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Opera and Absolutism in Restoration Italy, 1815-1860Author(s): John A. DavisReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 36, No. 4, Opera and Society: Part II(Spring, 2006), pp. 569-594Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3656345 .Accessed: 22/02/2012 07:36

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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvl:4 (Spring, 200oo6), 569-594.

John A. Davis

Opera and Absolutism in Restoration Italy, I8I5- 1860 Opera played an important part in the lives of urban Ital- ians during the decades that followed the fall of Napoleon's Euro- pean empire and the restoration of the Italian legitimist rulers by the Congress of Vienna (I814/I5). That Italy was building new theaters at an unprecedented rate, as well as restoring and enlarg- ing old ones, at the time may seem surprising, since the period is more generally associated with the reactionary political and cul- tural climate of the legitimist Restorations, devastating epidemics, falling agricultural prices, and prolonged recession. The next dec- ade was to bring even more severe economic challenges.1

Why the theater and its most eagerly followed repertoire, the opera lirica, should have thrived in this otherwise barren period is not immediately evident, though historians often look to the later rise of Italian nationalism to explain opera's growing popularity. In Kimbell's words, "During the Risorgimento opera played a more central part in national life than at any time before or since. When Felice Romani described Donizetti as a patriot of the intellect and the imagination and when Carducci exclaimed of Verdi's early operas 'Oh songs, unforgettable and sacred to anyone born before the '48 (the 1848 uprising),' they were paying the tribute of several generations to a whole repertory of Italian music from Rossini to Verdi. From the theater which was its proper home, this music overflowed into the streets (ground out on barrel organs), into di- vine service (as organ voluntaries), and into soir6es, receptions and other social gatherings grand or modest. It became a kind of folk music." Kimbell described the theater "as a kind of spiritual Tro- jan Horse."2

John A. Davis is Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair of Modern Italian History, University of Con- necticut. He is the author of Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy (New York, 1989); editor of Italy in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 200oo0).

? 2oo6 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.

I Carlotta Sorba, I Teatri. L'Italia del melodrama nell'eta del Risorgimento (Bologna, 200oo), 17- 93. 2 David Kimbell, "Italian Opera since I800o," in Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (eds.), The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (New York, I1996), 450; idem, Italian Opera (New York, 1991), 394.

57o0 JOHN A. DAVIS

Support for Kimball's view appears in some studies on the proliferation of nationalist imagery in the arts of this period. Re- constructing what he calls the "morphology of national dis- course," Banti reveals how the fiction of Alessandro Manzoni, the poetry of Giovanni Berchet, the great historical narrative paintings of Francesco Hayez, and the dramas of the great opera librettists were pervaded by images of oppression and emancipation. Patri- arca submits that even the apparently arid science of statistics pro- vided Italians with opportunities for lamenting present oppression and imagining future emancipation. But contemporary Italian as- pirations for liberty found expression, above all, in the rediscovery of the struggles of the medieval Lombards against the Holy Ro- man emperors-the Oath of Pontida, the Lombard League, and the Battle of Legnano. Tales from the Bible and antiquity filled out the repertoire of enslavement and freedom, in which patriotism equated with filial loyalty, the nation with the family and maternal virtue, and Italy's enemies with defilers of female honor.3

The language and iconography of emancipation infiltrated all forms of cultural production in Italy, even finding echoes on the stage, despite the censors, especially when the rapid collapse of government in the Papal States after the elections of Pius IX in 1846 made revolution appear inevitable. At this point, moderate nationalists like Massimo d'Azeglio were prepared to rely solely on the force of public opinion-described as a "conspiracy in open daylight"-urging the revolutionaries to stay their hands.4

Yet the idea that opera played a significant part in the rise of Italian nationalism has its detractors, not least of whom is Leydi, who claims that the links between nationalism and opera are greatly exaggerated and largely a retrospective invention. Simi- larly, Rosselli argues that attempts to impose nationalist readings on the music or librettos of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Doni- zetti, and Vincenzo Bellini are seriously anachronistic and take too little account of either the declared political views (or indiffer- ences) of the composers or the notoriously conservative political

3 Alberto Banti, La Nazione del Risorgimento (Turin, 1999); Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (New York, 1994); Adrian Lyttelton, "Nationalism and Painting," in Albert Ascoli and Krystyna Von Henneberg (eds.), Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (Oxford, 200oo1), 27- 63. 4 Massimo D'Azeglio, Gli Ultimi Casi di Romagna (1846).

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 571

and cultural tastes of their audiences. Leydi finds little evidence that the music of opera spilled into popular Italian culture, and even less evidence that any Italian operatic composer of this period drew significantly on Italian folk or popular music.5

Mazzini's reservations about Italian music are well known, as are his severe judgments of Rossini and Bellini, even though he was better disposed toward Donizetti. However, in Philosophy of Music (1836), he argued that Italian composers had failed to take up the national mission, although the extent to which Mazzini's ideas may have influenced Giuseppe Verdi remains, as Smart has argued, uncertain. Verdi's endorsement of the Piedmontese mon- archy in the I85os did not endear him to either Mazzini or the democrats.6

Attempts to locate nationalist allusions in Italian opera before 1848 founder on the labile meanings of images and allusions open to many different, even contradictory, interpretations. As nation- alist programs took more explicit political form after the revolu- tions of 1848, they were more likely to divide than to unite Ital- ians. Before 1848, the nationalist position amounted to little more than an often-repeated but vaguely defined yearning for release from foreign (Austrian) rule. Before the revolutions of 1848/49 di- vided nationalists into fiercely opposed conservative, radical, and moderate factions, the idea of Italian emancipation could easily ac- commodate a motley set of strange bedfellows: from the republi- can Mazzini and the federalist Carlo Cataneo to the ex-Mazzinian abbe Vincenzo Gioberti, whose Primacy of the Italians (1843) urged

5 Roberto Leydi, "The Dissemination and Popularization of Opera," in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth (Chicago, 2003), 309-313; John Rosselli, The Italian Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (New York, 1984), esp. 165; Rosselli, "Opera Production 1780-1880," in Bianconi and Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and Its Resources (trans. Lydia Cochrane) (Chi- cago, 1998). 6 Giuseppe Mazzini, "Filosofia della Musica" (1836), in Edizione Nazionale delgi Scritti Edirti ed Inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini (Imola, 19Io), VIII, Part 2, II9-165 (on Rossini, 138-140, 156; on Bellini, 158; on Donizetti, 159-163). On Mazzini, see Mary Ann Smart, "Liberty on (and off) the Barricades: Verdi's Risorgimento Fantasies," in Ascoli and Von Henneberg (eds.), Making and Remaking Italy, II3-115; Sorba, I Teatri, 190-224. On Verdi, see Philip Gossett, "Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in the Risorgimento Opera," Cambridge Opera Journal, I (1990), 41-64; Roger Parker,"Arpa d'or deifatidici vati": The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 184os (Parma, 1997); idem, Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, 1997); William Weber, "Redefining the Status of Opera: London and Leipzig, 180-1848,"Journal ofl Interdis- ciplinary History, XXXVI (2005), 509-534; Sorba, "Musica e nazione: alcuni percorsi di ricerca," in Contemporanea, VI (2003), 393-402.

