America in Italy: The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763–1865 by Axel Körner

Author:Axel Körner [Körner, Axel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Political Science, History & Theory, World, General, Philosophy, Political
ISBN: 9780691164854
Google: CGyYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2017-06-13T19:35:05+00:00

Turning Gustavo into Riccardo

Although audiences and critics accepted Verdi’s music as an authentic description of “creoles,” “negroes,” and the colonial administration of New England, the history of the plot’s evolution from Gustavo to the masked ball in Boston needs further explanation, not least because the changes to the composer’s original plan are frequently used to present Verdi as the political and aesthetic victim of his vicious censors. As mentioned earlier, Verdi’s opera was based on Scribe’s French libretto about the assassination of Gustaf III, to be performed at the San Carlo in Naples. When negotiations with the censors reached an impasse and Verdi was no longer prepared to make further compromises on the libretto, the composer set out to seek a new home for his work. In the meantime Verdi had also realized that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where his new opera was meant to be premiered, did not yet apply the recent international conventions on authorship. Writing an opera for Naples therefore might have resulted in an important loss of royalty payments. Rome and its social and political elites were particularly keen on spectacular works of opera. The Apollo’s powerful impresario Vincenzo Jacovacci promised Verdi to get his libretto accepted in no time at all. But the papal authorities likewise demanded changes to the work, prompting the decision to move the location of the drama across the Atlantic, to Massachusetts.108

Scribe had called his work on Gustav III an opéra historique, with the aim of putting on stage a historical event in as much detail as possible. This was exactly what Verdi did not want to do. As he explained in a letter to Vincenzo Torelli, he considered such an approach “too conventional.”109 After I Lombardi, Giovanna d’Arco, and La battaglia di Legnano, or most recently Les vêpres siciliennes, Verdi was not much interested in writing another opera on a specific historical-political event. Investigating human relationships, depicting personal character and psychology with the help of music, was what had interested Verdi since the 1850s. There were clear traces of this in Macbeth, but with Il trovatore and La traviata the psychology of his main characters and the relationship between them became the main aspect of his work. Through extracts in Carlo Rusconi’s translation of Shakespeare, Verdi knew about August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. We also know that he read Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, which discussed the same themes treated in the works of the Schlegel brothers, albeit in more accessible form. These readings helped Verdi to develop his own concept of dramatic unity and theatrical effect.110 While he continued to write operas set in the past, history itself disappeared into the background, a change of emphasis for which he was severely criticized by some contemporary observers.111 Meanwhile, a dehistoricized plot seemed appropriate for an opera set in America. As demonstrated in chapter 1, many Italians thought of the United States as a country untainted by history, living the experience of modern time without the constrictions of the past.

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