« “the twilight of the true gods”: cristoforo colombo, i medici and the construction of italian...

Cambridge Opera Journal, 8, 3, 251-269 ? 1996 Cambridge University Press

The twilight of the true gods: Cristoforo Colombo, I Medici and the construction of

Italian history LUCA ZOPPELLI

In little more than a year, between October 1892 and November 1893, the Italian operatic repertory acquired two ambitious and monumental works, similar in their choice of a national-historic subject and in their dramatic form: Alberto Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo and Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici. After a few revivals scattered over several decades, both disappeared from circulation, and recent productions have confirmed doubts about their stageworthiness, notwithstanding some convincing passages (particularly in Colombo) and the enormous investment of intellectual and historical reflection that had attended their birth. Ideological motivations determined the musico-dramatic structures of the two operas, and are closely related to the failure of their projects.

1

Alberto Franchetti was almost thirty when the city of Genoa commissioned an opera dedicated to Columbus. In spite of his close proximity in age to the Italian 'giovane scuola', and friendships with many of its members, Franchetti's previous opera, Asrael, had displayed his German musical education (Munich and Dresden), and thus a proximity to the anti-materialistic Europeanism of the Italian scapigliatura of the 1860s and 70s. The libretto of Colombo was one of the first by Luigi Illica, who had close personal ties with Baron Raimondo Franchetti, the wealthy father of Alberto. Its gestation, documented in part by correspondence,1 was long and difficult, a source of continual misunderstanding - to such an extent that the notoriously touchy Illica ended by withdrawing his name from the libretto at the first performance.

The opera, based on the Historia de las Indias by Bartolome de Las Casas, presents in four acts and an epilogue all the basic elements associated by popular culture with the myth of Columbus. In the first act (Salamanca, 1487), a crowd awaits the Council's decision: a legend intoned by provincial pilgrims leads the populace to hope for the discovery of new lands, but a demoniacal ballad by the villain Roldano Ximenes evokes the monstrous dangers lurking in the ocean, inciting the crowd against Columbus. The Council's decision is negative: jeered at and almost lynched by the mob, Columbus meets Queen Isabella, who in an ecstatic duet grants him the means to attempt his voyage. Act II (12 October 1492) takes place aboard the Santa

Some of Alberto and Raimondo Franchetti's many letters to the librettist, preserved in the Fondo Illica at the Biblioteca Passerini-Landi in Piacenza, will be cited below.

This content downloaded from 134.21.45.76 on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 16:13:22 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Luca Zoppelli

Maria at night: the crew despairs of ever landing or seeing their homeland again, and even Columbus has doubts; during the evening religious service a mutiny led by Roldano breaks out. Just as Columbus is about to be thrown into the ocean, the shout of 'terra, terra!' (Land! Land!) is heard to general exultation. In Act III (Xaragua, 1503), a representation of Spanish atrocities against the Indians is interwoven with a love plot involving a young Spanish officer and the princess Iguamota, daughter of Queen Anacoana (who has seduced Roldano, the better to prepare a massacre of the invaders). In Act IV, Columbus returns to re-establish law and order: his magnanimity has succeeded in overcoming even Anacoana, when a royal messenger arrives to announce his dismissal and imprisonment. While the ferocity of the Spanish soldiers rages, the Indians immolate themselves on a pyre inside their temple. In the epilogue (Medina del Campo, 1506), an aged and infirm Columbus seeks an audience with Queen Isabella in the crypt of the kings of Castille, only to discover that she is dead. All his hopes crushed, he goes mad and dies recalling his past endeavours.

Despite its critical and popular success,2 Cristoforo Colombo seemed too long, and Franchetti undertook a series of cuts and revisions involving the two American acts (III and IV).3 The original version has not survived, and exists only in the libretto published for the Genoa premiere on 6 October 1892. For the next production, on 26 December at La Scala, Milan, Franchetti cut about a hundred pages of the orchestral score,4 although he added a reprise of the Indians' funeral laments to replace their collective suicide in the finale of Act IV. The first vocal score, published by Ricordi, corresponds to this revision. On 24 October 1894, Toscanini conducted a version at the Teatro Sociale in Treviso in which the two 'American' acts were combined by means of further cuts, this following a suggestion made in summer 1892 by Mancinelli, conductor of the Genoa premiere.5 A second vocal score was based on a further reduced four-act version, which contained an appendix indicating the steps necessary to combine the two American acts according to the Treviso version. It seems clear that Franchetti continued to prefer the four-act version,6 even though the three-act one prevailed. Finally, in a version staged without success at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 7 December 1923, the American acts disappeared: the composer, in collaboration with an anonymous librettist (probably Arturo Rossato, after an unsuccessful meeting with Giovacchino

2 Since Boito wrote to Verdi on 16 March 1894 (with reference to Fior d'alpe) that 'Franchetti, who navigated well with Christopher Columbus, has drowned in a teacup, or rather wanted to make a storm in a teacup and was shipwrecked', Colombo may have been valued in Verdi's circle. The Verdi-Boito Correspondence, ed. Marcello Conati and Mario Medici, trans. William Weaver (Chicago, 1994), 217.

3 I repeat this account of the Cristoforo Colombo versions to rectify some inaccuracies in Alan Mallach, 'Alberto Franchetti and Cristoforo Colombo', Opera Quarterly, 9 (1992), 16-17. 4 The autograph score, preserved in the Ricordi Archives in Milan, bears obvious signs of cuts and substitutions. The whereabouts of the deleted material, which would permit a reconstruction of the original version of the opera, is unknown. 5 See the letter by Franchetti to Giulio Ricordi, 16 August 1892 (Archivio Ricordi, Milan).