572 I JOHN A. DAVIS

the pope to form an independent federation of Italian rulers, and Count Cesare Balbo, who was to champion the Piedmontese kings as solely qualified to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Austria, allowing Italy to become a federation of independent rulers. Before 1848, national identities-as Mazzini reluctantly acknowledged-were as much local as Italian, and in 1848, many people expected the existing rulers-including the pope-to lead the struggle for independence. Even some of the rulers who chose not to oppose Austria continued to project themselves as represen- tatives of a national community.

To argue, therefore, that opera was important because of its association with nationalism is to get the formula the wrong way around. The reason why the nationalists wanted to harness opera to their cause was because opera mattered. Why the theater was uniquely important to urban Italians during these years has many answers. In a world where other means of communication~-the press and informal public assembly-were banned, the theater of- fered urban, educated Italians the opportunity to be entertained and to congregate lawfully in a public place. The heavy reliance of the authorities on censors and police to ensure that nothing un- toward might be seen or heard on the stage did not seem to dull the enthusiasm of the audiences, at least initially. Nor did it deter the great Italian maestri-Rossini, Bellini, Saverio Mercadante, and Donizetti-from presenting their works, which met with an eager reception not only in the leading Italian theaters but also in Vienna, Paris, and London during the two decades after the Res- toration. Indeed, during this interval, Italian opera achieved a Eu- ropean primacy that the Italian nationalists of the next generation could only aspire to imitate in politics.

Opera's popularity had powerful aesthetic reasons as well; Italian Romanticism found its most resonant voice in the music and themes of the opera lirica. In fact, opera provided the only op- portunity for new sensibilities in painting, literature, and music to be expressed all together. But historians of the opera have also shown how the primacy of the Italian opera at the time owed much to the leading Italian theaters, which proved capable of meeting the heavy costs of staging these major new productions.7

7 On the problems of definition posed by Romanticism in Italy, see Giovani Carsaniga, "The Age of Romanticism I80oo-70," in Brand and Pertile (eds.), Cambridge History of Italian Literature, 399-449. Roselli, Italian Opera Industry; idem, "Opera Production," 81-164; Gos-

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 573

Italian opera's development as a burgeoning industry was

closely linked to the emergence of a new postfeudal order from the wreck of the Italian Ancien Regime principalities. In the newly constructed principalities, the great metropolitan theaters and their lesser provincial imitators were instrumental in repre- senting the legtimist monarchies that had acquired nationalist trap- pings. By virtue of events both on stage and off, the theaters helped to redefine social relations, rank, and status. This article ex- plores this issue, primarily, but not exclusively, in the context of the largest of the pre-Unification states-the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Naples, which until the late I830s could claim to be the capital of the Italian opera.8

OPERA AND THE POLITICS OF POSTFEUDAL ITALY The years of Na-

poleonic rule in Italy marked important changes in the theater. Historians have long recognized how the court theaters of the eighteenth century contributed to European absolutism's "power of culture." The San Carlo theater in Naples, like other royal the- aters in Italy, was both an extension of the court and, by virtue of its position within the complex of royal palaces in the center of the city, a critical point of contact between the court and the capital.9

After the collapse of the Ancien Regime monarchies, how- ever, the royal theaters, which were undergoing reconstruction and renovation, began to assume many of the functions once per- formed by the court, which had become smaller and more formal. No less formal, the new theaters offered a larger venue for display- ing the royal family in settings of grandeur and luxury. Napoleonic vanities found many imitators, and in their sumptuously refitted theaters, the monarchs of Restoration Italy could regularly display themselves-as well as their family members, ministers, prelates,

sett, "La fine dell'eti borbonica 1838-I860," in II Teatro di San Carlo (Napoli, Guida I987), I, 167-202; Sorba, I Teatri, 179-181; Roselli, "Atristi ed impresario," in Bianconi and Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production, 27-60. 8 For France, see Jane Fulcher, The Nation's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politi- cized Art (New York, 1987). 9 Timothy C. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (New York, 2002); Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), Rome, Naples, et Florence (Paris, 1817); Gaetana Cantone, "I1 teatro del re: dalla corte alla citti," in Franco Carmelo Greco et al. (eds.), II Teatro del Re: II San Carlo da Napoli all'Europa (Naples, I988), 45-77; Greco, "I1 teatro del re: dall'istituzione alla legittimazione," in ibid., 9-33; Franco Piperno, "Dal teatro di San Bartolomeo al teatro di San Carlo," in Raffaele Aiello et al. (eds.), II Teatro di San Carlo (Naples, 1987), I, 63-112.

574 JOHN A. DAVIS

and military officers-amid a public that was a microcosm of the broader "national" community that the Restoration rulers claimed to represent.

No less indicative of social and political change was the rapid expansion of new theaters in the provinces, which had begun the previous century but had intensified during and after the years of French rule. These new theaters often became highly sensitive symbols of newfound regional identities, which they, in turn, helped to define.10

In a world of rapid economic change, the theaters also al- lowed rulers to make their first tentative (and generally unsuccess- ful) steps toward the marketplace. Opera became a business. Its ability to stage costly new productions depended increasingly on the success of its previous ones, which now owed as much to the entrepreneurial as to the aesthetic skills of a new cohort of theatri- cal impressari. Within the sluggish and narrow economic confines of urban Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century, the principal theaters became important sites for entrepreneurial in- vestment, but they also gave employment to sizeable sections of the urban population, which made them significant enclaves of patronage."1

The critical role played by rulers in sustaining and funding the major theaters and in promoting the leading composers during this period is easily overlooked, since the primary focus tends to be on the battles between audiences and authorities, particularly involv- ing censorship. But it is impossible to understand why opera mat- tered in these years without first understanding why the Italian rulers were prepared to devote considerable time, money, and en- ergy to promoting theatrical productions of the quality needed to acquire national and international renown.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM: A SOUTHERN PROFILE Not surprisingly, the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies carried the imprint of the new postfeudal society more deeply than any other Italian principality restored in 1814/15, and Naples became the capital of Italian opera during the first decades of the Restoration. Naples had already been considered the capital of European music in the

10o Luciana Zingarelli, "Teatri nuovi e nuova domanda," in Angelo Massafra (ed.), II Mezzogiorno Pre-unitario. Economia, societh, istituzioni (Bari, 1988), 945-964. II Rosselli, Opera Production, 89-99.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 575

eighteenth century. It was the only Italian capital to boast four music conservatories, and it had a rich patrimony of theaters. The San Carlo theater, however, was the one on which the city's repu- tation came to be based. Built within four years of the accession of the Spanish Infanta Don Carlos in 1734, when the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies finally won its independence, San Carlo was one of the great symbols of the new dynasty's grand ambitions.12

Naples retained its reputation for music until the end of the eighteenth century, but the revolution of 1799 and French occu- pation from 1806 to 1815 marked a period of relative decline-in part because Napoleon was able to lure the star of the Neapolitan repertoire, Giovanni Paisiello, to Paris. The Neapolitan theaters were thoroughly reorganized during the years of French rule. Their moment of glory came after the Restoration, between 1815 and 1838, when Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Mercadante made their names. Thereafter, especially after Donizetti's departure in 1838, economic constraints-among others-hampered their ability to mount successful premiers of significant works. As a result, Na- ples lost its primacy.13

