When the curtain finally rose on a new opera, the composer was normally required to be physically present, alongside the orchestra and in full view of the public, for the first three performances. Contracts often referred to his leading the performance “from the cembalo,” suggesting that he gave cues, set tempi, and personally accompanied secco recitative, but the phrase continued to be used even after cembalos and the secco recitative with which they were associated had disappeared. According to an oft-repeated anecdote, told first by the original Rosina, Geltrude Righetti-Giorgi, during the notorious premiere of Il barbiere di Siviglia in 1816 Rossini ostentatiously applauded the singers (and, implicitly, his own music) at the end of the first act, bringing further howls of abuse from an angry public.8
As the century progressed, contracts no longer specified the composer’s presence at the “cembalo,” but he was still expected to be in the theater for the first three evenings. Verdi’s contract with La Fenice for La traviata, for example, has the following clause, which appears to have been standard: “Maestro Verdi must remain in Venice at least until after the third performance of his new opera, and he must be present at all rehearsals for it, large or small, as well as at the first performances.”9 Verdi’s bitterness at the dreadful failure of his second opera for La Scala, Un giorno di regno, whose first performance took place on 5 September 1840, just a short time after the death of his first wife, Margherita Barezzi (both their infant children had died within the past three years), was unquestionably exacerbated by his having to appear in the theater—perhaps even at the cembalo, for this opera buffa still has secco recitative. As he wrote in a famous letter to his publisher, Tito Ricordi, almost twenty years later:
Since that time I never again saw Un giorno di regno, and it is probably a bad opera, although who knows how many operas no better have been tolerated or even perhaps applauded. Oh, if then the public had only—not applauded—but had borne that opera in silence, I would not have had sufficient words to thank them!10
In success or failure, the composer was there to receive directly the audience’s reaction.
Whatever problems may have arisen in coordinating the performance (setting tempos, fixing dynamic levels, correcting mistakes in the parts) would have been handled by a word here, a gesture there. Communication between the singers and the orchestra was more direct, for there was no Wagnerian orchestra pit, no “mystic gulf” in which the instrumentalists were hidden: the orchestra sat on the same level as the audience.11 Likewise, there was no conductor with a baton beating time—just the composer, for his three obligatory performances, and the leader of the first violin section, who was responsible for keeping things together. This violinist worked not from a complete orchestral score of the opera, but rather from a “violino principale” part, a special first violin part that included the main vocal lines and instrumental solos, so that necessary cues could be provided. Independent conductors in Italy were not common until the 1850s, although they were regularly employed at the Paris Opéra already during Rossini’s years there, from 1826 through 1829.12
We must try to understand how these first performances in Italian theaters were prepared and executed, since these were the conditions in which scores for Italian operas from the first half of the nineteenth century were prepared. They allowed no time to verify individual instrumental parts, to eliminate notational errors or infelicities, to fix details in ensembles. Only the most obvious errors, those which immediately sprang to a composer’s attention aurally, could possibly have been corrected. Indeed, nineteenth-century performance materials actually used in the theater are so filled with mistakes that one wonders how the performers ever got through an evening. If they were good musicians, though, instrumentalists presumably knew where they were harmonically, had some sense of where they were likely to be going, and negotiated the difficulties intelligently.
While there was considerably more rehearsal time in Paris, the never-ending changes and the presence of many individuals seeking to control the process left such confusion about what should be played that the theater was soon awash in incomprehensible and contradictory indications. When oral tradition faded, the Opéra had to return to the printed score of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell to find a comprehensible text. In the process, they lost many of the modifications Rossini made during the rehearsal period.13 Verdi’s pronouncements about “la grande boutique,” as he not so affectionately called the commercial enterprise that was the Paris Opéra, reflected a common feeling among Italian composers: despite the high performance royalties, the enticing possibilities for elaborate staging, the superior quality of the orchestra, and the attention paid to the literary quality of librettos, operas written for France lacked a unified artistic vision. Verdi was no fan of opera by committee.14
After the first three performances, the composer was free to depart. Now his opera began to make its way without his presence. If we are to understand materials used for performance in the nineteenth century, from which are derived many of those still employed today, we must know not only how they came into existence but, even more, how they were transmitted from the time of the first performance until the present. The process of transmission changed radically between 1810 and 1865, and the changes were related to a transformation in the economics of composition. Rossini was a prime example of the earlier system, centered on a theater and its impresario (who commissioned an opera and paid the composer a fee for his work) and on copyists of that theater (who often had a contract granting them the right to distribute manuscript copies of operas performed there, with no further payment to the composer). Verdi was rooted in the later system, dependent on both a theater commissioning a work (for which the composer was paid a fee) and a publisher who acquired directly from the composer subsequent distribution rights (against payment of a further fee and/or royalties). Composers of the generation of Bellini and Donizetti belonged to a time of transition between these two economic systems.
