L'Opera en France et en Italie (1791-1925): Une Scene privilegiee d'echanges litteraires et musicaux. Actes du colloque franco-italien tenu a l'Academie musicale de Villecroze (16-18 octobre 1997) (review)

The present volume, the third in a series of conference proceedings dedicated to the relationship between French and Italian music, focuses on the relationship between French and Italian opera from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, a 'long century' that allows for the exploration of roots and ramifications. The contributions cover a wide variety of topics, including musical style, form, versification, dramaturgy, aesthetics, exoticism, ideology, reception history, and copyright. Of the more popular recent scholarly trends, only gender study is absent. The presentations, mostly by leading scholars, are grouped into two parts: 'Diversity of the Exchanges', with contributions by Andrea Fabiano, François Lévy, Hervé Lacombe, Fiamma Nicolodi, Steven Huebner, Gérard Loubinoux, and Danilo Villa; and 'About Verdi', with contributions by Damien Colas, Pierluigi Petrobelli, Gilles de Van, Anik Devriès-Lesure, and Karen Henson. They have been variably expanded for publication, in one case to more than thirty pages.

The editor's introduction skilfully relates the contributions to one another in a broad historical context, but specific connections among them are largely left to the reader to make. To note but a single example, the subject of copyright, which lies at the heart of two articles, is neither mentioned in the introduction nor cross-referenced in the articles themselves, nor is it traceable through either of the indexes (one for names but not terms, the other for works). Still, the variety and originality of the topics and the overall scholarly thoroughness make this a valuable collection of essays. Unfortunately, this review can touch on only some of them.

Intrigued by the opinion of eighteenth-century French critics that Italian operas of this time were largely based on French models, Andrea Fabiano in the opening essay sets out to examine this relationship, focusing on works of the comic and semiseria types from the period of the French Revolution. He shows that Italian composers' frequent appropriation of French librettos (usually without acknowledgement, permission, and financial reward for the French librettists) caused concern among French authors for their rights and eventually led to the copyright laws of 1791 forbidding any production in France of a living author's work without his written consent. It seems that these laws (a very general summary of which is given in n. 4) did not stop Italian composers from appropriating French models, but the reader is left wondering how the practice could continue despite additional petitions and their subsequent discussions in the Assemblée nationale.

Fabiano draws on the writings of Giuseppe Carpani to illustrate the popularity of French comedy in Italy and its function as a model for structural reform of opera buffa. While Carpani's account suggests the superiority of French dramaturgy, Fabiano passes over the aesthetic issues and concentrates on description. The centre of his investigation is Camille (libretto by Benoît-Joseph Marsollier, music by Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac) and its transformation into Camilla (translation by Carpani, music by Ferdinando Paër). Fabiano outlines dramaturgical differences between Camille and Camilla (the distribution of the arias, pantomime to express what words cannot, and delayed introduction of some of the protagonists), but the relative force of French and Italian aesthetics in Camilla remains unclear in his treatment. Such larger matters as the interaction between dramaturgy, aesthetics, and copyright and the establishment of mechanisms to guide this interaction await further study, for which Fabiano has provided an excellent foundation.

The subject of copyright resurfaces in the second part of the book, in Anik Devriès-Lesure's essay on the...