6 See the letter by Franchetti to Carlo Clausetti of 19 September 1922 (Archivio Ricordi, Milan).

252


Cristoforo Colombo and I Medici

Forzano) substituted a new act,7 largely recycling already existing music, which presents Columbus's return to Palos, a procession of Indians who march past the inquisitive eyes of the Spaniards, and the arrest of the navigator.8

Leoncavallo's IMedici was originally conceived in the 1870s as the first part of a trilogy Crepusculum about the Italian Renaissance (it was to have been followed by Gerolamo Savonarola and Cesare Borgia), an Italian 'response' to a Wagner who was venerated in vague terms but actually little understood.9 The historico-literary essays of Giosue Carducci, one of the most influential poets and philologists of the new Italy, whose lectures Leoncavallo had heard at the University of Bologna, hung over the subject and its treatment. The composer drafted his own libretto in 1887 and began the music in 1890. Practical difficulties obliged Leoncavallo to set the project aside, but after the success of Pagliacci he finished I Medici, which was presented at Milan's Teatro Dal Verme on 9 November 1893. The performance was preceded by a programmatic text in the form of a letter to a friend and critic, Francesco Carlo Tonolla, which appeared in the Milanese newspaper La Sera.10 As with Colombo, the opera presented 'scenes' from a stock of popular historical images about the Medicis and the Italian Renaissance: the preparation of the Pazzi conspiracy by Vatican agents, the love of Giuliano de' Medici and Simonetta Cattanei (told by Poliziano in the unfinished Giostra di Giuliano), the role of art in Lorenzo the Magnificent's manipulation of public opinion, and the killing of Giuliano and the wounding of Lorenzo during a religious service at the Church of Santa Reparata on 26 April 1478. In writing the libretto Leoncavallo drew on the most prestigious historical and philological sources available: from William Roscoe to Pasquale Villari, and from Gregorovius to Carducci. In addition to extensive quotations from the poetry of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Angelo Poliziano, the libretto imitated linguistic and metrical forms used in the fifteenth century.

Both operas, then, chose as their subject a historical 'tableau' within a Renaissance setting that focused on one or more 'heroes' of the 'Italian spirit'. Franchetti took for granted the Genoese origins of Christopher Columbus, assuming that his discoveries were a natural consequence of the spirit of enquiry and intellectual freedom generated by Italian humanism. Such choices reflect the obsessive quest by the ruling class of the new Italy in the decades after unification to develop a sense of national identity (historically and politically problematic), searching for its roots in the civilisation of the Italian past. As Carducci wrote:

7 Numerous letters by Franchetti in the Archivio Ricordi document the process of this final transformation.

8 This version of Franchetti's Colombo, not Christophe Colombe of Claudel-Milhaud, was the first opera on Columbus that 'completely avoided the introduction of some love relationship into the plot of discovery or conquest'. Jurgen Maehder, 'The Representation of the "Discovery" on the Opera Stage', in Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance, ed. C. E. Robertson (Washington, D.C., 1992), 259.

9 For a more detailed discussion, see my 'I Medici e Wagner', in Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo. Atti delprimo convegno internaionale di studi su Ruggero Leoncavallo, ed. Jurgen Maehder and Lorenza Guiot (Milan, 1993), 149-62.

10 15-16 October 1893. Henceforth cited as the letter to Tonolla, from my transcription in 'I Medici e Wagner', 151-2.

253


Luca Zoppelli

'when Prince Metternich said that Italy was a geographical expression he did not understand the matter; it was a literary expression, a poetic tradition'.11 National memory therefore identified with a portrait gallery of illustrious forebears, a Pantheon of intellectual glories (like the one that would have been realised by transferring the remains of illustrious Italians to the Florentine temple of Santa Croce), which became a historiographical canon and stimulus to political action.

The decisive episodes of this cultural history were reinterpreted in a markedly liberal sense, as progressive moments affirming a secular spirit against religious obscurantism. In other words, the true enemy of the new Italy was identified neither as the ancient local dynasties nor as foreign powers (relations with Austria were generally good from the 1880s on), but as the Church. In fact, these two librettos share a strong anticlericalism typical of Italian liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Representatives of the Church are presented as obscurantists, greedy, hypocritical and violent; on a more symbolic level, it is significant that the attempted murder of the protagonist in both operas occurs during a religious service. This anticlerical element was originally more pronounced. Leoncavallo suppressed a prologue with Pope Sixtus IV plotting the overthrow of the Medicis, while in the earliest version of Colombo the extermination of the Indians at the end of Act IV concluded with a tableau of religious intolerance:

(Attorno al tempio in fiamme passano torme di frati e di soldati salmodiando enfatici e fanatici) FRATI E SOLDATI:

Awampa fuoco! Struggi l'empie imagini! Divoratrice fiamma ardi e purifica! Noi sulle ceneri del fosco tempio piantiam la croce ove sorgeva un idolo.

(II tempio si sfascia, crolla spaventosamente. . . . Unfrate domenicano, stringendo nella sinistra una spada e nella destra una croce, la pianta fra i ruderi fumanti del tempio. Cristoforo Colombo, stretto da catene, si copre il viso al'orrore di quello spettacolo e piange). [(Friars and soldiers, singingpsalms loudly andfanatically, swarm around a temple in flames). FRIARS AND SOLDIERS: 'Blaze up, fire! Consume the wicked images! Devouring flame, burn and purify! In the ashes of the dark temple we will plant the cross where an idol stood.' (Terrifingly, the temple disintegrates and collapses. A Dominican friar, clenching a sword in his left hand and a cross in his right, plants the cross in the ruins of the temple. Christopher Columbus, bound in chains, covers his face in horror at the spectacle and weeps.)] The moderation of anticlericalism by means of these deletions perhaps corre- sponded to a cautious reconciliation between the liberal bourgeoisie and the

Giosu6 Carducci, 'Presso la tomba di Francesco Petrarca' (1874), cited by Maria Serena Sapegno, 'Italia', 'Italiani', in Letteratura italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, V: Le Questioni (Turin, 1986), 169. On the use of 'history as education to national consciousness' in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Alberto Asor Rosa, 'La cultura (dall'Unita all'eta giolittiana)', in Storia d'Italia, ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti, XI.1: Creajione e assestamento dello stato unitario (Turin, 1975), 821-999; Albano Biondi, 'Tempi e forme della storiografia', Letteratura italiana, III: Leforme del testo, 1075-1116; and, above all, Bruno Tobia, 'Una cultura per la nuova Italia', in Storia d'Italia, ed. G. Sabbatucci and V. Vidotto, II (Rome and Bari, 1995), 427-529.