It is crucial to differentiate between the way that operas were transmitted through written sources (whether manuscript copies, printed editions, or performing parts)—the subject of this chapter—and performing traditions associated with those same operas (changes introduced into the vocal line by singers, added cadenzas and high notes, cuts or interpolations, modifications in instrumentation made by contemporaries, etc.). The texts transmitted through written sources—however problematic they may be—do not embody what I am describing as performance traditions. Only rarely does a particular reworking of an opera by later performers become part of a continuous written record, although some transmitted reworkings have had a pernicious influence on the history of a work (as when Ricordi for half a century distributed a late nineteenth-century reorchestration of Il barbiere di Siviglia or other Rossini comedies). Modifications made by individual singers or cuts, on the other hand, tend to be exemplified in single copies, and are not transmitted from one written or printed source of a work to another. The occasional publication of an aria with the ornamentation of a favorite singer, for example, almost never influenced the text of the work from which the aria was taken. So we need to differentiate between operas as transmitted by manuscript and printed sources, and performance practices that develop over time and are passed down from one generation to another. The persistent failure to separate transmission from performance traditions continues to plague efforts to think clearly about Italian opera.
ROSSINI AND HIS AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPTS
Let us begin with the transmission of Rossini’s operas and those of his contemporaries. After the obligatory three performances for a new work, Rossini would usually depart for the city of his next commission or return to visit his family in Bologna. Even during his residency in Naples (1815–22), he often left that city after a major premiere. The future of the opera just composed would depend on the contract Rossini had with the theater that had commissioned it. That there could be significant disagreement as to the meaning of such a contract emerges from the dispute th
at developed between Rossini and the Neapolitan impresario, Barbaja, after the premiere on 16 February 1822 of the composer’s last opera for Naples, Zelmira. This opera was written just before the company transferred for the spring season to Vienna, where its residency at the Kärtnertortheater won the favor of the Viennese public and many intellectuals (including a delighted Hegel), raising the hackles of local musicians, Beethoven among them. The dispute between Rossini and Barbaja also reflected their animosity in 1822, motivated by Rossini’s decision not only to leave Naples but also to rob Barbaja of his prima donna (and perhaps former mistress) by marrying Isabella Colbran. However titillating the context, the dispute reveals much about the transmission of Italian operas during the early 1820s.
On 17 April 1823, after the premiere of Semiramide and before Rossini began the trip that would take him to Paris and London, he wrote the following letter to a Neapolitan friend, Carlo de Chiaro, living at that moment in Vienna or St. Petersburg:
Dear friend: I can do nothing less than thank you for the interest you take in me, but unfortunately you have undertaken a mission that, despite your good heart and sense of justice, will go badly for you. I have not responded to that last letter from Barbaja because I do not possess a style dignified enough to respond categorically. I will say only that if I had sums belonging to Barbaja deposited with me and if I could not or would not give them back to him, I would at least have the scruples to pay him interest. He has six thousand ducats in hand, a year has passed since the society came to an end, and he has neither paid nor proposed paying any interest and only sets forth stupid reasons against paying, simply to get revenge.
I own all my original manuscripts, it being custom and law that a year after an opera is given, authors have the right to have their autographs back. Did I perhaps steal my originals from Barbaja’s archive? I asked him for them, and he granted them to me; then why now does he reclaim them?