To explain Naples' earlier pre-eminence, it is necessary to take account of the unusual features of the Restoration monarchy in the South. As in the rest of Italy, it was never simply a return to the Ancien Regime. Napoleon's satellite rulers had abolished feu- dalism and established in its place new forms of power modeled on Napoleonic France. After the Restoration, even Pope Pius VII and the king of Piedmont, who firmly rejected the French past, did nothing to dismantle the administrative and financial changes that the French had introduced-for good reason, since the re- stored Italian rulers had inherited a bureaucratic autocracy power- ful beyond the dreams of their predecessors. Gone was the power sharing with the privileged orders of the Ancien Regime. The no- bility had lost its privilege; the powers of the church had de-

12 Rosselli, Italian Opera Industry, 82; Cantone, "I1 teatro del re"; Greco, "I1 teatro del re." 13 Rosselli, Italian Opera Industry, 169-170; idem, "Artisti," 27-30; Gossett, "La fine dell'etd borbonica 1838-1860," 194-202; Giampiero Tintori, "Giampiero Donizetti e Bellini," in Aiello et al. (eds.), II Teatro di San Carlo, I, 141-159; William Ashbrook, Donizetti and His Op- era (New York, 1982); idem, "The Nineteenth Century: Italy," in Parker (ed.), The Oxford Il- lustrated History of Opera (New York, 1994); Herbert Weinstock, Donizetti and the World of Opera in Italy, Paris and Vienna in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, I1963); idem, Rossini: A Biography (New York, I1968).

576 | JOHN A. DAVIS

creased; the debts of the old monarchies had disappeared; and new systems of uniform taxation had taken hold.

Nowhere in the Italy of I8I15 was there greater continuity with the Napoleonic past than in Bourbon Naples. When the Congress of Vienna restored king Ferdinand IV to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in I815, he retook possession of a throne much different from the one that Napoleon's invading armies had forced him to vacate in 1806. The king's advisers were well aware of how the centralized bureaucratic autocracy that the French had estab- lished had strengthened the monarchy, and in 1816, the French re- forms extended to Sicily as well, which lost its ancient privileges as a separate Crown.

Although these changes met with some resentment in Sicily, others viewed them as a mark of modernity in the restored King- dom, which was the oldest and the largest in Italy. With a popula- tion estimated at about 400,000, Naples was still Italy's largest city by far and the fourth largest in Europe. According to Stendhal, it was the only Italian city that deserved to be called a capital. Palermo's population of 120o,ooo000, second only to Naples in the Kingdom, also made it Italy's second-largest city, slightly bigger than papal Rome.14

In 1815, the restored Bourbons avoided any repetition of the Royal Terror and the bloody purges that accompanied the fall of the Jacobin Republic of Naples in 1799. In I8I15, those who had served the former French government, from public officials to army officers, kept theirjobs. The theme of the Restoration in the South was ralliement and unity, as well as freedom from foreign conquest. The restored Bourbon rulers enthusiastically took up the language of "national" monarchy that their French predeces- sors had invented and sought to present themselves as liberators af- ter a decade of foreign military conquest and occupation.

The Restoration rulers' flirtation with the rhetoric of nation- alism was deeply contradictory, since they all remained both polit- ically and diplomatically dependent on Austria. Following the rev- olution in Naples and Sicily in 1820/1, Austrian bayonets put King Ferdinand back on his throne for the third time: "Lets hope this time [he] will manage not to fall off it again," Prince Klemens

14 Stendhal, Rome, Naples, et Florence, as cited in Luciana Di Lernia, "La Visita al San Carlo del Viaggiatore Straniero," in Greco et al. (eds.), II Teatro del Re, 160; Roselli, "Artisti," 27.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 577

von Metternich complained without optimism. Yet although they flatly rejected the demands for constitutional government that had grown with the opposition to Napoleonic autocracy, the Restora- tion rulers understood that the principle of dynastic legitimacy needed to be strengthened by an association with nationalism. Thus did ceremonial display present itself as a way for the new monarchy to underline its modernity and its bonds with the newly discovered national community. What better place was there for it than the theater?1s

The theater offered the new autocratic rulers an opportunity to exhibit and market themselves in a closely monitored, though still ostensibly open, friendly environment. In addition, the hierar- chical organization of the seating helped to articulate and define the new power relations. The tone and style were still over- whelmingly aristocratic, but with a new emphasis on showing the postfeudal nobles in their roles as ministers and army officers, splendidly attired in uniform. This symbolic representation of power became a surrogate for political participation-in the audi- torium as well as on stage. On one hand, it reflected the broader militarization of society that Napoleonic rule had brought to Italy; on the other, it was a constant reminder that the nobility was now to be identified with service, not privilege. It may have been play- acting on a big scale, but it was serious.16

The Romantic works of the new operatic maestri dwelt not only on emancipation but also on virtue, loyalty, sacrifice, duty, and honor, the very themes of the postfeudal order. The presence of censors and police agents maintained the boundaries in the au- dience and guarded against any departure from approved scripts, costumes, and gestures in the performance. But the operatic themes were not the ones that alarmed the rulers; they were pre- cisely the values that authorities eager to pose as symbols of na- tional unity and independence from French rule sought to pro- mote."

Because all of this supervision and display was costly, rulers

15 George T. Romani, The Neapolitan Revolution of 182o-1821 (Evanston, 1950), 80-96. 16 See Giuseppe Montroni, Gli Uomini del Re La nobiltt napoletana nell'Ottocento (Rome, 1999); Sorba, I Teatri, Iio-148. 17 Raffaele De Cesare, La Fine di Un Regno. I. II Regno di Ferdinando II (Rome, I9o09); Rosselli, Italian Opera Industry; idem, "Censorship," in Stanley Sadie (ed.), New Grove Dictio- nary of Opera (London, 1992), IV.

578 JOHN A. DAVIS

and entrepreneurs entered into partnership. Although the royal theaters were funded primarily by the Crown and by the noble families who purchased season tickets for their boxes or stalls, the French rulers had been the first to look for new commercial reve- nues. In I809, Joachim Murat, Napoleon's king of Naples, per- suaded the successful Milanese impresario Domenico Barbaja to come to the city. A barely literate, foul-mouthed, self-made man, Barbaja had made his name and fortune by installing gaming tables and ballrooms in Milan's Scala theater. He used the profits to sub- sidize his ever-more costly operatic productions. He introduced similar ventures in Naples and in Palermo after the Restoration. Barbaja's commercial operations contributed to the pre-eminence of the San Carlo theater until he left Naples in the mid-I830s. Even under his adroit handling, however, commercial revenues met only a portion of the escalating costs of staging major new op- eratic productions.'8

The rulers, however, clearly thought that their money was being well spent. The clearest indication of the political impor- tance that the government attached to the theater was its decision to rebuild and expand San Carlo immediately after a fire destroyed it in 1816. Astonishingly, Barbaja completed the rebuilding in only four months. Stendhal, who was in Naples at the time, saw this speedy reconstruction as a sure sign of the theater's political sig- nificance. He claimed that it won the king of Naples more love and loyalty from his subjects than even a constitution would have. "San Carlo is decidedly a political matter for the Neapolitans whose national pride-shattered by the expedition and death of Joachim Murat-it has restored."'19