254



Catholic Church, already taking place during the 1890s, a reconciliation motivated primarily by the need to reunite a middle class uneasy at the growth of political ferment within the proletariat.12

A further aspect linking the two works is the representation of crowds as an irrational and easily swayed mass, which any demagogue can move from one extreme to another, inciting the lowest and most violent instincts (Colombo, Act I; IMedici, Act IV). This particular political intention renders the message of IMedid problematic, even contradictory: on the one hand, it intends to be a 'national poem' (it was no accident that the German Emperor Wilhelm II congratulated the composer on having 'studied and glorified the history of his country');13 on the other, it draws its inspiration from Carducci's vision of history, which saw in the advent of the Medici signoria the suppression of communal liberties won during the Middle Ages. As Carducci wrote:

Lorenzo de' Medici ... in reconciling the art of the palaces with that of the streets, piazzas and fields had a purpose beyond his poetic taste. For the house of Medici to move closer to the people meant renewing its strength .... What messer Giovanni began with the cadastre, the great-grandson the Magnificent completed with poetry; it was the first time and the last, I believe, that cadastre and poetry were in agreement - and both conspired in the ruin of liberty.14

In the programmatic letter to his friend Tonolla published in the newspaper La Sera before the premiere of I Medici, Leoncavallo pretends to 'seek out the philosophical and physiological process from among a thousand incidents that seem disconnected but are in fact the logical consequence of statecraft, of a way of life', deciding to represent 'a philosophical idea' in his projected trilogy: 'the progress of the Renaissance politician'. There is a contradiction here between the generic desire to 'glorify' Italian civilisation and a vision of the Renaissance as the political decline of the country. None the less, it is unlikely that Leoncavallo, imitating Die Meistersinger in Act II of I Medici, wanted to represent the correspondence between art and life in the Florentine Renaissance,15 since art was precisely the means through which 'prince' Lorenzo conquered the common people and obtained the 'ruin of liberty' (at the expense of that communal bourgeoisie of the Italian Middle Ages with which the liberal bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century loved to identify 12 See Giuseppe Galasso, 'Le forme del potere, classi e gerarchie sociali', in Storia d'Italia, ed.

R. Romano and C. Vivanti, 2nd edn (Turin, 1989), I, 554ff. 13 See the typescript Appunti vari delle [sic] autobiografici di R. Leoncavallo, Archivio Sonzogno,

Milan, p. 79. Cited from the copy at the Biblioteca Cantonale di Locarno, Fondo Ruggero Leoncavallo.

14 Giosue Carducci, 'Delle poesie toscane di messer Angelo Poliziano. Discorso', preface to La stanza, l'O/feo e le rime (Florence, 1863). Cited from his Opere, XX (Bologna, 1909), 392-3. The vision of a progressive decline in Italian civilisation, including literature, from the Middle Ages on because of the loss of political liberty was a commonplace, sanctioned by the authoritative Storia della letteratura italiana (1870) of Francesco De Sanctis (according to Rene Wellek 'the most beautiful literary history ever written'). Carducci, however, disparaged De Sanctis's work as philosophical speculation lacking a sound philological basis.

5 See Jiirgen Maehder, 'II libretto patriottico nell'Italia della fine del secolo e la raffigurazione dell'antichita e del Rinascimento nel libretto prefascista italiano', in Atti del XIV congresso della Societa Internaionale de Musicologia (Bologna, 1987), III (Turin, 1990), 451-66.

255


Luca Zoppelli

itself). And the greatest Italian poet of the fifteenth century, Angelo Poliziano, is presented in IMedici as a shamelessly sycophantic courtier, a far cry from the nobility of a Hans Sachs.

Given the differences between Franchetti's and Leoncavallo's educational back- grounds and experiences up to this time, the extent to which the two operas resemble each other is surprising, not only in subject matter, but also in their relation to the various generic models then available to Italian opera composers. It is significant that both composers came from the ranks of the upper bourgeoisie. This impelled them to explicate the liberal ideology of a unified Italy in terms of a historical-patriotic opera, a choice that inevitably determined the dramatico-musical means they employed. The relationship between these two operas and the tradition of grand opera (or 'opera-ballo' in its Italian version), which at first glance seems self-evident, is actually rather tenuous, and not only for the purely technical reason that neither score calls for an independent ballet.16

The formative years of Leoncavallo and Franchetti were marked by the belated success of grand opera in Italy, a success that provided the opportunity for Italian musical culture to shed its provincialism and acquire a European outlook.17 From the 1850s onward, the avant-garde had imagined the possibility of treating elevated and 'philosophical' subjects in the genre, and even of experimenting with new dramatic forms and up-to-date compositional techniques. It is not fortuitous that Wagner himself, whose theories were discussed in Italian musical journals to a much greater extent than his operas were heard, became associated with Meyerbeer as the radical representative of 'dramma musicale'. However, the great public success of grand opera came only in the years after unification: the bourgeoisie of the new nation, having finally arrived at the threshold of economic and institutional 'modernity' (with the example and aid of neighbouring France, which remained its principal cultural and political model), adopted the tastes of the July Monarchy with a time-lag of thirty years. Of course, the genre was denied the particular philosophy of history that had supported the first flowering of Parisian grand opera. In spite of its emphasis on spectacle, Italian 'opera-ballo' avoided historico-political reflection or subordinated it to the representation of conflicts between individuals, persisting in a traditional predilection for what Giovanni Morelli has called 'semi-historicity' (or horror mythologie).18

16 There is a Danga Indiana in Act III of Colombo, but after a few bars the monologue of Queen Anacoana is superimposed on it.

