Italians in Spain

The summer courses at El Escorial, organized by the Complutense University of Madrid, provide an excellent forum for academic teaching and debate on a great variety of subjects. The 2005 course, 'Italian music and musicians in 18th-century Spain: Boccherini, Farinelli and Corselli' (27 June-1 July), under the direction of Emilio Casares and Javier Suárez-Pajares, offered a musicological contribution for just the second time in this forum; it was a considerable success.

Italian influence in Spain became particularly important at the end of the 17th century, largely through the circulation of repertories, performers and singers. This year marks the anniversaries of the celebrated castrato Farinelli and the composers Corselli and Boccherini; this makes it an appropriate occasion to reconsider the importance of the Italian influence. Although this was always acknowledged by Spanish musicology, it was often viewed through the negative veil of nationalism. In fact, as Javier Suárez-Pajares emphasized, Italianism was a socio-cultural stream with important ramifications right up until the 20th century.

There were two main levels of debate during the course. The first concerned the critical revision of nationalist historiography and its influence on the perception of 18th-century music today. This led to discussion of the national identity of the Italian music composed in Spain, the consequences of Italian influence on native genres (tonadilla, zarzuela) and the implications of Italianism in the 19th century. Some of the issues raised included the use of concepts such as modernization, updating, Italianization; the fusion of different styles; and the prejudice against the Italian as something foreign that still prevails in Spanish musicology. On the other hand, Antonio Martín Moreno's paper on the musical relationship between Spain and Italy emphasized the controversies arising in the field of musical thought, while Francesc Bonastre examined the difference in balance between the stile antico and stile moderno indicated by the repertory assembled by Corselli in order to provide music for the Royal Chapel after fire destroyed the Madrid Alcázar in 1734.

Second, there were the papers that sought, through adopting new research techniques and by proposing an alternative paradigm, to go beyond the problems created by the nationalist vision. Álvaro Torrente and José Gosálvez put the musical changes at the beginning of 18th century into a different perspective: Torrente showed how the aria and violin were the main vehicles of change, in almost every aspect: form, metre, texture, instrumentation, tonality and notation; Gosálvez discussed the polemic, arising in the field of philosophy, concerning ancient and modern music in context as part of the appropriate response of the age of the Enlightenment, clearly related to the rest of Europe. Juan José Carreras argued convincingly against the idea of Italianization as a homogenous process, a view stemming from the notion of 'invasion' at the heart of the nationalist historiography. He illustrated his argument by looking at the three different periods in which opera seria was established in Madrid, and he also pointed to the importance of opera (based on Dahlhaus's premise that in opera seria lies the unity of 18th-century music) for the placing of Spanish music in a broader context.

José Máximo Leza continued this deconstruction of the Italian 'invasion' by establishing the difference between the two levels on which Italian music was introduced into Spain: the institutional and the generic. The most striking and rapid aspect as regards genre was the change in musical style; stage productions and the function of spectacle altered much more slowly, and, where change occurred, it was in the public theatre rather than the court opera. Consideration of this question was complemented by Manuel Carlos de Brito's paper, which presented a structural comparison between Spanish and Portuguese approaches to importing Italian opera in two peripheral but quite different systems.

Following Carreras's aim of seeking new ways of integrating Spanish music in the musicological mainstream, Miguel Ángel Marín presented a critical summary of Boccherini research, emphasizing the neglect of Boccherini in Spanish musicology and the need to address this problem. He also proposed the ways in which research into Boccherini's life...