Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  M.lle Sontag would have wished to sing the role of Desdemona as it was originally given in Paris by M.de Pasta, but since the cavatina “Oh quante lagrime” has been returned to La donna del lago, for which it had originally been written, M.lle Sontag has agreed to sing the role just as I composed it for the Neapolitan Theater. To avoid any other interpretation, I beg you, sir, to have the kindness to insert this letter into your next number.20

  Although he was perfectly prepared to make or accept a modified version of Otello when necessary, Rossini was also prepared to set matters right when he had the chance.

  A Singer

  In preparing his Romeo and Juliet opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which had its premiere at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice on 11 March 1830, Bellini paid particular attention to the work’s conclusion. Felice Romani, his librettist, had prepared a libretto in 1825 on the same subject for Nicola Vaccai, Giulietta e Romeo, many verses from which he recycled for Bellini.21 Some verses Romani had to invent anew, since Bellini had decided to import into Capuleti several compositions from their previous, unsuccessful collaboration, Zaira (whose premiere took place at the Teatro Ducale of Parma on 16 May 1829).22 But some verses, particularly at the very conclusion of the opera, had to be newly written because the composer did not want to close his opera with elaborate solo music, as in Vaccai, but rather with a touching duet for the lovers, sung in fragments that strain for a moment of lyricism, then die away. We are convinced by this splendid effect, but the contemporary public was not: the audience was no more attuned to such a conclusion than were the audiences that twenty years earlier had refused the tragic finale of Rossini’s Tancredi.23

  Furthermore, Bellini was not taking into account the predilections of singers. In particular, his finale to I Capuleti e i Montecchi did not much please Maria Malibran, daughter of Manuel García (the original Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia). Malibran, who often performed the role of Romeo during the early 1830s, was one of the finest singers of her time, a legendary musician and a captivating personality, of whom Bellini became immediately enamored when he first saw her in London in 1833. He wanted nothing more than to write an opera for her, but the only tangible result of this desire was the Neapolitan version of I puritani, which (for reasons we will examine below) was never performed during their lifetimes. Malibran was also the very model of a capricious prima donna, and she decided that Bellini’s conclusion for I Capuleti did not show her vocal skills to full advantage. As a result, she introduced into Bellini’s opera, in performances in Bologna during October 1832, sections of the finale borrowed from Vaccai’s earlier opera.24 When Giuditta Grisi made the same substitution in Turin during the carnival season of 1836, Romani wrote a scathing article attacking the practice: “The third act of Vaccai was glued to the opera of Bellini, as in the punishment by which Mesenzio attached a dead body to a live one.”25 Then, taking off from a verse from his own libretto, Romani proclaimed:

  Ah! if you sleep, awake now [“Ah! se tu dormi svegliati!”], good Italian sense, and no longer permit yourself to be swindled in this way by the whims of virtuosos! Awake, if you sleep, public judgment, and do not permit the most beautiful operas of our imagination to be so perverted, mutilated, ruined! Awake, if you sleep, modesty, and cry aloud to singers that the time has come for the musical theater no longer to be disfigured by their peculiarities, by their pastiches, by their ridiculous habits [convenienze]! Awake, reason, awake, criteria, awake, taste, love for truth, desire for beauty, awake!

  But so many other singers imitated Malibran that Ricordi, in its vocal score of the opera, took to printing the Vaccai conclusion as if it were a valid and “sanctioned” alternative to Bellini’s.26

  When Giuseppina Ronzi De Begnis assumed the role of Romeo in Florence in 1834, it was suggested to her that she too follow the lead of Malibran, but she refused what she called this pasticcio alla Malibran, insisting instead that “if I make a fiasco, at least it will be all Bellini.” The performance instead was a great success, as she announced in triumph:

  I assure you that I was trembling, as the Florentines have the vice of not listening; and you know that in this third act there are no things that flatter the ear, and that to enjoy the beauties, whether of music or of declamation, there must be religious silence. I obtained that, and once the audience had seen me, they remained as if unable to move. In short, to make the matter brief, it gave great pleasure, and after it we were all called out.

