National theater and the age of revolution in Italy

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National theater and the age ofrevolution in ItalyCarlotta Sorba aa University of PaduaPublished online: 17 Jul 2012.

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National theater and the age of revolution in Italy

Carlotta Sorba

University of Padua

Abstract

Inspired by the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Denis Diderot, between1796 and 1799 Italy lived through an intense period of theatrical reform trying todiffuse the concept of ‘national theater’, financed and controlled by publicauthorities. This process resulted in the opening of new theaters and opera houses.During the Restoration period, the same idea found a different political declinationbut with similar results: an even more powerful propagating of public theaters asspaces of urban sociability. The article examines the impact of this process on Italiansociety since the end of the eighteenth century, identifying some specific charactersof the Italian theatrical system in relation to other national cases. The network ofItalian theaters during the early nineteenth century shows seemingly contradictoryelements whose dynamics have to be explained: local aspirations of excellence andparticipation in a national circuit of opera production; market dynamics andcensorship; police control and involvement in political nationalism.

Keywords

Italy, theater, opera, Risorgimento, nationalism, education.

In February 1797, a throng of rowdy spectators gathered around the entrance

of La Scala, waiting to get in: ‘At three o’clock in the afternoon the crowd in

the Piazza della Scala was like a swollen and blocked river that threatened to

overflow its banks and to leave death and destruction in its path’ (Rovani 1868,

tome II: 20). Thus wrote Giuseppe Rovani in his monumental novel about

Milan on the cusp between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Cento

anni, in which he recalled the day upon which there was the performance in

the city’s principal theater of a pantomime that caused a great stir, Francesco

Saverio Salfi’s General Colli in Roma, also known as Il Ballo del Papa.1 The

crowd was highly colourful, very diverse and markedly different from those

usually attending La Scala, drawn to the theater by the opportunity to have free

access to an otherwise exclusive space and to take part in a theatrical event that

was, to say the least, out of the ordinary, since it put on the stage a Pope who in

the last act rallied to the cause of the Revolution and donned the Phrygian cap.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17(4) 2012: 400–413

Journal of Modern Italian StudiesISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online ª 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.690578

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According to a contemporary account, more than 6000 copies of Salfi’s libretto

were in circulation in the city (Bottoni 1990).

What was this play exactly? It was not an opera but a pantomime a grande

spectacle, a highly fashionable genre at that time and not only in Italy, since it

was all the rage both in Paris, on the Boulevard du Temple, and in London in

the licensed and unlicensed theaters alike.2 The play used both mime and music

and referred in a strikingly visual manner to contemporary events, thanks in

large part to the acclaimed stage designer Paolo Landriani, who created parti-

cularly accurate and magnificent scenes and costumes. Across the stage there

processed a motley papal court consisting of cardinals, theologians, monks,

pages and eunuchs, Roman ladies and Swiss guards, all heatedly debating the

terms of a possible peace with France. After having listened at length to the

perfidious and craven advice offered by the courtiers and by General Colli,

who were pressing for open warfare, the Pope instead decided to place his trust

in the judgement of the only sympathetic character to be found on stage, the

General of the Dominicans. The latter urged him to renounce worldly display

and to don the cap of liberty instead, thereby recognizing the French Republic

and the inalienable rights of the people. Performances such as these inaugurated

an unprecedented politicization of the stage, with contemporary events now

having a marked impact upon what was enacted. During the short-lived

republican period there thus existed a militant theater addressing an audience

of ‘citizen-spectators’ (Azzaroni 1985). Indeed, in the 1790s, many European

countries witnessed the irruption of politics on to the stage, a development fully

consistent with a geopolitical framework shaped by the advance of the French

revolutionary armies (Barrell 1998).

