"Imaginary Imperialism": Goldoni Stages China in 18th Century Italy

While Carlo Goldoni's fame among theatre scholars rests primarily or even solely on his prose comedies, fully one third of his theatrical production was written for the musical stage. ¹ Over a period spanning most of his life, the Venetian dramatist produced eighty librettos for musical works ranging from intermezzi to comic and serious operas. These works articulate Goldoni's social reform project, i.e. his desires and prescriptions for middle class agency, every bit as vigorously as the bourgeois plays. Moreover, the conventions of musical theatre in eighteenth-century Italy permitted Goldoni to extend his ideological program promoting the middle class beyond the usual reach attained by his prose theatre. Brilliantly exploiting the performance practices of comic opera, his privileged musical genre, Goldoni compellingly campaigned for liberal bourgeois values not only in his native Venice, but also world-wide.

Certainly the status of Goldoni's lyric oeuvre in his own time calls for greater scrutiny on the part of theatre scholars. He produced the largest single body of musical dramas in eighteenth-century Europe and effectively shifted the center of Italian comic opera at mid-century from Naples to Venice. His literary and technical innovations on the Neapolitan opera buffa, including the invention of the ensemble finale and the particular operatic form known as the dramma giocoso, proved him a superb reformer of previous traditions of comic opera. ² Most importantly, his works met great audience acclaim. ³ Il filosofo di campagna (1754) enjoyed a clamorous reception, and Giuseppe Ortolani judges the 1760 production of La buona figliuola with Niccolò Piccinni's score the most successful comic opera in Settecento Europe. ⁴ Musicologists have long recognized the importance of Goldoni's lyric production, but a re-examination by literary and cultural historians of what Roman Vlad has tellingly labeled "the submerged Goldoni works" is in order. ⁵

The need to reassess Goldonian musical theatre is further underscored by recent illuminating scholarly investigations into the correlation between popular theatrical entertainments, their ideological content and critical socio-cultural functions. Current analyses of Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, for example, reveal the ways that thematic substance and formal properties coalesce to reflect, produce and/or resolve social conflict. ⁶ Ted Emery's 1990 study Goldoni as Librettist: Theatrical Reform and the Drammi Giocosi constitutes a valuable first phase of this brand of exploration. ⁷ It demonstrates how Goldoni's reform interests, that is, his advocacy of the Venetian bourgeoisie as the linchpins in the formation of an ethically- and financially-sound society, emerge in his comic operatic works. The virtues Goldoni praised in the merchant class included frugality, common sense, industriousness and economic productivity, as well as a keen awareness of the family as the moral anchor of society. When Goldoni juxtaposed these attributes with the negative traits of the declining Venetian nobility—rigidity, backwardness, immoderate stinginess or profligacy—his cherished middle class values took on even greater force. Emery shows how the tension between merchant and noble classes that animates Goldoni's best reform comedies, such as La famiglia dell'antiquario (1748), La locandiera (1752), and I rusteghi (1760), equally empowers his comic operas.

Much more remains to be done, however. Study of Goldoni's musical productions must be both expanded, to include overlooked works, themes and resonances, and deepened, to incorporate performance practices. With respect especially to this second aspect, Goldonian musical dramas must be analyzed on their own terms, and not as artistic products inferior to the standard set by the comedies. ⁸ Ideology and generic conventions operate in tandem in the comic operas, and together determine each work's overall business.

In light of these findings, Goldoni's little-studied dramma giocoso, L'isola disabitata (1757) deserves special attention. In its festive portrayal of the adventures of Dutch sea traders in the China seas, this ostensibly light comic opera patently evidences the author's cultural poetics, championing merchant activity and bourgeois morality against the...