He pretends that I made provisions for the full score of Zelmira [Rossini seems to be referring to the distribution of the full orchestral score], while I made no other contracts but that with Vienna [for the publication of a reduction for piano and voices, with the Viennese music publisher Artaria], as he knows well; and if he finds a contract in which I made provisions for the full score of Zelmira, I will pay any penalty at all. He has words, not documents. None of the operas written in Naples brought a single penny of gain to Barbaja in terms of distribution rights, since the copyist has the right to give the score to whomever he pleases. Should Zelmira alone be the opera that serves as an exception?15
Rossini’s departure from Naples was not happy. Barbaja apparently kept a sum of money Rossini had invested in a business enterprise in which they were partners, presumably the one that controlled the gambling concessions at San Carlo, and had neither repaid the sum nor given him interest on his investment. Faced with the composer’s demands, Barbaja claimed instead that Rossini had defrauded him by stealing the autograph manuscript of Zelmira from Barbaja’s archive, thereby robbing the impresario of income that would have come to him from controlling the distribution of the opera, marketing the product he had acquired when he commissioned the work, and making copies for other theaters.
Rossini denies the accuracy of this economic contention. According to him, the impresario had no rights at all to further commercial exploitation of operas first produced in his theater. Rather, the composer had the right to have his autograph manuscript returned to him a year after the first performance of a work, and Rossini claimed to own all his own autograph manuscripts: there was no justification for Barbaja to differentiate Zelmira from the others. A copy of that autograph manuscript would have been made by the copyist associated with the theater, and the right to produce further copies belonged to that copyist, not to the impresario. Of the nine opere serie Rossini composed for Naples between 1815 and 1822, the composer did indeed keep at least eight autograph manuscripts his entire life. Upon the death of his second wife, Olympe Pélissier, five of these (Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, Otello, Armida, La donna del lago, and Maometto II) passed to the city of his birth, Pesaro, where the Fondazione Rossini was formed to administer his legacy and establish a conservatory. Another three (Mosè in Egitto, Ermione, and Zelmira), now in various Parisian libraries, were given by Olympe as personal gifts, perhaps in lieu of cash payments, to her doctor, her lawyer, and others. Fortunately these manuscripts eventually made their way into public collections. Only the autograph of Ricciardo e Zoraide is in Naples (now at the conservatory library), where it has probably remained since its composition in 1818.
Thus, copies of these scores made in Naples, from which other copies were made, and then copies of the copies, as the operas spread from one theater to another in Italy and then elsewhere in Europe, were the sources used for performances of Rossini’s Neapolitan operas as they circulated in the nineteenth century. The autograph manuscripts remained with the composer. The accuracy of that first copy was therefore a crucial matter, as was the ability of successive copyists to produce accurate renderings in turn. But that, as we shall see, was precisely the problem.
Rossini, however, was being less than truthful with Carlo de Chiaro, and hence with Barbaja. He may well have had a contract with Naples that specified this disposition of his autograph manuscripts, but there was no “standard” procedure either within a single opera house or throughout the Italian peninsula. Individual contracts, rather than any generalizable custom or law, determined individual practice. Between 1810 and 1813 Rossini wrote five one-act farse for the Venetian Teatro San Moisè. Not a single autograph manuscript for these farse remained in Rossini’s possession. Two have disappeared (La cambiale di matrimonio and L’inganno felice), one recently resurfaced in a Swedish collection (La scala di seta)—as we saw in chapter 1—and two others turned up in the hands of Rossini’s friends, presumably purchased from previous owners. During the 1850s these friends hastened to Paris to find the aging Rossini and have him authenticate their treasures. On the autograph manuscript of L’occasione fa il ladro, or 1858 (the last number is difficult to read), “I recognize this score as my autograph.” On that of Il signor Bruschino, owned by Prince Giuseppe Poniatowski, himself an amateur musician and composer of operas, Rossini wrote in a more spirited tone on 10 February 1858, “I, the undersigned, declare that this is the autograph of my Bruschino, composed in Venice in 1813. It pleases me moreover to declare that I am Blessed that this Sin of my youth is in the hands of my worthy friend and patron, Prince G. Poniatowski.”16
After the first performances, these Venetian manuscripts became the property of the copyist of the San Moisè, Giacomo Zamboni. Indeed, after applying his stamp twice to the first page of the autograph of L’occasione fa il ladro, Zamboni wrote, “Original of Maestro Rossini. When making cuts or other changes, please do not ruin it by using ink, etc.” He signed his name: “G. F. Zamboni owner [proprietario].” The copyist of the San Moisè, then, apparently had not only the right to distribute the opera but also the right to keep the autograph manuscript itself, a right very similar to that gradually wrested from Milanese theaters by Giovanni Ricordi, patriarch of the firm whose name is intimately related to the history of Italian music for the past two centuries. We will take up that story later in this chapter.