Such developments were the immediate consequence of the revolutionary

conjuncture, but also belong to the context of an older debate regarding the

civil and educational role of the theater which had been conducted in and

between Enlightenment milieux in France, Germany and the Scandinavian

countries, and which had also reached Italy. At the heart of this debate stood

the notion of a National Theatre, a term coined by Johann Schlegel – with

reference to the Danish theater in Copenhagen, which had opened in 1748 –

and revived in German dramaturgy by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and latterly

by Friedrich Schiller (Krebs 1985; Zenobi 2009). The key idea involved was

that of not leaving the economic organization and running of the theaters to

impresarios or actors, who tended to degrade it to the status of a mere trade, but

to guarantee some public control over the repertory and the staging. Or, in

today’s terms, the call was for more state and less market in theater scheduling.

This was an idea that in the second half of the eighteenth century was

making considerable headway both in Germany and in Britain, where many

Royal Theatres – in which touring companies sometimes had a base – were

established. This was the case in Norwich and Bath (both in 1768), in

Liverpool (1771), in Manchester (1775) and in Bristol (1778). In France,

through Denis Diderot, and still more through Louis-Sebastien Mercier, the


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idea of educational theater became linked to the theorization of a theater for all,

involving a direct communication with the masses that no other art seemed

able to guarantee. The stage, if renewed and reformed, appeared to offer the

possibility of activating emotional mechanisms common to all men, and not

only to men of letters (Sorba 2009).

If Italian theoretical writings were in step with European thought, the same

could not be said of the life of the theater as a whole. Alfieri evinced in these

years a profound pessimism regarding the state of the theatrical art in Italy:

Among the many things that we in Italy lack . . . there is also the fact of our

not having a theatre. The lethal fact is that, to bring it into being, a prince is

needed . . . I firmly believe that men must learn in the theatre to be free,

strong, generous, transported through true virtue, suffering no violence,

lovers of the fatherland, true knowers of their own rights and in all their

passions ardent, upright and magnanimous . . . a theatre raised in the shadow

of any prince can never be such.3

What strikes us about Alfieri’s reasoning is his conviction that such a situation

was due to the general shortcomings of each and every element, without

exception, of which the theatrical world was composed, not least the audience.

In another, lapidary text from this same period he had maintained that ‘to give

birth to theater in Italy, first of all tragedians and writers of comedy would be

needed, then actors, and then spectators’.4 A very similar critical tone regarding

the lack in Italy of a theatrical civilization abreast of the times may similarly be

found at this time in the writings of the Verri brothers, above all in the pages of

‘Il Caffe’ (Romagnoli 1981). Theater itself, and the conditions governing its

production, formed an integral part of a wide-ranging discourse on the ‘moral,

cultural and political decadence’ of the peninsula that had come to prevail in the

course of the eighteenth century and that was reflected in the entry ‘Italie’ from

the Encyclopedie of Diderot and D’Alembert (Verga 2010). Francesco Saverio

Salfi, who was making a name for himself as the most active Italian theorist of

the Jacobin theater, was already, in 1796, putting forward a coherent pro-

gramme of reforms. The theater, Salfi (1796a: 162) wrote, should be regarded

as ‘the greatest of the public schools’, since it was the only one capable of

‘rendering public instruction a thing of pleasure for the people’.5 In the course of

the following year, a Commissione sui teatri, set up in December 1796, went on to

issue numerous statements and documents inspired by a similar philosophy.6

Where theater reform was concerned, the Cisalpine Republic played a

pioneering role in the peninsula, but in the following years such initiatives

spread to many other zones, diffusing new practices and new ideas regarding

theater organization and attendance which had to do both with the running

and supervision of the theaters and with the broadening of the audience.

Analogous programmes for the reform of the theaters, the performance spaces

and the repertory would be discussed at Rome, Venice, Brescia and Bologna.