17 On the diffusion and cultural function of grand opera in Italy, both imported and indigenous, see Guido Salvetti, 'La Scapigliatura milanese e il teatro d'opera', in 11 melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento. Studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila (Turin, 1977), 567-604; Giovanni Morelli, 'Suicidio e Pazza Gioia: Ponchielli e la poetica nell'Opera Italiana neo-nazional-popolare', in Amilcare Ponchielli 1834-1886. Saggi e ricerche nel 150? anniversario della nascita (Casalmorano, 1984), 171-231; Fabrizio Della Seta, 'L'immagine di Meyerbeer nella critica italiana dell'Ottocento e l'idea di "dramma musicale" ', in L'opera tra Venegia e Parigi, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence, 1988), 29-48; Della Seta, Italia e Francia nell'Ottocento (Turin, 1993), 277ff.; Alessandro Roccatagliati, 'Opera, opera-ballo e "grand opera": commistioni stilistiche e recezione critica nell'Italia teatrale di secondo Ottocento (1860-1870)', in Opera e libretto, 2 (Florence, 1993), 283-349.

18 Morelli, 'Suicidio e Pazza Gioia', 171.

256



The great success of 'opera-ballo' with the public was due to spectacle; according to Fabrizio Della Seta, 'superficial spectacular elements, which in the original conception of grand opera were integrated into the dramatico-musical structure', now became 'privileged as the central element of the performance'.19 As a result, the possibility of exploiting historical settings of opera for patriotic means remained unexplored. Among the more important and firmly established representatives in the Italian repertory we find a few operas - such as Gomes's II Guarany or Verdi's Aida - that were used to 'celebrate' the national identity of Brazil or Egypt, but none that could do the same from an Italian perspective. Around 1890 the 'opera-ballo' was exhausted, even its spectacular element having lost appeal. On the eve of the premiere of Cristoforo Colombo, Verdi, who had done so much for the Italian acquisition of grand opera techniques, let slip a significant comment:

Ah, Franchetti loves a spectacular mise-en-scene? Different from me, who detests them. What is necessary, and nothing more. With the grand mise-en-scene one always ends up doing the same thing ... bass drum and cymbals ... masses of people ... and farewell drama and music!! They become secondary.20

With their strongly weighted political subjects and their overt historico-political debate, Cristoforo Colombo and I Medici represent two extreme and exceptional attempts in the tradition of the genre. Without ignoring the importance of this model, however, one might also suggest that neither Franchetti nor Leoncavallo intended to co-opt the tradition ofgrand opera, or even 'opera-ballo'. Rather, Colombo and I Medici are a paradoxical result of the Italian Wagner reception, a curious representation of the misunderstandings and distortions through which Italians attempted to read Musikdrama in the period after unification. Leoncavallo gave his projected historical trilogy the title Crepusculum: The general title came to me from the final part of Wagner's Tetralogy: I/ crepuscolo degli dei [Gboterdammerung]. For a while I was inclined to borrow from my maestro and my author his entire title, because more than little Wotan, Loge, Donner, etc., the true gods of that grand twilight are for us as Lorenzo de' Medici, Savonarola, Cesare Borgia, Alessandro VI and Niccolo Macchiavelli!!21

It even seems that the young Leoncavallo had dared to announce the project to Wagner himself, whom he met in Bologna in 1876.22 And Franchetti wrote to Illica that if Roldano resembled Hagen, 'so much the better, thus we get away from Iago, Barnaba and Company'.23 Numerous details in both operas contain Wagnerian references, above all to the Romantic operas of the 1840s.

19 Italia e Francia, 280. 20 Letter to Giulio Ricordi, 10 October 1892. Cited from Franco Abbiati, Verdi (Milan, 1959),

IV, 464. 21 Letter to Tonolla (see n. 10). 22 The conversation is referred to in the Appunti van (see n. 13), p. 24. However, serious

doubts have been raised about the reliability of this source, for example, by Julian Budden, 'Primi rapporti fra Leoncavallo e la casa Ricordi: dieci missive finora sconosciute', in Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo (see n. 9), 49-60. 23 Undated letter, possibly spring 1892.

257


Luca Zoppelli

Wagner's reception in Italy sub specie Meyerbeer as an intensification of progressive tendencies already present in Les Huguenots (innovative harmony, complex orches- tration, lack of symmetrical phrases in the vocal writing), and the relative foreignness of the Austro-German instrumental tradition in Italian musical culture, prevented a full understanding of principles based, not so much on the dramatis- ation of song on the basis of the word (a misunderstanding to which Wagner's own theoretical writings also contributed),24 as on the semantically motivated elaboration of motivic references inspired by the model of sonata-form development. Leitmotivic technique was understood (and imitated) in Italy in a reductive manner based on traditional reminiscence and identifying motifs. But the most significant Italian distortion of Wagner,25 apparently owing to a too literal reading of the Master's writings, asserted that the central and distinguishing element of his art lay in its national character. According to Leoncavallo's letter to Tonolla: 'faithful to the maxims of the supreme artist of Bayreuth, I attempted to create a nationalpoem, and I therefore wanted a great feeling of Italian-ness to hover constantly in its musical aura'. The admiration for Wagner as a national artist thus allowed placing a completely authentic Italian music drama beside, and in contrast to, those of the Master. Elsewhere I have defined this as the 'Stelio Effrena syndrome', after the protagonist of Gabriele D'Annunzio's IlFuoco (1894-1900). Effrena, a poet and musician, admires and worships Wagner: in the last scene of the novel, set in Venice in 1883, he is among the composer's pallbearers. At the same time, this homage symbolises a superseding of Wagner, since Effrena plans to erect on the Gianicolo hill in Rome a temple to Italian art analogous and opposed to the one on the 'Bavarian hill' at Bayreuth. According to Effrena:

The work of Richard Wagner is based on the Germanic spirit; in its essence it is purely northern.... His drama is nothing if not the supreme flower of the spirit of a race ... If you imagined his work on the shores of the Mediterranean, among our bright olive trees, among our slender laurels, beneath the glory of Latin skies, it would grow pale and dissolve. ... I announce the advent of an art made new or refreshed, which, by the strong simplicity and sincerity of its lines, by its vigorous grace, by the ardour of its spirits, by the pure potential of its harmonies, will continue and crown the immense ideal edifice of our chosen race.