The situation in Rome was less clear. Of the five operas Rossini wrote for three different Roman theaters, he apparently kept the autograph manuscript only of the last, the opera semiseria he composed for the Teatro Apollo in 1821, Matilde di Shabran, at whose first performances Niccolò Paganini himself, the great Italian violinist and composer, served as “violino principale.” It presumably passed from Rossini to his young Belgian friend Edmond Michotte, in whose collection at the Brussels Conservatory it currently resides.17 The autograph manuscript of Rossini’s first Roman opera, Torvaldo e Dorliska, written to open the carnival season of 1815–16 at the Teatro Valle, is found in the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire, one of the treasures inherited from the French collect
or Charles Malherbe. Its previous history is unknown. The autograph manuscript of the only opera seria Rossini wrote for Rome, Adelaide di Borgogna, first performed at the Teatro Argentina on 27 December 1817, appears to be lost.
Of particular interest, of course, are the autograph manuscripts of the two opere buffe written by Rossini for Rome, Il barbiere di Siviglia (Teatro Argentina, 20 February 1816) and La Cenerentola (Teatro Valle, 25 January 1817). Both manuscripts ultimately became part of the collection of a Bolognese friend of Rossini’s, the lawyer Rinaldo Bajetti, at whose death in 1862 they were donated, respectively, to the libraries of the Bologna Liceo Musicale (where Rossini had been a student) and the Accademia Filarmonica (to which Rossini had been admitted in 1806, at the age of fourteen).18 We cannot trace the history of the autograph manuscript of Il barbiere di Siviglia between the opera’s premiere and the time of Bajetti’s gift to the Liceo Musicale. For La Cenerentola, a clause in the original contract specified that the manuscript would remain with the impresario of the Teatro Valle, Pietro Cartoni (the score will “remain the full and absolute property of Sig. Cartoni, without the said Maestro’s being able to reclaim his original after a year”).19
As we saw in the discussion of recent New York and Pesaro performances in chapter 1, La Cenerentola is an opera for which Rossini made extensive use of a collaborator, the Roman musician Luca Agolini, known as Luca “lo zoppo” because of a characteristic limp. Agolini wrote the secco recitative and three musical numbers: arias for the Prince’s tutor (Alidoro) and one of the stepsisters (Clorinda), and a short chorus at the beginning of the second act. In Rossini’s autograph manuscript, all the recitative and Clorinda’s aria are present, in Agolini’s hand, while the chorus is missing.20 Where the Alidoro aria should occur, however, just before the first-act finale, the manuscript includes neither Agolini’s “Vasto teatro è il mondo” nor the aria with which Rossini replaced it in 1821 for a later performance at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, “Là del ciel nell’arcano profondo,” a piece whose size and difficulty give the role of Alidoro an altogether different weight. Instead, the manuscript has another aria, written in yet another hand, “Fa silenzio, odi un rumore.” This aria was performed during a revival of La Cenerentola in 1818 at the Teatro Apollo of Rome to celebrate a state visit of the King of Naples and his family. Rossini’s autograph manuscript, then, was still in the hands of the Roman impresario at that time, and the substitution was made without the composer’s knowledge or approval. When Rossini prepared “Là del ciel” for Alidoro in 1821, he kept its autograph manuscript, which is part of the collection he willed to the Fondazione Rossini. Reconstructing the history of Rossini’s involvement with the music of La Cenerentola, in short, requires control over a set of autograph sources (and manuscript copies) in many different libraries.
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