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Giuseppe Lattanzi, the author of the Roman project, wrote about it as follows

in 1799:

Not everyone knows how to read and a wise legislator must therefore

identify other means to insinuate himself into the hearts of the People, and

to instruct them. There is no more wide-ranging, easier or more delightful

way of succeeding in that endeavour than the one offered by the National

Theatres. The Theatre is the principal school for the masses. (Lattanzi

1799: 5)

At Venice, Ugo Foscolo himself, in 1797, dedicated a pamphlet to a Manifesto

per l’istituzione di un Teatro civico, that is to say, a stage upon which there would

not be represented ‘wretched comedies or farces but . . . a doctrine of morality

in action’ (Foscolo 1972: 719; see also De Michelis 1979: 225). Meanwhile in

Brescia the provisional government set in motion a complete reorganization of

the theaters inspired by the Jacobin proposals. Luxurious display as regards

internal decor was to be banned, and only texts serving to educate audiences in

the principles of liberty and equality were to be performed.7

The common denominator in all these projects, and avowedly so, was the

idea of a National Theatre that had been given its most complete theoretical

formulation in the German lands, and first and foremost in Lessing and Schiller

(for European realizations, see Dace 1981; Senelick 1991; Ther 2003). In Italy,

the epithet ‘national’ took on the meaning of a theater promoted, administered

and supervised by the public authorities and accessible to the largest possible

public. The first real attempts to apply this notion thus occurred in a productive

system dominated more than was the case in other national contexts by the

unimpeded circulation of impresarios and touring companies. In contrast with

France, but also with England, where the theater system was only liberalized

through a law enacted in 1843, in Italy the opening and running of a theater

was not subject to a rigid system of ‘licences’ or of ‘privileges’ granted by the

authorities, although it had of course to submit to strict police surveillance and

censorship of texts.8 Indeed, the republican proposals also entailed a degree of

liberalization of theater activities. So it was that in Venice the decision was

taken to suppress the traditional calendar permitting the opening of the theaters

only at specific times of the year, whereas in Rome women were for the first

time allowed to play those feminine parts up until then reserved for castrati.

And yet the free market itself was the most immediate target of these proposals,

which were designed to wrest the administration of the theaters ‘from the venal

hands of the impresarios’, as Salfi (1796b: 441) put it, expressing the wish that

all contracts in force in the big Milanese theaters be revoked. Only public

control of the running of the theaters and of the repertory would permit – or

this at any rate was the guiding idea – a theatrical life free of such a source of

‘wheeling and dealing’ (the impresario circuit) and therefore devoted to the

education of an ever larger public. As things turned out, the reformers soon


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came to realize how impractical it was to impose radical measures of this sort,

which would have caused productions, wholly dependent upon the arranging

of free contracts between individual theaters, impresarios and theater managers,

to grind to a halt. A theater supervised by the public authorities and aimed at all

the citizens ought obviously to impose an upper limit on ticket prices, and now

and then to put on performances that were free of charge. In many contexts,

and not only in the Cisalpine Republic, we in fact find the authorities

exercising political control over prices and staging numerous free performances.

All the theorists of the period, from Salfi to Giovanni Antonio Ranza or to

Lattanzi, maintain in their writings that the theaters ought to offer at stipulated

intervals performances for which audiences did not have to pay, and to

distribute tickets in various quarters of the city so as to reach a public that

would normally never set foot in such places.

On this question there is no record of specific legal arrangements but rather

of initiatives taken by individual municipalities or of clauses in the contracts

between the latter and private individuals. Yet, nonetheless, it represents an

important precedent for the granting of access to a sector of the population that

was normally excluded, and of which we know very little in the sources apart

from fleeting references to ‘crowds’ that throng in front of the theaters. Alfieri’s

Bruto, one of the most cherished texts of the period, was performed free of

charge at La Scala in 1796, before a huge audience; and again in 1803 the great

Milanese theater put on a free performance of a play and a ballet.

The unprecedented opening up of the most important theater in the city to

the entire citizenry of course gave rise to a fair number of problems: it stirred

up tricky legal disputes with the owners of boxes, who claimed and obviously

won untrammelled liberty to make use of them; and it also led to a proliferation

of regulations on the part of the authorities running the theaters, and which

ruled that decency, decorum and calmness of demeanour were the charac-

teristic attributes of every true and sober republican. Salfi himself insisted in his

writings on this aspect, indicating amongst the priorities of the reform the

‘need to inspire in the audience the greatest respect for the theater’, as an

indispensable condition for the democratization under way (Bosisio 1990: 197).

