Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

Italian opera was one of the dramatic genres that most directly responded to the epoch-changing social, political, and cultural events in the American Colonies during the second half of the eighteenth century. News from overseas flooded into European gazettes and newspapers, arousing as much enthusiasm as harsh criticism. They carried along ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, as well as new types of characters that found their way onto operatic stages: the good-hearted Native, the peaceful Quaker, the emancipated woman. This had far-reaching effects on the ways operas challenged established social structures and institutions, even when America was not directly evoked in the subject of librettos. Given the pervasive impact that American events had on European culture of the time, it is surprising that music historians have paid such scant attention to the ramifications for opera.

Pierpaolo Polzonetti's monograph fills this lacuna and provides a welcome contribution to our understanding of the genre. Through an impressive array of philosophical texts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and memoirs, all tied to close readings of musical sources, his study analyzes the burgeoning influence of American subjects in eighteenth-century Italian opera and the relationship to the development of several different strands of thought in Enlightenment culture. The book covers several geographical areas inside and outside of Italy, and it focuses on a period of forty years: from 1750, when Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi's Il mondo della luna received its premiere in Venice, to 1790, the year Lorenzo Da Ponte turned Giuseppe Palomba and Pietro Guglielmi's La quakera spiritosa into a pasticcio for Vienna. The first of these, in fact, antedates the earliest entry in Polzonetti's "core repertory" (p. 4), I napoletani in America (libretto by Francesco Cerlone, music by Niccolo Piccinni), by eighteen years. Il mondo della luna introduces the profound impact of contemporary American events on European culture at large. In Haydn's 1777 version of the opera for the relatively conservative court of Eszterháza, the Moon, a topsy-turvy counterpart of the Earth, becomes a metaphor for America, serving the court's attempt to align itself with the enlightened reformism promoted in Vienna. The terminus post quem non of Polzonetti's work shows that the European fascination with America as "the land of hope and opportunity" (p. 15) gradually came to an end when the French Revolution violently shook the political foundations of Europe. As censorship became stricter, characters like Vertunna, the independent, gun-toting female protagonist of La quakera spiritosa, were looked upon with increasing discomfort, and subjects dealing with revolutionary topics were considered subversive. As Polzonetti argues (pp. 298-307), when Da Ponte made a pasticcio out of Palomba's libretto for Vienna, he toned down the stereotypical features of the main character and tempered the gender role inversion that dominated the original work.

While Polzonetti's forty-year time-span coincides with the golden age of opera buffa, his discussion of works on American subjects begins with an opera seria—Carl Heinrich Graun's Montezuma on a libretto by Frederick the Great, King of Prussia (Berlin, 1755). Although Montezuma does not concern itself specifically with North America, it serves as an introduction to the web of discourses that joined the European interest in the New World with the growing cultural influence of Enlightenment.

If opera seria provided a platform for the ideological agenda of Frederick's enlightened absolutism in Prussia, opera buffa became the principal vehicle for disseminating the view of America as a place of political utopias in Italy. Five out of the book's eight chapters present case studies showing how the European reception of the political situation overseas shifted over time towards an increasing awareness of its potential impact in the Old World. The first comic opera on an American subject was Niccolò Piccinni's I napoletani in America, on a libretto by Francesco Cerlone (Naples, 1768), which was...