THEATRICAL IDENTITIES The opposition to the innovations de- scribed above reveals other reasons why opera mattered during these years. In the revolutionary activity ofJuly 1820, both the San Carlo in Naples and the San Carolino in Palermo were targets of mob violence. On Sunday July 16, "a band of miscreants entered the house of Baron Cuggino [in Palermo], which was used as a gambling casino by a certain Barbaja, as well as the apartment be-

I8 Rosselli, Italian Opera Industry; Ottavio Tiby, II Reale Teatro San Carolino e l'Ottocento Musicale Palermitano (1958), 80-82; Weinstock, Rossini, 47. 19 Stendhal, as quoted in Di Lernia, "La Visita," 160. Joachim Murat was Napoleon's brother- in-law; he ruled Naples from 1808 to 181i5.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 579

low, which was rented by his partner, the impresario Tedeschi, both of whom ran the gaming tables from the profits of which the Theater Royal was now financed: This gaming house was much hated in the city and under the direction of certain gentlemen who had lost at cards, the mob threw everything out on the street, and then set a huge blaze in the Quattro Cantoniere square where all the furniture and fittings went up in flames."20

Two weeks earlier, Barbaja's casino in the San Carlo theater had undergone a similar attack. Unlike in 1789 Paris or 1830 Brussels, however, where events in opera houses arguably started, or at least abetted, revolutions, the instigators of the attacks in Palermo and Naples apparently had no overt political agenda. In Palermo, the immediate pretext was the unhappiness of those "gentlemen who had lost at cards," but behind those resentments may lurk wider issues. The attacks certainly reflected hostility to- ward a foreign contractor (Barbaja) who had acquired a commer- cial operation of considerable importance that had previously be- longed almost exclusively to the civic aristocracy. The resentment was all the greater among the Palermitan elites because of the monarchy's decision to abolish Sicily's jealously preserved autono- mies in 1816; Palermo lost its status as a joint capital and now had to play second fiddle to Naples. The new contractor for the prin- cipal Palermo theater was not only a Milanese speculator but also, to make matters worse, an intimate of the inner circles of the Bourbon court in Naples.21

Barbaja was also under fire from the Neapolitan families that had previously held the contracts that were now his, and the cli- ents of the new gaming house met with the displeasure of the city's conservative interests, particularly the clergy, who opposed the monarchy's endorsement of gambling and late-night debauch- ery. The attacks on the theaters in Naples and Palermo neatly cap- ture the tensions generated by the Restoration monarchy's forays into modernity and its willingness to engage, albeit in limited terms, the marketplace. They illustrate the centrality of the the- aters in the economic and commercial lives of the two cities, where they provided employment for musicians, singers, techni- cians, teachers, costume makers, builders, painters, cleaners, clerks,

20 Tiby, II Reale Teatro San Carolino, 84. 21 Theodore K. Rabb, "Opera, Musicology, and History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVI (200oo5), 321-33o.

580 j JOHN A. DAVIS

and so forth. But most of all, the theaters defined identities. In Pal- ermo, protest at the dilapidated state of the San Carolino theater became a symbol of Sicily's subordination to Naples, and theaters in other parts of the South offered a powerful focus for provincial discontents.

Croce long ago noted that the flood of demands for licenses to open theaters during the late eighteenth century was among the first signs of cultural change in the southern provincial Italy. By the early nineteenth century, virtually every town of any substance enjoyed some form of theatrical season, even if only during Carni- val. Foreign travelers-like the Englishman Keppel Craven who toured southern Italy in I820-noted that no town could be held in any regard unless it could afford a theater season, even in the ab- sence of a permanent theater. As Sorba also emphasized, the mania for building theaters in Restoration Italy went hand in hand with the creation of new administrative hierarchies. Because the new provincial theaters became the repositories of regional and local identities, they participated in the fierce municipal rivalries that Napoleonic reform had left to Italy.22

OPERA LOVERS Not all of the reasons for the prominence of the- ater and opera in Italian public life during these years were politi- cal. Muir makes the point that going to the opera was, first and foremost, a social event throughout all of Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century. The opera season provided the only form of public entertainment available to wealthy and educated Italians. Since the end of the eighteenth century, even meetings in private houses required police permission if more than a dozen people were involved. Gossip and news circulated through taverns and coffee houses, even under the watchful eye of police spies and agents, but polite society tended not to frequent such establish- ments. Church services and major public religious or civic festivi- ties were the only other occasions when large numbers of people could gather.23

The theaters were ranked in a typically Italian hierarchical

22 Richard Craven Keppel, Excursion in the Abruzzi and the Northern Provinces of Naples (London, 1838), II, 6.148-149, 339; Benedetto Croce, I teatri di Napoli dal Rinascimento alla fine del secolo decimottavo (Bari 1947); Sorba, I Teatri, 9I. 23 Edward Muir, "Why Venice? Venetian Society and the Success of Early Opera,"Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVI (2005), 331-354. For the most comprehensive analysis of the social composition of theater audiences, see Sorba, I Teatri, 92-146. For Bologna after Unification, see Axel Korner, "The Theater of Social Change: Nobility, Opera Industry and

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 581

form. At the top were five Teatri di Alto Cartello, followed by an only slightly less distinguished group of Teatri di Cartello. The rep- ertoire of the great theaters came almost exclusively from opera, although most operatic works now included a ballet performance. Only the Teatri di Alto Cartello produced new operatic works, however, and their season ran for practically twelve months. A broad cross-section of the wealthier classes met as often as three evenings a week in these major theaters to dine and play cards while listening to the action on stage, or watching through mirrors placed at the rear of their boxes. Financial constraints meant that the smaller metropolitan theaters and most provincial theaters were open for shorter periods and that they were less able to mount major productions.24

Unlike in France, Britain, and the United States at this time, clubs, associations, libraries, and museums barely existed in Italy. Caglioti showed that before 1848, the government in Naples au- thorized the founding of only a handful of scientific academies and an even smaller number of cultural associations, in which mem- bership was restricted to certain aristocratic circles. Social and cul- tural life was hardly dead, however. Visitors to Naples after the Restoration invariably noted the vitality of private salons, as well as the importance of the theater in the social and cultural lives of the aristocracy and the wealthy classes. Dumas, for example, de- scribed the typical day of a Neapolitan aristocrat as card playing in the morning, carriage riding in the afternoon, dining at the theater in the evening, and returning to the card table for the rest of the night.25

By modern standards, the number of productions at the great metropolitan theaters in Restoration Italy was extraordinarily high. Rosselli calculated that between 1809 and 1844, both the San Carlo and the Teatro Fondo in Naples staged at least Ioo pro- ductions every year (and in 1824/25, as many as 138), and Naples

Politics of Culture in Bologna between Papal Privilege and Liberal Principles,"Journal ofMod- ern Italian Studies, VIII (2003), 341-369. 24 At the time of the Restoration, five Teatri di Alto Cartello were in operation: La Scala (Milan), San Carlo (Naples), the Theater Royal Tordinona (Rome), the Theater Royal (Tu- rin), and La Fenice (Venice). The next tier (Teatri di Cartello) had nineteen: Ancona, Bolo- gna, Florence (2), Genova, Livomo, Lucca, Modena, Naples (3), Palermo, Parma, Pisa, Ravenna, Rome (2), Turin (2), Trieste, and Verona. Tiby, II Reale Teatro San Carolino, 83; Sorba, I Teatri, I46-I47. 25 Alexandre Dumas, II Corricolo (1843), cited in Daniela Luigia Caglioti, Associazionismo e sociabilitd d'elite a Napoli nel XIX secolo (Naples, 1996), 43.