  Things seem to me to be going well; I really am content. To tell you the truth, I would have been very unhappy if this opera had failed; and I am the more content because it is all Bellini’s work. There were people who said: how does Malibran happen to change the third act? It seems to me that, as a singer who is supposed to be such an actress, she should be content. Does this seem to you a small triumph?27

  For Bellini it was a great one.

  A Theater

  Even more surprisingly, theaters themselves recognized that introducing changes into operas for reasons having to do with needs of local productions, however necessary they might seem and however carefully they might be done, could be damaging to the works themselves. In 1836, the Teatro alla Scala mounted Rossini’s Armida, an opera that had practically disappeared from the stage after its premiere, but whose most famous numbers had occasionally been inserted (even by Rossini) into performances of other operas.28 In the libretto printed for this occasion, the Scala management informed the public:

  In offering this opera, which the famous Maestro wrote for the Royal Teatro San Carlo of Naples in 1817, we have sought to reproduce it in its original form, even though some pieces have been heard in other operas. This has been done because of the difficulty of adding pieces which equal (let alone better) the beauties of the originals and because Rossini’s genius must be respected in every way possible.29

  “Rossini’s genius must be respected in every way possible” (il genio di Rossini vuol essere in ogni maniera rispettato): those are words that one hardly expects to find spoken by a commercial Italian theater in the mid-1830s, and yet they represent the contemporary realization that the greatest composers of Italian opera had written works whose integrity was worthy of respect. While it is true, then, that Italian composers were part of a commercial system in which the shape of operas could be modified by themselves or by others to meet performance needs, there was a keen sense that their operas were also works of art whose “constitutive properties” (to adopt Nelson Goodman’s term)30 were to be respected. This sense was shared by composers, librettists, publishers, singers, and sympathetic critics. Every time we decide what version of an Italian opera to perform in the theater, and every time we make decisions about cuts, we are reliving—and provisionally resolving—this historical and aesthetic conflict.

  SOCIAL CONTEXT AND OPERATIC TEXTS

  The perception that Italian operas may need to be modified in performance today, and sometimes presented with a different sequence of musical numbers or in an abbreviated form, is in part a function of the difference between the social conditions in which these operas were performed in the nineteenth century and those of modern society.31 Under normal circumstances, modern audiences do not appear to have what the theatrical clock would suggest was the staying power of early-nineteenth-century audiences. After all, performances at the Teatro alla Scala of Milan in the 1810s began with the first act of an opera (lasting approximately two hours), to be followed by a full-length heroic ballet unrelated to the opera (an hour in length), the final act of the opera (an hour and a half), and a shorter comic or semiserious ballet (a half hour). When Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero was first performed at La Scala on 26 December 1819, according to the original printed libretto, the evening began with the first act of the opera, continued with the “ballo tragico” Cimene by Salvatore Viganò (divided into six “acts”), proceeded with the second act of the opera, and concluded with the “secondo ballo” La campanella d’argento by Filippo Bertini (divided into t
hree “acts”).32 Stendhal and other contemporary writers refer to evenings in the theater that began around seven o’clock in the winter and nine o’clock in the summer and continued for approximately six hours.33 Even by midcentury, when ballets on extraneous (or even related) subjects were no longer performed between the acts of an opera, a theatrical evening often included a full-length opera, followed by a full-length ballet.34

  Yet we must avoid drawing false conclusions about the attention span of nineteenth-century audiences in Italy. Theaters were not temples of art, where lights would be extinguished and a rapt public would concentrate all its attention on the stage. Theaters fulfilled then, as they do now, many social and aesthetic functions. In cities as diverse as Milan, Venice, and Naples, the opera house was the center of public social interaction for the nobility and the professional classes, while some areas in the theater were also economically accessible to students and tradesmen.35 The public viewed the operas from an open area in front of the stage, known as the platea (our modern orchestra): depending on the theater, this included some fixed seats (which could be rented) and benches, as well as a considerable area for spectators to view the opera on foot. The platea was surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped set of four to six superposed rows of boxes (palchi), either owned by noble and wealthy families or rented by them on a yearly or multiyear basis. These boxes were laterally closed off from one another, and most were supplied with curtains that could isolate the occupants from public view. (In the most tightly controlled society in the peninsula, the Bourbon monarchy in Naples, such curtains were banned.) Despite architectural modifications of various kinds, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theaters constructed along these lines remain prevalent today throughout Italy, from the Teatro alla Scala of Milan and the Teatro San Carlo of Naples to the Teatro Regio of Parma and the smaller Teatro Rossini of Pesaro.

