Axel Körner

Music of the Future: Italian Theatres and the European Experience of Modernity between Unification and World War One

This article challenges the common idea of Italy’s obsession with Italian music, and with Verdi in particular, an image which supports stereotypes of Italians as narrowly focused on their own national culture, mentally sealed off from what is happening outside the peninsula. Starting from an analysis of the frequently rather mixed or even negative reception of Verdi’s music in Italy, the article outlines the general crisis which affected Italian opera after Unification. One of the responses to this crisis was a remarkable internationalization of the repertoire on the Italian stages. Taking music and opera as an example, the article demonstrates the extent to which Italy articulated its experience of modernity and nation building through a transnational exchange of ideas and a generous reception of European culture.

Opera and nation in nineteenth‐century Italy: conceptual and methodological approaches

Abstract The article responds to existing debates between historians and musicologists interested in exploring the connection between culture and politics, patriotism and opera, music and the Risorgimento in nineteenth-century Italy. Scholars in both disciplines tend to make assumptions about the nature of this relationship without investigating its content on the basis of methodologically informed archival research. Starting from three specific examples, the article argues that some of the operas that historians consider to be patriotic in content were not necessarily understood in this way by the protagonists of the Risorgimento. The article goes on to introduce the various contributions to this special issue, linking them to themes that historians and musicologists interested in the connection between opera and the Risorgimento need to explore in order to make this relationship meaningful.

Uncle Tom on the Ballet Stage: Italy's Barbarous America, 1850–1900*

Giacomo Puccini’s Fanciulla del West (1908), which featured the Californian gold fever of 1849, and Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (1859), set in seventeenth-century Boston, are today probably the most famous Italian representations of America on stage. Although very different in character, both operas present American life as a mixture of exoticism, vice, and violence, far from the idea of a society founded on the high principles of the European Enlightenment.1 But it is another stage work that arguably had a more lasting effect on how Italians discussed life in the United States. In 1853 Milan’s Teatro alla Scala staged what was to become one of the greatest success stories in the history of Italian ballet: Bianchi e Neri, Giuseppe Rota’s adaptation of Stowe’s epochal novel of 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.2 Although

The Experience of Time as Crisis. On Croce’s and Benjamin’s Concept of History

In the early decades of the twentieth century the experience of time as crisis became the catalyst for a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between historical materialism and idealism, leading to the rejection of simplistic mechanical concepts of historical time. This reorientation represents a turning point in the history of European ideas, clearly evident in the work of two major thinkers of this period, usually associated with opposing political ideologies: the Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin and the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. Based on a conceptual framework borrowed partly from Reinhart Koselleck, this article explains how the experience of acute crisis led both thinkers to develop a new understanding of historical time, which shows surprising parallels. Both authors used the reorientation in the relationship between idealism and materialism to criticize positivist approaches to the analysis of historical change and to reject deterministic accounts of the future.

The theatre of social change: nobility, opera industry and the politics of culture in Bologna between papal privileges and liberal principles

In Bologna, after Rome the second biggest city of the Papal States, the Teatro Comunale played a major role in the citys cultural self-representation from the eighteenth century. After the Unification of Italy local politicians and the rising middle class used the theatre - together with the famous university, the Liceo musicale and the Pinacoteca - to present Bologna as one of the young nation-states cultural capitals. A study of Bolognas opera house as a social institution highlights social, cultural and political processes and conflicts which marked the transition from the papal regime to the liberal nation-state. Bolognas nobility, which owned the theatres prestigious private boxes, opposed the idea of democratically elected politicians and professional experts determining the fate of their theatre, the theatre which for centuries had provided the preferred backdrop for staging their social status.

Transnational Emotions in Times of Conflict: An Afterword

The afterword reflects on the case studies presented in the book to then outline the potential role of the arts during moments of conflict. Drawing on the example of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grands operas in mid nineteenth-century Europe, Korner draws attention to the place of emotions in establishing transnational subjectivities. Meanwhile, his example also cautions us to stay away from facile conclusions about the emergence of international solidarity.

Beyond Nation States: New Perspectives on the Habsburg Empire:

Starting from a discussion of three new books, the article examines recent developments in Habsburg historiography, which have important implications for the ways historians explain nineteenth-century European history as a whole, and the Empire’s relationship to its many nationalities in particular. Wolfram Siemann’s monumental new biography of Metternich makes a crucial contribution to reassessing the historical context from which the Habsburg monarchy emerged. At the centre of this work is the statesman’s political thought and his dramatic experience of political change between the French Revolution and the aftermath of 1848. Pieter Judson’s history of the Habsburg monarchy exemplifies a substantial new body of research that has shifted attention from the antagonistic relationship between the Empire and its nationalities to the compatibility between a sense of national belonging and imperial loyalty. Both works complement the discussion of hybridity and national indifference during Emperor Franz Joseph’s long reign, which Michaela and Karl Vocelka examine in a new biography.

Italien in Europa und der Welt: Opernpublikum und die Erfahrung gesellschaftlichen Wandels um 1900

Am 10. November 1910 befand sich Giacomo Puccini auf dem Weg zu den Proben fur die erstmalige amerikanische Urauffuhrung einer seiner Opern, namlich von La fanciulla del West in New York.

Verdi and the historians: Politics, passion, and new mezzi di lavoro

Verdi continues to evoke controversy among opera scholars and historians. If under normal circumstances academic disagreement can be reduced to the availability of evidence and questions of methodo...

Masked faces. Verdi, Uncle Tom and the unification of Italy

This article explores Italian images of America during the Risorgimento and the time of Italys unification. At the centre of this investigation are two remarkably painful theatrical representations of life in the New World: Verdis 1859 opera Un ballo in maschera, set in seventeenth-century Boston; and Rotas 1852 ballet Bianchi e neri, based on Harriet Beecher Stowes epic novel Uncle Toms Cabin. Often performed together during the same evening, both works presented Italians with an extremely disturbing image of America, a negation of Italys own cultural values. The article reads these theatrical representations of America within a wider context of Italian debates on the United States. Italians did not always look at life in America as a political, social or constitutional model; and if in the eyes of many Italians the United States became an epitome of modernity later in the nineteenth century, they did not necessarily identify with the particular model of modernity America stood for. The article argues that historians have tended to overlook some of the complexities of Italys image of America.