Laying the first stone on his Festival Theatre, the poet of Siegfried consecrated it to Germanic hopes and victories. May the Teatro d'Apollo, which rises steeply above the Gianicolo, where eagles once descended to deliver auguries, be nothing if not the monumental revelation of the idea towards which our race is led by its genius.26

But before D'Annunzio could elaborate an imaginary 'Mediterranean' mythology, on which the most ambitious operatic undertakings of the early twentieth century could march (from Mascagni to Pizzetti, Franchetti to Montemezzi, Zandonai to

24 See Carl Dahlhaus, 'The Twofold Truth in Wagner's Aesthetics: Nietzsche's Fragment "On Music and Words" ', in his Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 19-39. 25 See Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Tristano, mio Tristano. Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner (Bologna, 1988). 26 Gabriele D'Annunzio, II Fuoco, in Prose di Romanzi, 2nd edn, II (Verona, 1964), 650-1 and 658.

258



Malipiero), the transposition of a Wagnerian ideal to Italy necessarily implied a transition from imaginary and mythological subjects (always considered irreconcilable with the spirit of Italian art) to a historical dimension 'grounded in reality'. According to Leoncavallo's letter to Tonolla:

I wanted, then, to try a genre not yet exploited in the theatre: an epicpoem.... I had therefore to reconcile the idea born in my mind without betraying my convictions as a verista in literature and art, since music - I must confess - is for me nothing other than the mostpoetic andpefect expression of the soul. For inspiration, therefore, I need subjects that are men of flesh and blood like me, who feel and think as human beings.... I thus had to take my epic from history - and not from history as a pretext, as previously used in opera, but virgin history, intact, with its chronicles, its dates, its characters, and the intimate passions and flaws of my heroes.

IMedici and Cristoforo Colombo, therefore, seem to grow out of an intellectual attitude in which a historical subject, while maintaining connections with the grand opera tradition, is refigured as a national mythology of Italian civilisation and its 'heroes'. History rises to the level of a subject with its own dynamic of facts and political signfication.

This is quite new in the context of an operatic convention that Leoncavallo called 'history as pretext', a faSade beneath which not only Italian 'semi-history' but also the more engaged tradition of Parisian grand opera can range. Indeed, if historicity functions in Italian opera only as an interchangeable background for a drama of individuals, whereas in grand opera political and collective elements come to the fore, it also seems - notwithstanding the greater care with local and historical colour and the choice of subjects drawn from modern history - that the historical and political questions debated in grand opera are always obvious allegories of the present.27 The audience of Le Prophete saw the Anabaptists as 'socialists of the sixteenth century', and the events it represented as a description of what could be expected from a victory of modern socialism.28 To be sure, in grand opera the parties involved seem to embody conflicts of ideas,29 but the ideas themselves are certainly not plausible for the historical period represented (e.g., Posa's improbable 'Donnez la liberte!'). Moreover, although it is usually possible to distinguish the oppressed from the oppressors, the former are rarely presented in such a positive way as to justify their reactions and the ensuing violence completely. Rather than put forward precise political opinions, grand opera seems to deprive historical events of their particularity (a reason the action of the Duc d'Albe could be switched to Palermo) and read them as eternal repetitions of the periodic threat to civil order. According to the tradition of the genre, then, 'Politics, no matter of what slant, proves to be a force that intrudes destructively on real domestic-economical life'.30

27 See Anselm Gerhard, Die Verstddterung der Oper. Paris und das Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1992).

28 Ibid., 223. 29 See Sieghart Dohring, 'Meyerbeer - Grand opera als Ideendrama', Lendemains, 31-2 (1983),

11-21. 30 Carl Dahlhaus, 'Die Historie als Oper. Gattungsgeschichte und Werkinterpretation', in his

Vom Musikdrama ;ur Literaturoper (Munich and Mainz, 1989), 58.

259


In Cristoforo Colombo and IMedic, by contrast, the declared purpose is to present a historical event as such, in the reality of its political significance, according to - of course - the particular vision validated by the dominant culture. To be sure, the ultimate goal of this intellectual operation was always to impinge on the present, but this occurred not by means of a transparent allegory that immediately refers to the present, but rather through the reconstruction of a precise historical tableau that manipulates the political vision of a citizen only in so far as it intrudes on his cultural consciousness. To the questions recently posed by Caryl Emerson (following Richard Taruskin), 'Can we expect historical opera to transmit historical truth? ... Do we expect historical drama to tell us something authentic about history?',31 Franchetti and Leoncavallo would certainly have answered in the affirmative. They aspired towards a 'historical verismo',32 derived from the conviction that Italian national music-drama could be created by transplanting to historical subjects the conceptual and philosophical dimension that Wagner had embodied in mythological ones.

2

The mixing together of such far-too-disparate aesthetic premises ('historical verismo'; individuation of philosophical 'ideas'; 'expression of the soul' in 'men of flesh and blood') strongly influences the dramaturgy of these two operas, or, rather, serves to tear them apart. In I Medic and Cristoforo Colombo irreconcilable levels of dramatic discourse coexist, each one expressed by different means. The lack of reciprocal relation between these levels (and in some cases their disjunction) constitutes the dominant feature of the two operas.