  Illustrations and descriptions of theater life during the first half of the nineteenth century are remarkably consistent in showing free movement in the platea, with audiences purchasing food and drink from itinerant vendors, conversations among spectators, individuals moving in and out of the theater. The name aria di sorbetto reflects the practice of buying and consuming ices during short arias sung by secondary characters. Even at the Teatro San Carlo, one of the few theaters to fill the entire platea with benches and, later, individual seats (another political effort to control the public), there was adequate room between rows to allow easy access during a performance.36 Furthermore, theaters were illuminated throughout the performance, first by candlelight or oil, later by gas, so that movement was unhindered by darkness.37 Operatic managements, in short, would not have understood modern concerns about the incompatibility of an act that lasts two hours with an audience’s need to use bathroom facilities.

  For the nobility in the palchi, social intercourse was even freer. Stendhal’s La chartreuse de Parme, Balzac’s Massimilla Doni (with its fictional portrait of the countess Cristina Belgiojoso),38 and countless literary invocations of Italian theatrical life suggest the atmosphere in which opera was received. Across from the palchi, there were comfortable rooms, furnished by the box holders, in which social gatherings could be held, meals served, intimate meetings arranged, and servants instructed to wait. As Stendhal wrote, “La Scala [...], situated as it is in a city with a damp winter climate, soon grew to be a general meeting-place for the whole town. A well-heated, well-lit establishment, where one may be quite certain of meeting people on almost any evening in the week, is a most invaluable institution for any city.”39 In the large public areas that led to the platea and palchi, gaming rooms provided another form of public entertainment, until they were largely banned by approximately 1820. Even fee structures reflected the multiple uses of the opera house. Everyone who entered was charged an ingresso (an entrance fee), but those who came only to gamble or to visit with friends in public areas removed from the actual theatrical space were not expected to pay an additional charge for the right to be present at the performance.40 A similar fee structure persisted in many European opera houses well into the 1960s, although I am sure that few of those who paid or collected these fees understood their historical source.

  As we have seen, the theatrical year was usually divided into several seasons, each lasting two to three months, during which a fixed company of singers presented to a largely unchanging audience three or four different operas, at least one of which was newly composed. If a work pleased the public, it would be performed night after night. Thus, for the carnival and Lenten season in 1821 (which began on the preceding St. Stephen’s eve, 26 December 1820), La Scala offered three works: the premiere of Simone Mayr’s Fedra, which opened the season and played thirty-seven times; a revival of Rossini’s Neapolitan opera, La donna del lago, based on the narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott, which opened 8 February and played thirty-two times; and a new opera by Giuseppe Mosca, Emira, Regina d’Egitto, whose short and unsuccessful run began on 6 March and ended after a mere three performances. Each opera was, as usual, accompanied by ballets.41

  There is ample evidence from newspaper reports and an analysis of musical sources, that theaters made modifications during the course of a season, even for an ostensibly successful work, in response to public opinion, the capabilities of singers, and the wishes of composers. For revivals in later seasons or different cities, printed librettos, usually prepared anew for every season in which an opera was to be given and intended to mirror the words actually performed on stage, provide extensive documentation of the ways in which some operas were modified or cut. From them we observe that the integrity of certain works was regularly maintained, while other works were routinely dismembered.42

  This partial reprise of our earlier discussion of the social realities of Italian opera performance and composition in the nineteenth century suggests that it is perfectly appropriate for a modern opera house, functioning under extremely different social constraints, to concern itself with the structure and length of an Italian opera, to weigh alternative versions, and to consider making cuts. The call to invoke the early history of these works, in an effort to further our understanding, demands neither the reconstruction of a hypothetical “ideal” nineteenth-century performance nor the re-creation in today’s opera house of a documentable version from the past. Rather, it encourages undertaking practical decisions sensitized to the social and cultural history of Italian opera in general and to both the composition and the reception history of individual works. These practical decisions are a function of aesthetic judgments, familiarity with the repertory, local theatrical custom, the abilities of singers, the changing taste of audiences, union wage regulations, train or bus schedules, and restaurant opening and closing hours. Such issues, whether directed by the composer or not, determined the shape of operas in their premiere performances and contemporary revivals. They remain determinant in our present-day operatic culture.