Disciplining the new audience was therefore one of the first objectives to be

identified and became one of the avowed aims of the reforms.

The theater reform promoted during these years had a significant territorial

spread, as theaters multiplied beyond the major urban centres. This represented

a genuine novelty, in this case too aimed at extending the potential audience.

It is striking just how sudden the shift in attitude was. Thus, in 1788, the

government in Vienna had dismissed out of hand the possibility of taking

theaters outside the major centres and perhaps even into the rural zones, since

the proliferation of country theaters was deemed to be risky, and might bring

with it ‘the corruption of customs, fomenting idleness and rendering the

inhabitants inclined to a kind of entertainment that was hardly compatible with

their circumstances’ (Bosisio 1990: 135). Yet only ten years later the

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Commissione Teatri della Cisalpina, after having promoted a large-scale survey of

the theaters within its own territory, had come to just the opposite conclusion,

resolving that ‘the executive Authority must guarantee in the capital of every

Department, and in every other commune containing more than 8000

inhabitants, a theater that is the property of the nation and is run by the local

administration’ (Monticini and Alberti, vol. 5: 849). The idea of theater as a

school for the masses also found an echo in the practice of amateurs, which

blossomed in these years with the local creation of groups or theaters defined as

Teatri patriottici (De Michelis 1966; Monaco 1968).9

But there is another aspect to be borne in mind, and one that lent substance

to the idea of the ‘citizen-spectator’. In the writings and proposals that were

elaborated in the course of these few, short years, here as indeed on French

territory, the nub of the question was the direct relationship between extending

the audience and involving it emotionally. In order to carve out a serious civic

role for itself, the theater had then, as far as was feasible, to ‘democratize’ its

access and its public spaces, creating large arenas and theaters for thousands of

spectators, but also to intensify its capacity to engage emotionally, and thereby

to speak to a broader public.

So it was that in Italy too, at the end of the century, the notion of

educational theater as the principal means of inculcating virtue through the

power of the emotions swept through the theatrical world, accompanied by all

the elements characterizing it in other parts of Europe: on the one hand, the

impulse to effect an ‘egalitarian’ renewal of theatrical space and, on the other, a

rethinking of the repertory, to transcend the frivolous banality of the musical

theater, against which Alfieri and the Italian Enlightenment thinkers had often

railed, so as to turn the theater into an unrivalled means of educating the

masses. In this regard, one of the reformers’ most frequent targets was indeed

opera, which was perceived to be the genre most representative of the

aristocratic world, on account of the sumptuousness of the stagings, the

tendency to subordinate poetry to music and the artificial nature of the singing.

Attempts were therefore made to enhance the appeal of prose theater, on the

one hand infusing the tragic genre with a heightened political inspiration, on

the other commenting upon current events in more immediate and popular

forms of drama such as farces and pantomimes.

The patriotic theater was a short-lived experiment: that, at any rate, is how it

has traditionally been perceived in the historiography (see Azzaroni 1985; De

Felice 1958; Montanile 1984; Paglicci Brozzi 1887). Nevertheless it left behind

it an inheritance that deserves reconsideration, especially when we look not so

much at the political aspects, which were swiftly marginalized, as at the

repercussions for the theatrical market. Just as in France during these same years,

so too in Italy the revolutionary theater in fact provided a significant

opportunity for increasing the numbers of theaters and the size of audiences,

and for reinvigorating theatrical life. There was a marked acceleration in the rate

at which Italian urban communities acquired new theaters, and such edifices


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would assume still more importance in the course of the Restoration. The

politicization, and the intensification, of theatrical life, essentially proceeded in

tandem, until the former was abruptly halted in the Napoleonic period, while

the latter continued and even gathered pace in subsequent decades, though

inspired by motives and concerns that were by then quite different.