The first level, which we might define as 'dramatic' (that involving personal conflicts), pertains only to sections of the operas that - quantitatively speaking - are marginal. This is the only level on which the composers attempted something approaching the building blocks of Wagnerian Musikdrama, in particular the use of a simple leitmotivic technique. In I Medici, the only recurring motifs are those given in Example 1; they become associated with the conspirators, and occur only in scenes involving them. In Cristoforo Colombo the most frequent recurring theme is given in Example 2. It first appears during the duet between Isabella

31 Caryl Emerson, 'La storia in scena. I1 tema di Boris e il pensiero storico di Karamzin, Pushkin e Musorgskij', programme note for Boris Godunov, Venice, Teatro la Fenice (1994), 87.

32 The term is taken from William Ashbrook, 'Alcuni aspetti di Ruggero Leoncavallo librettista', in Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo, 148. Among other rare examples of this tendency, Medio Evo Latino should at least be mentioned, a trilogy by Ettore Panizza (later famous as a conductor) to a text by Illica and performed at Genoa during the 1900 autumn season. Illica (I cite from the Ricordi libretto) wanted 'to reunite an entire epoch - the Middle Ages - in its three most characteristic [historical] moments'. The opera consists of three acts, the first in Italy during the age of the Crusades (c. 1050), the second in France during the age of the Courts of Love (c. 1250), and the third in Spain during the age of Torquemada (c. 1450). These stages mark a line of inexorable decadence, from the 'mysticism of the Crusades' to the 'savagery of religious trials'. Medio Evo Latino had a very limited stage life.

260 Luca Zoppelli



/ , ? f f . .i _ I I . I I 1 \ z @ ? 1 -, J . S i i

affrettando ^

j> i j> A .6

Ex. 1

Larghetto

i; "i .J l

A;i" J Umil ff nJ iniFf>4 vEx. 2 f O -

Ex. 2

3 - l l I

and Columbus, as an emblem of the Grand Idea, of marvellous lands waiting to be discovered. More than a motif capable of development, however, it is a real theme, broad and syntactically complete, on which entire closed numbers or sections of numbers are based: the choral peroration at the close of Act II, the arioso of Anacoana's monologue in Act III, the arioso about brotherhood sung by Columbus in Act IV. Only in one extremely effective instance is it employed with a Wagnerian leitmotif technique: the first four bars recur pianissimo in the brass near the beginning of Act III to comment bitterly on the death of the old Indian killed by Spaniards thirsting for gold. Another motif that Franchetti uses

261


Luca Zoppelli

Largo maestoso J = 63 3

:a" t - I' > - I L I > I $ ' w - I > I ' I

-.>>% > P

Ex. 3 Ex. 3

frequently, and tautologically, often embedded in the Great Idea melody, is associated with Columbus (see Ex. 3); varied, it becomes the theme of a funeral march in the orchestral prelude to the Epilogue. Finally, the initial phrase of Roldano's ballad recurs on occasion as an emblem of his sinister machinations. On the whole, Franchetti's recurrences seem to follow the logic of repeated citation or reminiscence, perhaps varied, more than that of a leitmotif with motivic and semantic elaboration. This logic culminates in the final scene as the dying Columbus deliriously reviews episodes in his life, providing Franchetti with the opportunity to offer a clumsy musical recapitulation of the principal moments of the opera; the effect is more reminiscent of a CD scanner than a counterpart to the sublime retrospective of Siegfried's funeral march that the composer perhaps sought to create.

The second level is 'lyrical', reserved for the characters' intimate expressions and especially the love plot (more extensively developed in I Medici than in Colombo). Here we find a self-conscious return to typical 'Italian' lyricism based on a traditional periodic structure, the principal means by which the 'giovane scuola' pursued a goal of popularising opera among the new, lower-middle-class audience. In his correspondence with Illica during the genesis of Colombo, Franchetti was surprisingly conservative: he insisted on 'well-defined passions', to be idealised through music, and exhorted the librettist not to use uneven verses and not to change the metre too often in lyrical sections.33 Under these restrictions, the sections devoted to the love plot make no use of leitmotivic techniques: on a technical level the autonomy of periodic syntax came into conflict with the idea of a musical discourse based on constant development of motivic nuclei, while on the level of the relationship between a composer and his characters the two systems end up diametrically opposed. If, according to

33 Letter to Illica of 1 September 1889.

262

>

I

I



j-^_ #_ #_ t; #; .j i # j-a I .) P- _

Ex. 4

Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, verismo opera does indeed offer a 'regressive point of view' in which the orchestra - historically increasing in importance - 'echoes and validates the voices', places itself at the same emotive level as the characters and assumes their perspective,34 then there would seem to be no room for a dramaturgical instrument such as the leitmotif, which creates a perspective through which the omniscient composer openly controls the narrative.35 Thus the imperviousness of the 'lyrical' scenes to any kind of motivic recurrence, even if the Wagnerian model might otherwise seem stylistically preponderant. At the moment when Giuliano and Simonetta first meet, for example, Leoncavallo introduces an obviously Tristanesque motif (see Ex. 4); however, he studiously avoids using it again, and it remains an isolated occurrence, without even attaining the status of a knowing intertextual quotation, as happens with the dutifully cited Tristan chord in Puccini's Manon Lescaut (1893).

The third level, which might have functioned as 'background' elsewhere but which predominates here, consists of depicting ambience or local colour, defined either in historical or ethnic terms. Given the idea of reconstructing historical scenes as a goal in itself, with maximum richness of detail, it is perhaps understandable that this level predominates, taking to an extreme a tendency already pronounced in grand opera. Technically this occurs through a proliferation of characteristic stage music, music 'of the period', or at least perceived as such by the audience.36 Indeed, in the two operas considered here, stage music bears the weight of the essential dramaturgical structure, referring to a broad spectrum of widely disparate stylistic allusions. The following Table outlines the structures of the two operas with the stage music in italics:37

34 Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, 'Opera and Verismo: Regressive Points of View and the Artifice of Alienation', this journal, 5 (1993), 43-4.