582 JOHN A. DAVIS

had four other major theaters-the Fiorentini, the San Carlino, the Teatro Nuovo, and the San Ferdinando-with their own cal- endars.26

The theater was also the principal locus for the limited num- ber of other cultural activities that were permitted. Before the

I830s, scarcely any written periodicals appeared in Naples (or in the other Italian states), although their numbers began slowly to increase, albeit under the increasingly vigilant eyes of the censors. Since few other topics could be discussed in print, theater reviews took up a disproportionately large amount of space in these publi- cations.27

The accounts carried in the press and even in official govern- ment papers reveal that opera was subject to close and critical pub- lic attention. Every impending premiere met with great anticipa- tion, and the cult of the star was already in full swing. The arrival of new singers or composers was advertised well in advance, the occasion for one of the few forms of public reception permitted in Restoration Italy. All of these stars received escorts to their hotel. Later, their debuts elicited either wild acclamation or noisy hissing and booing, which the press minutely reported.28

Rabb compared nineteenth-century opera to the contem- porary cinema; passions ran so high that he might have added modern spectator sports. Opera audiences divided into clearly identified and often tightly organized factions. One of the most protracted theatrical disturbances occurred not during a revolu- tion, but in 1843/44 when running battles between the rival fans of the two leading ladies interrupted the entire season at the San Carolino in Palermo. The two claques staked out territory in the auditorium and competed to buy up blocks of tickets. One of the ringleaders, Rosolino Pilo, would later play a leading role in the revolutions of 1848: Whether he learned his skills as a political leader from the San Carolino conflicts remains unclear.29

THE OPERA: "A POLITICAL AND MORAL NECESSITY" As sites of fre-

quent public disorder, the theaters endured close police surveil-

26 Rosselli, "Artisti," 47-51; idem, Opera Production, 89-99. 27 De Cesare, La Fine di Un Regno, I27. 28 On opera criticism in England and Germany, see Weber, "Redefining the Status of Op- era." 29 Tiby, II Reale Teatro San Carolino, 190-192.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 583

lance. Yet even the most reactionary rulers knew that no city or state of standing could be without a theater, preferably one with an established international reputation. In the words of Giuseppe Zurlo, the Neapolitan Minister of the Interior, who had been one of the principal architects of the postfeudal monarchy, "Theaters are at once the sign and the cause of civil progress (incivilmento): once merely places for idle curiosity, in a great capital city they have now become a political and moral necessity that keeps the multitude from engaging in more pernicious gatherings, and in Naples in particular, the theater has for many years now brought our city the renown of a great metropolis and hence an important and profitable attraction for foreign visitors too."'3

In addition to bringing acclaim to the monarchy and attract- ing wealthy tourists, the theater had more devious political func- tions. Croce recorded the eighteenth-century rumor that Charles III had built the San Carlo theater to keep the nobility under scru- tiny after dark. In 1821, the Austrian police minister in Milan had a similar purpose in mind when shortly after the discovery of a major conspiracy, he ordered the immediate reopening of the city's theaters, which "attract[ed] to a place open to observation during the hours of darkness a large part of the educated popula- tion." One of his successors commented that La Scala was the key to Austria's control of Milan.31

Censorship went back at least to the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, but the Jesuits had been among the first to appreciate the theater as a medium for transmitting ideas and spiri- tual guidance. During the eighteenth century, ecclesiastical cen- sorship declined, and the secular variety became more selective. The bureaucratic reorganization of the police during the Napole- onic period made censorship both more effective and more inva- sive. After the Restoration, the Church's censorship regained much of its former strength.32

30 Minister di Polizia, I Ripartimento: Busta 152 (2): G. Zurlo, "Rapporto al Parlamento nationale sulla Situazione del Ministero degli Affari Interni" (23.10.1820), Archivio di Stato di Napoli. 31 Rosselli, Italian Opera Industry, 82-83. For Milan, see Bruno Saepen, "'Governare per mezzo dell Scala.' L'Austria e il teatro d'opera a Milano," Contemporanea. Rivista di Storia dell'8oo e del'goo, VI (2003), 593-620. 32 For extensive bibliographies on theater censorship, see Kimbell, Italian Opera; Rosselli, "Censorship"; Davis, "Italy," in RobertJ. Goldstein (ed.), The Warfor the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Westport, 2000), 81-124.

584 I JOHN A. DAVIS

The Restoration rulers' faith in the efficacy of censorship per- mitted the theater to be exploited politically to shape public opin- ion. In a memo written in the early days of the Restoration, the

Neapolitan minister of police argued that, thanks to the French re- form of the state, the authorities had the power to use unprece- dented levels of censorship to extirpate the "indulgence of the past." As a case in point, the police chief of Milan warned in 1821, "Theatrical performances can exercise the strongest impressions on those who watch them, are frequented by every sort of person, and organized by individuals who are eager to win applause and therefore inclined to bow to the tastes and opinions of the multi- tude without being scrupulous about how they may achieve it."33

In the international political climate of Europe during the first decade of the Restoration, the policies of Italy's rulers did not meet with much resistance. In the 1820s, absolutism was the norm; Barbaja's successful composers could move freely between

Naples, Milan, Vienna, and Paris, as well as Rome, without en- countering significantly different political regimes. As Rosselli persuasively pointed out, forms of self-censorship were also at work, deriving, in part, from impresarios' understandable concern to avoid themes that might cause problems with government cen- sors, but also--in Rosselli's view-from the social, political, and aesthetic conservatism of the Italian operatic public.34

With the advent of France's July Monarchy in 1830, the situ- ation began to change; autocracy was no longer the norm. The Italian rulers were severely shaken first by the developments in Paris and then by the uprisings against papal rule in Emilia and the Romagna in 1831 I that the changing political climate in France had inspired. A year later, Mazzini founded Young Italy with an openly insurrectionary program, and in 1833 he attempted to in- vade Savoy. Not surprisingly, the Italian rulers became increas- ingly sensitive, and censorship became more invasive.

