National theater and the age of revolution in Italy

Journal of Modern Italian Studies ISSN: 1354-571X (Print) 1469-9583 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmis20 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy Carlotta Sorba To cite this article: Carlotta Sorba (2012) National theater and the age of revolution in Italy, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 17:4, 400-413, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2012.690578 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.690578 Published online: 17 Jul 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 201 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmis20 Download by: [Universita di Padova] Date: 03 February 2016, At: 00:59 Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17(4) 2012: 400–413 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy Carlotta Sorba Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 University of Padua Abstract Inspired by the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Denis Diderot, between 1796 and 1799 Italy lived through an intense period of theatrical reform trying to diffuse the concept of ‘national theater’, financed and controlled by public authorities. This process resulted in the opening of new theaters and opera houses. During the Restoration period, the same idea found a different political declination but with similar results: an even more powerful propagating of public theaters as spaces of urban sociability. The article examines the impact of this process on Italian society since the end of the eighteenth century, identifying some specific characters of the Italian theatrical system in relation to other national cases. The network of Italian theaters during the early nineteenth century shows seemingly contradictory elements whose dynamics have to be explained: local aspirations of excellence and participation in a national circuit of opera production; market dynamics and censorship; 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 ISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online ª 2012 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.690578 Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy 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 à 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 particularly 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-Sébastien Mercier, the 401 Carlotta Sorba Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 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 Caffè’ (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 Encyclopédie 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 programme 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. 402 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy Giuseppe Lattanzi, the author of the Roman project, wrote about it as follows in 1799: Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 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 403 Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 Carlotta Sorba 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 characteristic 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 404 Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy 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 405 Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 Carlotta Sorba 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 406 Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy 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 Staël 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). 407 Carlotta Sorba 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. Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 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 cafés, 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 408 Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy 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 città’, 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 cafés, 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 409 Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 Carlotta Sorba 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 eighteenthcentury 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 première 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 predating 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 410 National theater and the age of revolution in Italy 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. Downloaded by [Universita di Padova] at 00:59 03 February 2016 Notes 1 The text Il General Colli in Roma, pantomimo eseguito dal cittadino Le Fèvre in Milano has been republished in Salfi (1975), along with a number of other (then highly celebrated) dramas by the same author, such as the Virginia bresciana and also various theoretical essays on the social function of the theater. 2 Pantomime and melodrama represented the most important genres during the decades at the turn of the eighteenth century, as a more commercial theaters – aimed at 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 the Italian 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 (see Monticini and Alberti (1917–1927), vol. 5: 848 ff). The Commission’s proceedings have been analysed in detail in Bosisio (1990). 7 AA.VV, Il Teatro Grande di Brescia. Spazio urbano, forme, istituzioni nella storia di un’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 degli spettacoli in Reggio Emilia; but above all, for its national and international scope, I Teatri in Milan); a number of tentative and short-lived ventures had been launched during the precious decade. Among the collections dedicated to the theater, the first wide-ranging and coherent experiment along these lines was the one published in Venice under the title Il Teatro moderno applaudito ossia Raccolta annuale divisa in dodici mensuali volumi di tragedie, drammi, e farse, a compilation of texts published in Venice between 1796 and 1806 by the publisher Antonio Rosa; in this regard, see (Accorsi 1997). 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). 411 Carlotta Sorba 14 Verdi’s Attila exemplifies the complex nature of the relationship between Risorgimento nationalism and the theater, and on this topic see the symposium convened and co-edited by Helen Greenwald (2009). 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