35 See my L'opera come racconto. Modi narrativi nel teatro musicale dell'Ottocento (Venice, 1994), chapters 3-4.

36 On the status of 'stage music' as 'voice of the character' and its intersection with the parameter of 'register', see L'opera come racconto, chapter 2. The numbers presented as such (with appropriate titles) in the score are printed in bold italics in the table. In all other cases the outlines of closed numbers are immediately recognisable, even if not marked. The majority of these numbers are preceded by a brief introductory 'scena' not indicated in the Table. I have included the term 'scena' only for large and structurally autonomous episodes.

263


Cristoforo Colombo (second version: Milan, 26.12.1892) ACT I

(a) Council Procession (b) Pilgrims' Ballata (c) Roldano's Ballata (Ballata of the 'Rack') (d) Council Procession (e) Appearance of Colombo and the crowd's derision (f) Colombo's monologue and Isabella's Preghiera (g) Duetto Colombo-Isabella

ACT II (a) Preludio e scena (including a reprise of the Pilgrims' Ballata) (b) Coro (the crew's terror) (c) Aria (Colombo) con coro (d) Scena (reprise of the Preludio) and monologue of Colombo (e) Preghiera (Salve regina) and mutiny (f) Scena ('Land, land!') e coro

ACT III (a) Scena e coro (The Indians' grief) (b) Areytos lugubri (c) Scena (the arrival of Anacoana, chorus of old men, reprise of Areytos) (d) Danga indiana (with monologue for Anacoana) (e) Scena, danZa, concertato

ACT IV (a) Scena ed arioso for Colombo (b) Scena e concertato (c) Scena e finale (reprise of Arytos)

EPILOGUE (a) Preludio (b) Scena e duetto Colombo-Guevara (c) Preghiere funebri (d) Delirium and death of Colombo

I Medici ACT I

(a) Preludio e fanfara da caccia (b) Scena, Lorenzo's Arioso, Giuliano's Aria (c) Simonetta's Rispetto38 (d) Simonetta's Ritornello toscano39 (e) Scena e duetto

38 The rispetto is a typical Tuscan variant of a popular lyric form, widespread from the beginning of the fifteenth century. However, the metrical form chosen by Leoncavallo (AABBCCDD) is that of a genre close to it, the strambotto, while the rispetto usually has alternating rhymes with or without a final rhymed couplet. See W. Th. Elwert, Versificajzone italiana dalle origini ai nostrigiorni (Florence, 1989), 148.

9 The metrical form used by Leoncavallo (a5BA) is actually that of the stornello, widespread from the fifteenth century on. Cf. Elwert, Versificaione, 150-51. The error in nomenclature is puzzling, given that Carducci also wrote stornelli, but beyond his generic literary infatuation one should recall that Leoncavallo's philology course at the University of Bologna was very brief.

264 Luca Zoppelli



ACT II (a) Scena e quartetto of the conspirators (b) Lorenzo's Serenata (c) The Song Contest40 (d) Can.one a ballo per coro ('Ben venga maggio')41 (e) Simonetta's Canfone a ballo (f) Duetto Giuliano-Fioretta e Scena finale

ACT III (a) Fioretta's Aria (b) Scena e concertato (c) Duetto Giuliano-Fioretta e Scena finale

ACT IV (a) Religious service (Credo) and murder of Giuliano (b) Oration of Lorenzo

In this veritable supermarket of immediately recognisable cultural icons, tailored to audiences of average education, any coherence in the treatment of various levels is lost. The composers oscillate between attempts at historical restoration, a generic exotic effect and the imposition of a modern, 'authorial' register. Besides the obvious recourse to a modified Gregorian style for the liturgical music, we know that Franchetti was waiting for a 'collection of ProvenSal songs to finish the pilgrims' ballad',42 and that to set 'Ben venga maggio' Leoncavallo used a sixteenth-century balletto by Fabrizio Caroso, transcribed and published by Oscar Chilesotti, without later identifying it as such (the score calls it a 'very ancient Italian dance tune').43

This quest for authenticity - on which Verdi later heaped the most biting sarcasm44 - remains, however, on the surface, as the treatment of 'Ben venga maggio' suggests. Leoncavallo used as his reprise the initial distich (the real reprise) plus the first stanza, writing for this extended reprise an energetic choral dance theme completely lacking in historical character. In the second stanza of the text he introduced Caroso's dance, and in ensuing stanzas he used the initial theme in an entirely modern harmonic context. Lorenzo's gavotte, in addition to being patently anachronistic, is subjected to the same distancing of register, and the same happens

40 The reference to Tannhiuser is obvious. Lorenzo, challenged by two popular singers, improvises here on an interesting kind of ornate declamation: the text is actually taken from 'La Nencia di Barberino' by Lorenzo de' Medici, but the metrical treatment is anything but veristic, as Leoncavallo extracts an octave and a half from non-consecutive verses (1.1-8, X.1-4) and treats them as if they were three strophic quatrains.

41 A ballad by Angelo Poliziano, one of the most celebrated pieces in the history of Italian poetry.

42 Letter to Illica, 3 January 1890. 43 Fabrizio Caroso, Selva Amorosa (Venice, 1600); published by Oscar Chilesotti, one of the

pioneers of Italian musicology, in Dange del secolo XVI, Biblioteca di Rarita Musicali, 1 (Milan, 1883). The dance is reproduced in my 'I Medici e Wagner' (see n. 9), 159. Respighi subsequently used the same collection for his Antiche arie e dange per liuto, though without citing it, pretending instead to have consulted the original tabulature.