We may take the measure of this conjoined process by considering two key

indices: on the one hand the very impressive growth at the turn of the century

in the construction of new buildings; on the other the emergence in these same

years of major publishing initiatives dedicated to the theater, testifying to

intense levels of interest, public and private, in everything to do with the stage,

seen as a resource both for education and for entertainment. As far as

construction is concerned, a peculiarity of this particular phase is the fact

somewhat surprising in the light of what we have said so far, that in various

Italian cities a number of private investors – and not only the municipalities –

showed an interest in financing the building of theaters (Sorba 2008). What

spurred them on was probably the flourishing state of the urban land market

occasioned by the reuse of the confiscated plots of the religious orders, but also

a new demand for spectacle and entertainment, explicitly alluded to by many in

this phase. Most of what were now and in the decades to come the largest of

the private Italian theaters were born precisely at the beginning of the

nineteenth century. Milan witnessed some years of almost frenetic building

activity, reminiscent indeed of what was happening in the major European

capitals. Between 1803 and 1815, the Teatro Carcano, the Arena, the Teatro di

Santa Radegonda, the Lentasio and the Teatro Re all opened. In Bologna, the

pace of construction was almost equally frantic: between 1805 and 1814 the

Teatro del Corso, the Arena del Sole and the Contavalli were inaugurated. In

every case these were sizeable theaters, designed to accommodate the most

popular and the most profitable forms of entertainment. Building projects

financed by private investors also went ahead in Trieste (in 1798), in Piacenza

(in 1802), and in Livorno (in 1803).

The second index concerns the sphere of publishing associated with the

theater, which was enriched both by periodicals and by plays or libretti

published in serial form.10 Many telling references to the remarkable liveliness

of the theatrical world, and to the teeming companies and actors, especially in

cultural centres such as Milan and Venice, may also be found in the accounts

given by contemporaries which contain both critical denunciations of the

moral disorder that actors caused and more positive responses to the

opportunities such milieux offered. And we are also given some very vivid

descriptions of the theater mania that seemed to be sweeping the peninsula.

The compiler of Il Teatro moderno applaudito, Angelo Dalmistro, maintained in

July 1797 that Venice had been invaded by theater troupes, some of which

were none too professional. ‘In the rapid shift from a complete ban to the

fullest permission to put on every kind of dramatic performance no matter what

the season . . . ’, wrote Dalmistro, ‘it was almost impossible to combine good

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taste with the swarms of actors, singers and ballerinas who had turned up in

Venice’. The reformers’ initiative had thus ended up giving free rein to the

wandering players, ‘those infamous packs of histrions of every kind, who, raised

in poverty, ignorance and vice, degrade the stage with countless loathsome

follies and obscenities’.11 It was therefore the actual protagonists of this new

phase who show how the ideological and patriotic impulse to create a theater

for all brought in its train all the risks entailed by an unfettered liberalization of

the market.

In Italy, as in France, the new centrality accorded to the theater by Jacobin

politics and propaganda, even if in a pedagogic and ‘national’ (that is, public)

perspective, markedly critical of what were termed the iniquities of the

impresario system, did in the end impart fresh vigour to the theatrical market as

a whole, and hence also to activities meant for public amusement and not solely

for republican instruction.12

It may fairly be said that the age of the ‘citizen-spectator’ was itself very

short-lived, although its effects were more enduring. Reforming activity in

relation to the theaters was restricted to the years between 1797 and 1799 –

those in which the most extreme politicization of the stage was also to be seen –

and ended with the fall of the republics and the brief return of the Austrians.

Already, at the dawn of the new century, it was far rarer to come across

theoretical reflections and pamphlets on the role of the theater akin to those

that had appeared in such numbers but a few years before. In the meantime,

politics moved out of the theaters, which reverted to a form of scheduling less

thrown off balance by current events while at the same time being marked by a

censorship that was imposed with redoubled energy in the Napoleonic period.

