and adapt for the opera stage the distinctly epic quality of Goethe's work. The epic in Mefistofele is not only a stylistic register, evident for instance in the deliberately paratactic sequencing of separate episodes, as described below. More than this, the opera strives to render the epic of Faust as a poetic aspiration, or better, to quote Franco Moretti's famous formulation, as the temptation of modernity. In his study of canonized epic masterpieces of Western culture, Moretti proposes that a "modern epic" such as Goethe's Faust aims at reviving the genre's ancient legacy: to represent the incommensurate, expansive, universalizing scope of experiences under the aegis of a hero.26 Thus 24 25 26 Disposizione scenica per l'opera "Mefistofele" di Arrigo Boito (Milan, 1881); reprinted in "Mefistofele" di Arrigo Boito, Ashbrook and Guccini, eds., 35–146 (henceforth, DS-Mef; page numbers refer to the manual's own pagination). Premiered in Paris, at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1859, it was first performed at La Scala in 1862; for a more detailed comparison between Gounod's and Boito's versions see Ashbrook, "Boito and the 1868 Mefistofele Libretto," 270–1. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, Quintin Hoare, trans. (New York, 1996), 13. 23 24 Opera and Modern Spectatorship Boito's ambition to include both Parts i and ii manifests an earnest conviction of the original's capacity to evoke a multifarious experiential totality. Despite the necessary large omissions, the opera strives to exploit the modernity of Faust's epic "temptation" – that is, the sheer range of different episodes, the totality of which constitutes what Moretti calls the epic's "world system." And, even more radically, by changing the title from Faust to Mefistofele, the opera hints at completing something Goethe had started. As Moretti explains, with Goethe the character of Faust undergoes a fundamental transformation: the self-possessed hero of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus had mutated into the inert spectator of Mephistopheles' deeds. Where the former takes charge of the action, the latter is a hero deprived of poietic (and ethic) responsibility. As a consequence, the experiential array offered by Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is structurally limited to the confines of the hero's imagination and desires. In Goethe, instead, these confines can be expanded immeasurably once the poietic agency is transferred to Mephistopheles' magic. Thus Boito's version takes this process a step further and with Mefistofele completes the transference of agency: the demiurge becomes the eponymous hero of the opera. The operatic adaptation thus enacts a fundamental double shift. First of all there is a shift of perspective, from the interest of the spectator to that of the author: the work becomes about the creator's power and "interest," about the artist's "promesse de bonheur." Secondly, it effects a medial shift, through which opera redefines its own power as a medium. Mefistofele's magic is produced by means of the spectacular operatic machinery, which in turn is defined by establishing a relation of causality between its devices and technologies and the effects they would trigger in the spectators. But if Mefistofele's role is that of the epic demiurge, roughly aligned with that of the artist and with opera's potential as a medium, what role is left for the character of Faust? If Faust has become a spectator, in an opera that so overtly tackles its relation to the audience, then it seems that this function needs to be qualified. Moretti is quick to identify the function of spectator as one of utter passivity and mere reactivity, relying on the commonplace polarization whereby the doing/showing/speaking from the stage is se