44 To Giulio Ricordi, 21 August 1894, in Abbiati, Verdi, IV, 551-2.

265


AREYTOS LUGUBRI (Le donne si seggono attomo al morto. - Dietro di esse si adagiano alcuni indiani. - In disparte contemplano ed ascoltano muti i cacichi e i vecchi)

ni p i RI c- I- rA n I

IJ I r ' Al - - - to, vo -

Mezzi Soprani

Contralti

1&' - I -I Larghetto J=76

fr r m P p IP >-r r r -lan - ti a-qui - le bian- che fen- do - no e gri - gie

rI - 4-1-1 1 ub' - I

~~i~~~~~~

tr rr pT 1- r--- nu - bi e l ciel por ta - no I'a - ni - ma

Han - no i tuo

L;^ rra - n l o

_ j n j j J n j n j i i Ex. 5 Franchetti, Cristoforo Colombo, Act III

,A Sopra 0-

ldp -t 0 -O - -L 4 4



cor - po i ge - mi - tic Ie ne nie

p

il de - so

w~-?a. j, . j,,j .j .j :JJJJJ ..... J-- J J .J J J J J 1 jjj-nrjjj

7. 7 g J. D iJj j la - to suol dl san - - - - gue la - cri - me.

iEx. J 5 (d.J J

Ex. 5 (cont'd.)

to the pilgrims' ballad in Franchetti's opera. On the other hand, Roldano's Ballata del Rack or Simonetta's dance song have no historicising aspirations - their obvious models are, respectively, Nelusko in L'Africaine (with additional help from the Nibelungs and Alvise in La Gioconda) and Isolde's Verklirung. As for folkloristic elements, Simonetta's ritornello harkens back to popular song forms as a reference to immutable 'Italian character', whereas the Indian music of Colombo exploits modal writing, ostinato rhythms and various timbral effects, as in Example 5, where the ostinato accompaniment is given to three-part strings (arco, dorso and pizzicato) and the horns' bells are required to be enclosed in linen bags.

The stage music of course cannot be involved in the leitmotivic web; it is entirely a product of individual character, identified narratively with his or her 'voice' and thus with a point of view often irreconcilable with that of the composer. Moreover, it consists by definition of closed numbers and thus shares in the compositional

267


Luca Zoppelli

difficulty of inserting leitmotifs in a self-sufficient syntactic structure. At most, as in the incipit of Roldano's ballad (which, not by chance, exploits an up-to-date style), it can provide material for a thematic reminiscence in first-level scenes. If we compare this fragmentation of styles with what happens, for example, in Die Meistersinger (for Italian composers the ideal of an historicising music drama devoted to the 'glorification' of national culture), we see that in Wagner the apparent historicity of the language (polyphonically based archaic diatonicism) never interferes with the composer's technique as found elsewhere.45 The fundamental unity of register (which sounds simultaneously 'old' and 'new', like Walther von Stolzing's song) and motivic returns between stage music and non-stage music bears witness to a strong relationship between the 'authorial' world of the composer and that of the characters.46 The listener thus receives an impression of balance, of stylistic coherence, which expresses a continuity between different periods of German history realised aesthetically, and not merely postulated ideologically.

In Cristoforo Colombo and IMedici, then, various levels of dramatic discourse exist side by side without interacting: the quest for historical authenticity, the striving towards dramatic continuity and the search for 'truth' of expression are articulated in fragments, with only occasional moments of contact. At times, attempts to merge them result in dubious effects. The three-level scene in I Medici, in which a dialogue between Giuliano and Fioretta occurs during the preparations for the conspiracy and Simonetta's monologue, arbitrarily superimposes events that could easily be separated in time, creating embarrassing problems of clarity. Fioretta's crucial confession to Giuliano that she is expecting a child by him - the future Pope Clemens VII - gets lost in the general hubbub of the septet. Thus, in the absence of an adequate 'parola scenica', it is literally impossible to understand why Giuliano suddenly becomes so worried in the ensuing duet. Only in Act IV, where the motifs associated with the conspiracy impinge ominously on the course of the religious service, while the text of the Credo underscores the events in progress, are various levels superimposed in a convincing manner. Both operas, having been conceived on the premise that history could constitute the dramatic point of reference, are essentially based on a sequence of stage music numbers: icons offered for the acculturation of the new urban audience, they had not only to create an ambience, but also articulate the structure of the opera and its emblematic oppositions.

The paradoxical result can be gauged by the complex compositional history of Colombo. The progressive cuts to the third and fourth acts, besides redirecting the love plot between Guevara and Princess Iguamota, eliminate completely the scenes in which Columbus and Queen Anacoana confront one another, and thus omit the transition from concealed mortal antagonism to the acceptance of a utopia of humane justice and tolerance, which historical events ultimately proceed to destroy. All this disappears, while the exotic stage music remains untouched (Argetos, dances, choruses), acquiring disproportionate weight and structural importance. The

45 See Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas (Cambridge, 1979), 88-9. 46 See Arthur Groos, 'Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die

Meistersinger', 19th-Century Music, 16 (1992), 21.

268


Cristoforo Colombo and I Medici 269

American scenes in Colombo completely lose their dimension as an encounter (even given the limits within which this could be conceived by a liberal nineteenth-century European intellectual), and are reduced to a purely esoteric curiosity, exalting the Areytos, a colouristic emblem of mourning, as its symbol. Burdening these lamentations with such a structural weight, the dramatic dimension dissolves in the icon of the 'dying Indian', a simplified abstraction from a historic abuse of power.

The dramaturgical incoherence of Cristoforo Colombo and I Medici thus reflects negatively on the attempt to employ a constellation of historical icons as a true and proper subject - as a principal motivation or even a framework for an opera. But the misunderstanding with which Franchetti and Leoncavallo began replicates the general misunderstanding of postunitarian Italian culture, which believed that it could base on history (on myths of national civilisation) the new identity, shared by all, of a modern, liberal European power. The failure of their dramaturgical project could only prefigure that of the larger political undertaking - as is glaringly evident today.

(Translated by Arthur Groos)


« “the twilight of the true gods”: cristoforo colombo, i medici and the construction of italian...

Documents