What did this phase of effervescence in theatrical life bequeath to the

following period? Some specialists seem to read it as a none too important

parenthesis. Giovanni Pindemonte, a dramatist who was then very much in

fashion, sketched a picture analogous to that outlined by Alfieri twenty years

before. ‘In Italy’, Pindemonte (1827, vol. 2: 279) wrote,

we still do not have true theatres, true actors and true plays, which is as

much as to say that our nation simply has no theatre. . . Italians go to the

theatre just to while away the time, and taking no real interest in what is

enacted on the stage, most of them regard it as a place of fun, amusement

and distraction.

Markedly similar words may also be found in the passage devoted to Italian

theatergoing habits by Madame de Stael in the famous letter of 1816, which in

Italy precipitated the celebrated dispute between classici and romantici: here she

regrets that in the Italian peninsula people only go to the theater to ‘chatter’

with friends, and that spending five hours each day listening to ‘what are called

words in an Italian opera is necessarily bound, for lack of exercise, to blunt a

nation’s intellect’ (Stael-Holstein 1816).


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At this distance, however, things appear in a different light. For we can now

see that many changes had been set in motion and would not be checked;

indeed they would find new reasons for growth under the Restoration, albeit

in a different political climate. Such changes have to do with a number of

different aspects of the world of the theater, which I now briefly summarize.

Spaces

A process of capillary diffusion of theaters across the whole of Italy had begun.

This process would continue in the following fifty years, and it would result in

a theater geography denser by far than that of any other European country

during this period. They were therefore not the egalitarian spaces promoted

during the French period, for the stress was rather upon the hierarchical

division of the internal spaces, invariably with galleries for the lower classes, and

separate entrances to the different parts of the theater. Many such buildings

were Teatri Civici or Teatri Municipali; others were Teatri Sociali, that is to

say ventures funded by a limited company of shareholders who owned their

own private boxes. In their different ways, however, both types were an

expression of the urban communities and of the leading families that headed

them, and only in very exceptional cases were they the property of private

investors in the field of entertainment. Apart from functioning as sites of

sociability and entertainment, these theaters served to embody municipal pride

and to demonstrate how the community was ‘abreast of the times’: they were,

for example, the place to which all foreign visitors to the city might repair each

evening and encounter local notables (Sorba 2001).

The intensified pace of theater construction was due to a notion of the

‘public utility’ of theaters that permeated both the publicity generated by the

sector itself and the policies implemented by governments, and harks back to

the declarations regarding civic and educational theater made in the French

period (Mariti 1989). Now, however, the public virtues for which theater was to

serve as the best possible school were of a different kind: the theaters, we read in

many manuals of theater economy published in this period (Petracchi 1821;

Ritorni 1825; Valle 1823), are closely supervised spheres of public activity,

where Italians might learn how to conduct themselves within a collectivity and

to treat with deference their social superiors. They were spaces of sociability

more easily supervised and surveyed than was the case with circles, associations

and cafes, which is why the Restoration governments, and Austria in particular

(Spaepen 2003), promoted them even in the smaller urban centres.

The audience

Conferring different kinds of dignity upon the different parts of the auditorium,

theater space in the Italian guise permitted a hierarchical structuring of the

public, thereby avoiding the dangers of a promiscuous intermingling of social

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groups. The image of the ‘citizen-spectator’ thus gave way to a more reassuring

fragmentation between aristocratic, bourgeois and plebeian audiences, each

seated or standing in different areas of the theater. During the Restoration

decades the Civic or Social Theatres (often termed ‘Teatri di citta’, or city

theaters, to distinguish them from private, commercial ones) became the

principal public and civic space and owed their existence to communal

subsidies and to the annual fees paid by the box-holders. Takings from

performances represented a very small percentage of the theaters’ overall

income, in part because ticket prices were kept very low, exactly as had been

proposed during the French period, so as to facilitate a broad, almost

continuous level of access, and virtually on a daily basis.