  “MANCA UN FOGLIO...”: NONAUTHORIAL MULTIPLE VERSIONS

  Surprisingly few well-known Italian operas exist in a unique version identifiable with the composer: among them are Rossini’s Il signor Bruschino and Il viaggio a Reims, Bellini’s La sonnambula (although the opera presents serious textual issues that have yet to be resolved),43 and Verdi’s Luisa Miller and Rigoletto. By and large these are operas the composers staged only once. Donizetti’s name does not appear on this list: he supervised productions of his most successful works not only in Italy but also in Paris and Vienna, constantly introducing variants. Even in the case of Verdi, who wrote (by most counts) twenty-six completely distinct operas and made a habit of insisting on their integrity, only eight exist in unique versions.44 A vast body of information, mixing in unequal parts serious research and folklore, has developed around multiple authorial versions, but complete explanations and performance materials exist only for works available in critical editions.

  Alongside these multiple authorial versions, we find an impressive array of nonauthorial versions, versions prepared in the ab
sence of the composer. The contents of these performances can most easily be reconstructed from printed librettos. Theaters and performers may well have had strong reasons for proceeding as they did, and had the composer been present to supervise the revival, he might well have made similar adjustments. In his absence, however, theaters did what administrators, musical directors, singers, or governmental censors thought best. Few of these nonauthorial versions entered the preserved musical record. Indeed, what is most impressive about surviving musical sources is how uniform they tend to be: only a handful of pieces in the sources for Rossini’s operas cannot be traced directly to an authorial version. This is true even for an opera such as Aureliano in Palmira (first performed at La Scala on 26 December 1813), probably the most unstable Rossinian text in the contemporary performance tradition, judging from printed librettos.45

  When nonauthorial versions do become part of the written musical tradition, the misinformation they convey can have serious consequences for the subsequent performance history of a work, extending well beyond the performances for which they were introduced. Don Bartolo’s aria “A un Dottor della mia sorte,” from Rossini’s Il barbiere di Sivigilia, must have been considered too difficult, too long, or just not congenial by Paolo Rosich, the singer who participated in the Florentine revival of the opera at the Teatro di Via della Pergola during the autumn of 1816, just a few months after its Roman premiere. The local music master was Pietro Romani, a highly respected craftsman of his time, whose work as musical director for the Florentine theaters was, in the absence of a composer, necessary and significant.46 “A un Dottor della mia sorte” is one of the more demanding buffo arias in the entire repertory; it is also one of the greatest, when sung well. But with the local Bartolo in grief, Romani came to the rescue by providing a simpler, distinctly inferior aria of his own composition, “Manca un foglio.” With gratitude, Rosich performed Romani’s piece, leaving that of Rossini aside.47 Because other singers had a similar problem, “Manca un foglio” began to circulate more widely, both in manuscript and in printed form.48 During the course of the century, some printed editions, giving no hint of this history, simply substituted Romani for Rossini, while others printed Romani in an appendix, marking “A un dottor della mia sorte” with notes such as: “This aria is never performed, and that of Pietro Romani, published as an appendix, is preferred.”49 In some German editions both arias were printed, that of Rossini in act 1, that of Romani—with a modified text (sometimes only in German)—to open act 2.50 Confusion began to spread: Just what piece did Rossini write? Even artists perfectly capable of singing the original found that they were expected to sing Romani’s piece. Thus, a change made to suit the needs of a particular singer had become writ: a “tradition” had been born. Fortunately it is a tradition that has been reversed. While modern Bartolos may complain that Rossini’s aria is very difficult (and while they may insist on abbreviating it when they find themselves incapable of doing justice to the entire piece), there is little chance that Romani will return with any regularity.51