The changed international situation made censorship more difficult to apply, for reasons that the Neapolitan case again well illustrates. The accession of the young Ferdinand II in 1830 had

given rise to expectations of a shift toward a more liberal regime, particularly since the new king was the nephew of France's new

33 Davis, "Italy," 87; Giuseppe Berti, Censura e circolazione delle idee nel Veneto della Restaura- zione (Venice I988), 9. 34 Roselli, Italian Opera Industry, 82-83; idem, "Censorship," 57-67.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 585

constitutional monarch, Louis Philippe. With growing signs of economic and commercial expansion and the young king's mar- riage to a popular and beautiful Savoyard princess, hopes rose that the new ruler would imitate his uncle and introduce a constitu- tion. But Ferdinand had no intention of making political conces- sions, and as pressures for change grew, the government instituted increasingly contradictory policies, attempting to combine "lib- eral" economic measures with stricter political and religious cen- sorship. Although the authorities permitted more periodicals to be published (to demonstrate the government's modernity), they now subjected them to even closer surveillance and censorship.35

Following the death of the young king's first wife in child- birth, the situation became even more confused. In 1836, Ferdi- nand unexpectedly married an extremely bigoted and pious Habs- burg archduchess, Maria Teresa. The ecclesiastical censors were the beneficiaries of the new aura of moral rectitude that the Aus- trian queen imposed on the court; they became more influential than their civil counterparts. The unpredictability of the Neapoli- tan censors began to turn the leading composers away from the southern capital. In a letter from Paris to his friend Francesco Flor- imo, Bellini-who was notorious for not disclosing his political views-joked that his new opera I Puritani (1835) would be per- fect for Naples because "it contain[ed] no religion, no nefarious love-affairs, no politics whatsoever."36

Censorship's unpredictability reflected serious conflicts that were becoming apparent in all of the Italian autocracies. In addi- tion to tensions between ecclesiastical and civil censors, diplomatic representatives of foreign powers-especially of the Habsburg monarchy and the pope-regularly objected to what appeared on stage, regardless of how vague the allusions were. Their protests exposed the hollowness of the Italian rulers' pretensions to auton- omy.37

In 1844, the Marchese Ceva Grimaldi, the president of the Council of Ministers in Naples, informed his colleagues that cen- sorship was becoming counterproductive for the monarchy. The

35 Pietro Calh-Ulloa (ed. Giuseppe de Tiberiis), II Regno di Ferdinando II (Naples, 1967), 31-34. 36 Kimbell, Italian Opera, 406. 37 Francesco Predari, I primi vagiti della liberthi in Piemonte (Milan, 1861), 19. Predari's de- scription of censorship in Turin in 1844 is especially detailed and valuable.

586 | JOHN A. DAVIS

government no longer controlled the censors, and the interven- tions of the different clerical and civil censors risked revealing the anarchical reality of what passed for autocracy. The ineffective censorship gave offense to the very body of moderate public opin- ion that the government needed to please.38

Coordinating the censors' many hands had always been a problem. In 1823, Parlermo's police caused a riot when they stopped the performance of an opera at the San Carolino theater on the grounds that the prima donna had substituted a word in the approved script. The theater exploded in a frenzy of catcalls and hisses. The performance came to an end when an agent of the In- terior Ministry got up and denounced the police officers.39

Grimaldi's comments above reveal a new awareness that the monarchies were losing the battle for public opinion. They were no longer marketing themselves through the theater as successfully as they had in the previous decade. Grimaldi's recommendations that censorship be reduced and more sharply focused and that the government actively promote many different forms of cultural ac- tivity looked back to the policies of the early Restoration theater, but in a changed Europe, they were proving more difficult to sus- tain.

WHEN THE BANDS PLAYED ON: OPERA AND THE ITALIAN REVOLU-

TIONS OF 1820/1848 Once revolution became a reality, the rela- tionship between opera and politics changed. The Italian opera houses participated in the nationalist excitement and expectation that swept through Italy with the election of Pope Pius IX in 1846, but after the revolutions, the theaters were, with only a few exceptions, relegated to a marginal role. As in 1820, the press be- came the main instrument of revolutionary propaganda in 1848. Indeed, the revolutions in Italy may well have begun with Pius IX's decision to ease censorship in 1847, which resulted in an un- controllable explosion of the popular press that spilled into the neighboring states.40

38 Ministero di Polizia (Ministero Interno, I Ripartimento) Diversi (1824-25), fascic 2912, Archivio di Stato di Napoli. 39 Tiby, II Reale Teatro San Carolino. 40 Sorba, "I1 Risorgimento in musica: l'opera lirica nei teatri del 1848," in Banti and Roberto Bizzochi (eds.), Immagini della Nazione nell'Italia del Risorgimento (Rome, 2002), I134- 136, 133-156; Parker, Leonora's Last Act, 20-37; Giuseppe Porizo, Le origini della liberthi dela stampa in Italia (1846-1852) (Milan, 1980), 33.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 587

In contrast with the republican experiments in Italy between 1796 and 1799, when the theater had actively promoted republi- can and Jacobin ideas, the democrats did not attempt to use the theaters for revolutionary propaganda either in 182o or 1848. That task fell to the popular press and to public meetings. The theaters tended to remain under the control of the rulers who had granted the constitutions-except, briefly, in Milan, Florence, and Rome when more radical regimes came to power.41

The revolutions led the authorities to state clearly why they had to keep the theaters running. The terms in I820 and in I848 were similar. In 1820, the attack on Barbaja's gaming tables in Palermo also resulted in the destruction of the Green Room of the San Carolino theater. The loss of sets and costumes placed further productions in jeopardy. The authorities in Palermo warned the provisional government in Naples that prolonged closure of the theater was politically dangerous. They tried to reopen it, but the public refused to turn out for productions suffering from a lack of theatrical accoutrements and money. Eventually, the contractor went bankrupt and stopped paying the artists, musicians, singers, and theater employees. The Palermo authorities again appealed to the government in Naples for assistance, but the theater was able to remain open only fitfully. At the end of the year, Cardinal Pietro Gravina, the newly appointed acting Royal Lieutenant General in Palermo, warned the king that the closing of the the- ater "not only add[ed] to the semblance of squalor and decay at a time when [the city] awaited the arrival of a foreign army . .. but also mean[t] that during the evening periods the city [was] in a state of inactivity and idleness, which [was] the cause of many dis- orders and crimes."42

Little is known about the role of the San Carlo theater during the nine months in 1820 when Naples had a constitutional gov- ernment, although Bellini, while a student at the conservatory, composed a patriotic hymn, which he later abjured and for which he went strangely unpunished, even though it was performed. The theater, however, hosted an official celebration of the consti- tution, duly attended by the prince regent and his family suitably decked in the colors of the new government. The Neapolitan the-

41 Davis, "Italy," 93- 42 Tiby, II Reale Teatro San Carolino, I 3I.

588 | JOHN A. DAVIS

aters also staged a number of" Carbonarist" dramas, and held patri- otic rallies during the final months when Naples was awaiting in- vasion by the Austrian army.43

The constitutional regime ended on March 23, 1821, when Marshal Johann Maria Philipp Frimont's troops entered the city. Among the first signs of the royalist triumph was the reopening of the San Carlo theater for what was to be Rossini's final season.