Public civic discourse on the theater in fact extended beyond the actual

space of the theater in the sense that, as we very often read in the newspapers of

the period, it overflowed into the cafes, squares and shops, where lively

comment was passed on the performances, the triumphs or fiascos of the singers

and of the operas staged that evening in the city’s theater. Important circuits for

the popularization of the products of the theater, both in music and in prose,

were the amateur societies (philodramatic societies, philharmonic societies,

brass bands) that multiplied in a capillary fashion throughout the national

territory from the Jacobin period onwards (Carlini 1999).

The stage

The influence, direct or indirect, of the theories and practices celebrated in

1797–99 was certainly less visible now on the stage itself. More particularly, it is

very clear that in Italy there did not occur, or at any rate not until the second

half of the nineteenth century, that flowering of prose writing for the theater,

whether as tragedies or as comedies, that the pro-French theorists had hoped

would put an end to the monopoly held by opera productions and inaugurate a

new era of civic theater. The idea of a National Theatre was integrally bound

up with this perspective, and recurs in, for example, the writings of Gustavo

Modena, the great Mazzinian actor who in the 1830s dreamed, like the

eighteenth-century reformers before him, of egalitarian spaces that were

altogether different from the box theaters, and of tragedies imbued with a civic

impulse.13

Beginning with the ‘Rossini-mania’ of the 1820s, the Restoration decades

witnessed instead the passionate unfolding of the great age of romantic opera,

and hence a renewed impulse to produce and disseminate an ‘artificial’ and

‘unnatural’ genre deemed by Rousseau to be representative of aristocratic

society. Opera during these decades would, however, not lack – even if only

episodically and certainly not in a programmatic fashion – a discursive strand

inspired by civic and political themes.14 Images of, and allusions to, patriotic

and national discourses indubitably permeated texts produced between the

1830s and the 1850s, often focussed upon the counterposing of an oppressed


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people bent upon its own redemption and an oppressor destined soon to be

defeated. Despite the failure of a National Theatre – in the sense that Alfieri or

Pindemonte had understood it – to emerge, late eighteenth-century theories of

performance practice had left an indelible mark, for instance in forms of

performance such as choreographed ballets and pantomimes which would

prove highly successful in the 1810s and 1820s, and which would also

profoundly influence more traditional theatrical forms such as opera. Such

theories ascribed a crucial role to staging, stage design, costumes, special effects

made possible by advances in stagecraft, within the framework of a marked

preoccupation with the visual dimension that calls to mind the eighteenth-

century advocates of theater for all.

If we combine the above elements into a single picture we may say that

the impresario circuits of the Restoration were very effective in diffusing the

same operas throughout the national territory, using the dense network of

urban theaters covering the entire peninsula. Such circuits linked up those

cities that were by tradition the cultural capitals (Milan, Rome, Naples,

Venice), but also the medium-sized and small centres of urban Italy, and

similarly the theaters elsewhere in continental Europe, so as to form a

polycentric framework that was national and international in scale. The

system of Italian opera production thus meant that it was still possible in the

1850s for a Verdi premiere to be performed in Milan, in Venice, in London,

but also in little urban centres such as Rimini. Through this incessant

circulation of new operas the greatest composers of the romantic age made

their mark, their popularity also being bound up with a theater circuit that

had been built up between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth

century. In the theaters of the Restoration, which were municipal through

and through – in their construction, their management and the manner in

which they represented themselves – there circulated a narrative current with

what were in fact precociously national characteristics. The same operas

rapidly came to be performed before different audiences in different states

within the peninsula, thereby constructing an Italy of melodrama long pre-

dating national unification (Sorba 2001).

