Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform by Margaret R. Butler (review)

“The histories of Italian and French opera over the centuries are inextri-cable,” wrote Daniel Heartz in a path-breaking essay of 1969, considering Traetta’s Ippolito ed Aricia, created for the Teatro Ducale in Parma in May–June 1759.¹ Since Heartz’s article, scholars have indeed begun to engage with the connection, including work on “reform” opera in mid-century, around the time of Francesco Algarotti’s 1755 Essay on opera [Saggio sopra l’opera in musica]. Margaret R. Butler, well-known for her pioneering monograph Operatic Reform in Turin’s Teatro Regio: Aspects of Production and Stylistic Change in the 1760s (Turin, 2001), extends Heartz’s investigation to the range of operatic works produced in Parma in the mid-eighteenth century under French rule. In so doing, welcome attention is given to “reform” outside of the city upon which discussion has often tended to focus, namely Vienna. But Butler is equally concerned in this study with the very definition of “reform opera,” arguing that a more flexible definition of the term is required in order to appreciate fully the specificity and importance of Parma’s experiment. Pointing not only to the slight anachronism of the term (contemporaries did not have any hard and fast definition of what constituted a “reform” work, nor did they necessarily speak as if they did), but also to the domination of Vienna in modern scholarship on the question, Butler argues that the experiment of Tomasso Traetta has been undervalued owing to failure to recognize the specificity of Parma’s local circumstances, and to difficulties assembling a coherent range of appropriate sources.

In 1748, the Duchy of Parma was assigned to the Infante Philip of Bourbon by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Under Bourbon domination (in the words of Grove), “arts and letters flourished to such an extent that Parma became known as the ‘Athens of Italy.’”² As Butler herself reminds us in a related publication, “the history of Italian opera in the eighteenth century is as much the history of the cities and performers as it is the history of composers, genres, and works.”³ Hence the reader of her new monograph will find a welcome balance of close analysis of those works which have survived and of the institutional history of the Teatro Ducale and developments in court administration and performance, combined with sensitive elucidation of the cultural and political context which allowed the royal administrator Guillaume-Léon du Tillot to bring his project of reform to fruition. Indeed, Du Tillot and Philippe de Bourbon acted swiftly to import a wide variety of French cultural products. The year 1749 saw the engagement of Italian-born composer Egidio Duni who had played a major role in the elaboration of French opéra-comique. In 1755, a troupe of French performers was hired for a three-year residency, performing a range of French works including operas and ballets. Then, in 1758, Traetta himself arrived in Parma and began composing Italian-language operas comprising significant French elements: four such works were produced, all of them based on French-language originals.

A crucial element of Butler’s revisioning of the contribution of Traetta is her close preliminary examination of adaptations from French works which prepared the ground. There have been prior studies of the French troupe assembled at Du Tillot’s behest and managed by Jean-Philippe Delisle; but Butler takes us much further by looking in detail at personnel and financial documents, which also allow her to reconstruct information concerning repertory (Chapter 1: “The Genesis of Parma’s Projet”). Among new information considered is the importance of Lyons as a city of origin for many of the performers recruited (surprisingly, a hitherto unnoted fact), given Du Tillot’s prior connection with the city), the speed with which French operas were mounted, and the diversity of genres on offer. Butler also...