Rossini, who had impatiently sat out the revolution in Rome, re- turned with enthusiasm to resume his labors precisely at the mo- ment when the restored monarchy was mounting a massive purge of all those who had directly or indirectly supported the revolu- tion. Thousands of army officers, public employees, members of the professions, and priests became subject to arrest, imprison- ment, and dismissal. Nonetheless, the band at the San Carlo played on, and the beau monde resumed its seats to demonstrate its loy- alty to the restored monarchy.44

In 1848, the story was much the same. The Italian rulers' con- cessions to constitutional government were designed to stave off the threat of revolution. Although in most cases unsuccessful, these initiatives served to legitimize the provisional governments, which were the result of open revolt only in Venice and Milan. In Naples, Ferdinand II placed cautious conservatives at the head of his limited constitutional government. In Turin, conservative lib- erals like Count Camillo Benso di Cavour had to persuade recalci- trant King Charles Albert that a constitution was the only way to avoid revolution. Even in Venice, Daniele Manin's politically conservative group led the revolt against Austria.45

Ferdinand II was the first Italian ruler to move openly against the revolution. His soldiers fired on the supporters of the constitu- tion as they awaited the opening of the newly elected parliament, resulting in heavy fighting and loss of life in the center of the city-right in front of the San Carlo theater. Naples immediately withdrew from the war against Austria, suspended its constitution,

43 Pietro Colletta, Cenno storico intorno alla rivoluzione napoletana del 182o (Naples, 1848), III, 28.

44 Weinstock, Rossini, 47. 45 Constitutions were granted in Sicily and Naples (January), in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (February), and in Piedmont-Sardinia (March). In Rome, Pius IX agreed to make changes that were never fully enacted. On the revolutions, see David Laven, "The Age of the Restoration," in Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2ooo), 65-73. On Manin, see Paul Ginsborg, Daniel Manin and the Venetian Revolution 1848-9 (New York, 1984).

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 589

and in the months that followed, suppressed revolts in support of the constitution first in the Neapolitan provinces and then in Sic- ily. The Bourbon navy's shelling of Messina won Ferdinand the ti- tle of "King Bomba" in the liberal European press.

Within six weeks of the massacre outside parliament, the San Carlo theater reopened with a production of Verdi's I due Foscari

(I844)-a defiant signal of the monarchy's return to power and the city's return to normal cultural and social life. The decision to allow the production of Verdi's operas, which have a revolution- ary air about them, is difficult to explain. It suggests that the Nea- politan rulers wanted to be seen as leaders of a national monarchy. But the main concern was to keep up appearances.46

In another alarmed report to the government from Sicily in 1848 that illustrates the importance of keeping the theaters in op- eration for the public good, the duke of Terranova, recently ap- pointed director of the San Carolino theater (now renamed the Teatro Bellini), underlined the gravity of the political dangers posed by bankruptcy of the San Carolino theater's contractor because of the revolution: "In all civilized cities, theaters exist and are main- tained in the interest of the government and public morality. The- aters provide a living for many artists, painters, and singers, as well as a mass of other workers, and they are an essential means of edu- cating the public. No matter what the political, moral, or eco- nomic situation, theaters in all parts of the world are created by and maintained by their respective government, which has always been solely responsible for every aspect of their management and their productions."47

Where power remained in the hands of the revolutionaries, however, the importance of the theaters as a site of political debate declined. As in the revolutions of 1820/21, freedom of the press, de jure and de facto, in 1848 provided a much wider forum for political debate, which also moved to the representative assemblies or to the streets and barricades. Indeed, the remarkable quantity and quality of the clandestine-and later legal-papers, political flysheets, and journals that emerged throughout Italy in 1847/48 offers the clearest evidence that Italy had fostered an articulate, al- beit factious, populace, despite censorship and the other efforts to

46 Gossett, "La fine dell'eta borbonica 1838-1860," 181. 47 Tiby, II Reale Teatro San Carolino, 69.

590 JOHN A. DAVIS

channel public opinion through the carefully controlled confines of the theater.48

Operatic choruses and brani provided inspiration for national- ist mobilization, but the theater was an unwieldy instrument for

revolutionary propaganda. As the authorities in Palermo had dis- covered in 1820, opera audiences were not prepared to sacrifice aesthetic sensibilities for political causes. The technical problems of presenting new productions at short notice-not to mention their cost-helped to ensure that the theaters remained under the control of the conservatives who dominated the provisional gov- ernments.49

Not surprisingly, the only radical regime to emerge from the revolutions of 1848 in Italy, the Roman Republic of 1849, chose to celebrate its founding with a performance of Verdi's Battle of Legnano (I1848). Yet, despite the brief popularity of the production, and Verdi's open sympathy with the nationalist cause, reviving the city's habitually lavish theater season proved difficult. The Roman theaters soon closed for financial reasons, which severely discred- ited the republican government well before the start of the French siege that would lead to its overthrow in July.s50

AFTER THE REVOLUTIONS The ambiguities in the relationship be- tween opera and politics became even more evident after the col-

lapse of the revolutions. After 1849, the kingdom of Piedmont- Sardinia was the only Italian state in which constitutional govern- ment, along with freedom of the press and of public assembly, sur- vived. Yet Cavour, who by the early I850s had emerged as the leading figure among the moderate liberals, was far from comfort- able with this situation. He realized that constitutional liberties

were the basis for the new constitutional monarchy, as well as his own power as prime minister, but difficult political negotiations with the king required him to retain leverage over the press and

public opinion. He worked hard to ensure that his enemies-

48 This issue still awaits detailed study, but for an excellent overview, see Franco Della Peruta, "I1 giornalismo dal I847 all'Uniti," in Valerio Castronovo and Nicola Tranfaglia (eds.), La Stampa Italiana del Risorgimento (Bari, 1976), 519; Porizo, Le origini della libertd, 33. 49 Sorba, I Teatri, 209-225; Smart, "Liberty On (and Off) the Barricades," 103-115; Par- ker, "Arpa d'or deifatidici vati": The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 184os (Parma, I997), 37. 50 Philippe Boutry, "La Restaurazione 1814-1848," in Giorgio Ciucci (ed.), Roma Moderna (Bari, 200ooo), 378-413-

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 59I

especially Mazzini and the democrats-would obtain only limited access to the press.

In that context, Cavour's ability to win Verdi's endorsement of Victor Emanuel II as the nationalist head of state reflected the effectiveness of the cultural offensive mounted in these years by the House of Savoy when Cavour was also using public funds to promote a government press and to support intellectuals, artists, and composers who rallied to the House of Savoy. So far as theater was concerned, however, the regulations remained extremely contradictory, even in liberal Piedmont. Under the terms of the constitution, the theater enjoyed freedoms similar to those of the press, but the censors who had served the government before 1848 retained their positions. A ministerial decree of 1852 seemed to es- tablish new criteria for theater censorship, urging that "control... be guided by moral rather than political criteria ... [since] a genu- inely liberal government will win greater support by demonstrat- ing that it is based on foundations that are too strong to be shaken by the radical aspirations of a play." However, this lofty ideal was compromised by a willingness to censor anything in the "popular theaters and their repetoires" . . . that might incite sympathy for crime or hatred for the punitive actions of the State." In 1856, the government banned all plays in foreign languages and in dialect, and in 1857, it circulated a list of 250 proscribed plays, most of which were anticlerical, although some of them celebrated Giuseppe Garibaldi as a hero. Giambattista B. Niccolini's play, Ar- nold of Brescia-no stranger to censors before 1848 throughout It- aly-was banned once again because "it [was] not permissible to authorize works that set on the stage scenes that depict Popes, Priests and August, Sacred, and Holy Rites."51

Unlike the press, the Piedmontese theaters still came under a system of dual censorship-that of the General Directorate of Theaters (1849), under the pretense of "safeguarding" their free- dom, and that of the police, which regulated public assembly. All theatrical performances required official permission; scripts had to be submitted in advance to ensure that they did not contravene censorship or encourage public disorder. The police were present

5I See Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo 1854-1861 (Bari, 1984), 399, 410o, 423; Denis Mack Smith, Cavour (London, 1985), 129-144; Vittorio Emanuele Imperatori, "Teatri e libertL. La censura in Italia del secolo XIX," Nuova Antologia, CLVII (1912), 318-328.