The circuit’s efficacy depended upon the constant introduction of new

productions, and upon a capacity for penetration which, by comparison with

other cultural markets, for example those for books or for works of art, was

truly exceptional. Can we then say that opera touches and involves a broader

and more diverse public than the traditional audience of the highly educated? It

is difficult, perhaps impossible, to furnish precise data in answer to this

question. Opera was certainly not aimed at the illiterate masses to whom Salfi

or Girolamo Boccalosi presumed to speak (see e.g., Boccalosi 1796), yet many

signs point to an audience much broader than the one that read the novels or

poetry of the period, and this is still more the case if to the performances in city

theaters we add the many forms of popularization of opera through amateur

drama, brass-band associations and puppet theaters. It was no accident that

Carlotta Sorba

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Carlo Tenca, one of the most astute cultural commentators in the Italy of the

1840s, should have urged the more alert men of letters and publishers to

compare their own plight with the far more flourishing state of the theater, and

especially of the music theater. Indeed, in Tenca’s (1846) judgement, the music

theater had, in the course of the past few decades, managed to carve out for

itself a huge, deeply loyal audience and to establish a far closer and more

immediate relationship with it than writers and poets had managed in the case

of their own readerships.

Notes

1 The text Il General Colli in Roma, pantomimo eseguito dal cittadino Le Fevre in Milano hasbeen republished in Salfi (1975), along with a number of other (then highlycelebrated) dramas by the same author, such as the Virginia bresciana and also varioustheoretical essays on the social function of the theater.

2 Pantomime and melodrama represented the most important genres during thedecades at the turn of the eighteenth century, as a more commercial theaters – aimedat an audience that was at any rate potentially broader than it had been in the past –began to emerge. For a general survey of the phenomenon, see, for France, Brunet(2007) and, for Great Britain, Moody (2000); on the genre of pantomime in Italy,see Lombardi (1998).

3 This passage is taken from a discussion in 1784 regarding the lamentable state of theItalian tragic theater between Vittorio Alfieri and the poet and librettist Ranieri de’Calzabigi(Alfieri 1966a: 972).

4 The following year, Alfieri similarly intervened in the debate on the comic theater,with his text Parere sull’arte comica in Italia (Alfieri 1966b: 1095).

5 On Salfi’s trajectory, see Ferrari (2009).6 The Report of the Commissione sui teatri was presented on 1 July 1798, and both

expounded its guiding principles and included a draft proposal for legislation (seeMonticini and Alberti (1917–1927), vol. 5: 848 ff). The Commission’s proceedingshave been analysed in detail in Bosisio (1990).

7 AA.VV, Il Teatro Grande di Brescia. Spazio urbano, forme, istituzioni nella storia diun’istituzione culturale, Brescia 1985.

8 On France, see Hemmings (1994); and on Great Britain, Moody (2000).9 Amongst those who laid the most stress upon the capacity of the theater to promote

political mobilization, one should mention Matteo Galdi (1798).10 The first newspapers specifically dedicated to theater programmes and criticism arose

in the 1820s (the Corriere degli spettacoli italiani in Bologna and the Memorie deglispettacoli in Reggio Emilia; but above all, for its national and international scope, ITeatri in Milan); a number of tentative and short-lived ventures had been launchedduring the precious decade. Among the collections dedicated to the theater, the firstwide-ranging and coherent experiment along these lines was the one published inVenice under the title Il Teatro moderno applaudito ossia Raccolta annuale divisa in dodicimensuali volumi di tragedie, drammi, e farse, a compilation of texts published in Venicebetween 1796 and 1806 by the publisher Antonio Rosa; in this regard, see (Accorsi1997).

11 ‘Il Teatro moderno applaudito’, Venice, July 1797, tome XIII, p. 3 ff.12 A similar course of development was also evident in the German states (see Zenobi

2005).13 The theoretical reflections of the great actor are collected in Modena (1997); for

some comment on his theatrical and political trajectories, see Meldolesi (1971).


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14 Verdi’s Attila exemplifies the complex nature of the relationship betweenRisorgimento nationalism and the theater, and on this topic see the symposiumconvened and co-edited by Helen Greenwald (2009).

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Documents

National theater and the age of revolution in Italy