Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution by Pierpaolo Polzonetti (review)

Eighteenth-century public microscope demonstrations—popular as much for titillating amusement as for their educative purpose—often displayed the projected image of a humble flea, blown up to monstrous proportions (Peter Heering, ‘Fleas Like Elephants, Lice Like Bears: 18th-Century Solar Microscope Projections between Enlightened Natural Philosophy and Amusement for Women and Children’, Fifth International Conference for History of Science in Science Education (Keszthely, Hungary, 2004), 49–50). While microscopes enabled the minute to appear vast, conversely telescopes made the vast minutely detailed: planets were revealed in close up to be volatile bodies, their movements and changes reflecting not a fixed, stable universe as previously thought, but one alarmingly and enticingly in a state of flux, the immensity of which shrank the earth in proportion and challenged beliefs regarding its centrality in the cosmos (Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The Telescope and Imagination’, Modern Philology, 32 (1935), 233–60). Both telescopes and microscopes and the sometimes unsettling things they reveal raise the question of what is true sight and what is distortion: that which is seen by the naked eye, or the special vision only possible through a lens?

Telescopes and stargazing take on a literal aspect in the early chapters of Polzonetti’s fascinating book, which focuses on how the American Revolution was depicted in Italian opera buffa of the mid- to late eighteenth century. The subject is a timely one: Polzonetti rightly states that Italian opera of this period is predominately seen through the lens of the French Revolution, as though this were the only revolution of the age, and geographical separation from other parts of the world by extension means that the sphere of cultural influence stops at the eastern reaches of the Atlantic coast. Polzonetti’s study demonstrates that a Eurocentric reading of eighteenth-century Italian opera history risks a skewed view of these works by eschewing other rich and informative layers of interpretation. In widening the scope of his lens, he argues convincingly that a work can be defined as much by its periphery as by its centre; to do otherwise undermines not only the influence of America on European opera, but also the receptiveness of European cities such as Vienna and Venice to other cultures. While the book is largely concerned with Italian works with American influences, settings, or characters performed and disseminated in Europe, his study sits between opera history and music and globalization studies, a rich genre of academic music study which has also done much to break down Eurocentric readings of both European and non- European musical works.

The first two chapters focus mainly on Haydn’s and Galuppi’s settings of Goldoni’s libretto Il mondo della luna and the anonymous libretto of Piccinni’s Il regno della luna, operas in which the moon appears as a metaphor for America, a new frontier of Western civilization without a monarchy and a place safely distant from European society where traditional conventions can be turned upside down and alternative societal models presented. In these lunar utopias, class titles are non-existent, women have freedom, and daughters can challenge fathers. At a time when patriarchal authority was synonymous with monarchical and religious authority, rebellion or challenge in the domestic and sexual sphere mapped directly onto dominant societal and class hierarchies. However, rather than breaking family structures down entirely, Polzonetti demonstrates how several of the works he examines present a reimagining of the family unit (for example, including interracial marriage), demonstrating a more fluid approach to the concept of familial ties, often without patriarchal overtones. As such, these works are not concerned with destroying regimes but with regeneration or repositioning; they use new worlds to assert Enlightenment values over long-standing European social structures.

Arguably even more fascinating are the operas that explore America as a utopia for Enlightenment values without resorting to fantasies in space. Chapter 3 examines Graun’s Montezuma as a...