592 JOHN A. DAVIS

at all performances, empowered to suspend any production or performer that posed any such threat.52

In the states that reverted to reactionary absolutism after 1849, censorship escalated to unprecedented levels. Strangely, however, the theaters continued to produce the works of Verdi, whose asso- ciation with the nationalist cause, and with the revolutionary events of 1849 in Rome, was now beyond question.53

Gossett and Rosselli observed that in Naples, although the San Carlo's capacity to premiere major new works had declined, performances and general attendance did not. Contemporary ac- counts leave little doubt that even in the depressed and repressed political climate that followed the collapse of the revolutions, the theater, became the principal, if not the only, focus of urban social life. Writing long after the event, de Cesare recalled, however, that changes had occurred. For one thing, Neapolitan audiences shifted their loyalties away from the San Carlo-possibly as a result of shoddy productions or too much censorship-and for another, Neapolitans of all social ranks were constantly under police sur- veillance. The liberals were in exile or in jail, and King Ferdi- nand II-or Bomba, as he was called-made Naples synonymous with absolutism and reaction throughout Europe-a political anachronism in the age of the liberal revolutions. In a political pamphlet, Gladstone famously denounced the Neapolitan rulers as the "negation of God set up as a system of government."54

Censorship embarked on its own theater of the absurd, assid- uously excising every allusion that might be interpreted as a criti- cism of authority, an endorsement of rebellion, or a religious or moral offense, and mangling plots and libretti. In 1855, for exam- ple, censors retitled Verdi's Traviata (1 853) as Violetta and Rigoletto (1851) as Lionello before the San Carlo could stage them. Only Verdi's Trovatore (1853) was able to retain its original title. The hit of the season was Giacomo Meyerbeer's Roberto il Diavolo (1831 ), but it had to carry the title of Robert of Picardy because the religious censors objected to the devil reference. Furthermore, since Rob- ert of Normandy was an ancestor of the ruling dynasty, his title had to be switched to Picardy.55

52 For a fuller description of this regulation, see Davis, "Italy," 81-124. 53 Sorba, "I1i Risorgimento in musica"; Gossett, "La fine dell'eti borbonica I838-I860." 54 De Cesare, La Fine di Un Regno; William Gladstone, Two Letters to the Earl ofAberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government (London, 1851). 55 De Cesare, La Fine di Un Regno, 152-153.

OPERA AND ABSOLUTISM 593

These changes do not seem to have affected the success of the performances. In San Carlo's next season, however, poor produc- tions earned hostile receptions for long-time favorites like Donizetti's Anne Boleyn (1830) and Adelia (1841), as well as for Bellini's I Puritani (1835). Yet, the production of Trovatore, for which Verdi returned to Naples, was a wild success, inciting a fierce battle in the press over the talents of its leading lady. In 1858, a disastrous production of Bellini's Sonnambula (1831 ) preceded a celebrated one of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (1840), though under the title of Elisa Fosco to avoid upsetting the papal censors-the Borgias being a papal family (for unknown reasons, Elisa Fosco un- derwent a further transmutation at the hands of the censors to be- come Elisa Tosco).

But ultimately the failures and complications may have out- weighed the successes. The Neapolitan impresario Vincenzo Torelli could not persuade Verdi to write a new work (King Lear) for the San Carlo in 1856 because of the spectre of censorship, and after visiting Naples in January 1858, Verdi decided to abort a pro- duction of Un ballo in maschera (renamed Gustav III) because of censorship issues. De Cesare claimed that audience frustration with repeated failures and the obtuse intervention of the censors lay behind the revival of the other Neapolitan theaters during these years. In 1856, the Teatro Fondo, which had become mainly a prose theater, revived its music repertoire. Its leading prose ac- tress, Adelaide Ristori, became the favorite of the Neapolitan public. In 1858, Torelli wrote of her unparalleled success in the history of the Neapolitan theater. Both the Teatro Fiorentini and the San Carlino also won new popularity by presenting a varied repertory of melodramas and comedies with extremely popular actors.56

De Cesare also described the revival of theatrical productions that had a direct and explicit political message, albeit for carefully selected audiences in carefully selected venues. The closing years of the Bourbon kingdom saw a significant number of plays written and performed by members of the city's aristocratic elite for in- vited audiences in the houses of the nobility. The authors of these works enjoyed a freedom of allusion unknown to professional writers. Many of the performances took place in the presence of

56 Gossett, "La fine dell'etd borbonica 1838--I1860," I96-202; De Cesare, La Fine di Un Regno, 155-156, 159-164.

594 | JOHN A. DAVIS

the royal family-for example, Alda, La Stella, by Duke Proto Cicconi, which took place at the palace of the king's cousin, Don

Leopoldo di Borbone, in 1858. Duchess Ravaschieri took the leading role, with other nobles and courtiers in support; represen- tatives of the city's elite, including Baron Adolfo Rothschild, sat in the audience. The play's principal message-thinly disguised in al-

legory-was that Ferdinand II should ally with the king of Pied- mont to effect Italy's emancipation from the Austrian yoke.57

As late as 1858, a significant body of opinion in Naples still be- lieved that the king could embrace the national project in a way that would ensure the survival of an independent state within a broader Italian confederation of rulers. However, this position could no longer find a voice on the public stage-as it had in the

early days of the Restoration-only in the confines of private per- formance by and for the aristocracy. After the revolutions of 1848, nationalist politics and theater did not mix anywhere in Italy, not even in liberal Piedmont. But whether this situation made opera matter less than before is difficult to say. The fact that the theaters continued to draw regular audiences, regardless of censorship, would seem a sure indication that politics-at least not in the nar- row, nationalist sense-was not the primary reason why opera mattered.

Korner claimed that continuities in theater management, au- dience composition, and repertoire choice were important indica- tors of the deeply conservative features of the Italian political revo- lution. After 1860, the triumphant Italian bourgeoisie everywhere celebrated its victories by asserting control over the municipal the- aters and by building railway stations and town halls. Yet liberal It- aly's new bourgeois theaters carefully mimicked the aristocratic exclusiveness and taste of their absolutist predecessors. Opera con- tinued to matter, but, paradoxically, its horizons also became more

provincial without ever regaining the brief cosmopolitanism of the Restoration's early years.58

57 De Cesare, La Fine di Un Regno, 166-168. 58 K6rner, "Theater of Social Change"; Banti, Storia della Borghesia Italiana (Rome, 1996).