Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner

By Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner explores the latest developments in opera analysis by considering, side by side, the works of the two greatest opera composers of the nineteenth century. Although the juxtaposition is not new, comparative studies have tended to view these masters as radically different both as musicians and as musical dramatists. Wagner and his "symphonic opera" set against Verdi "the melodist" is one of many familiar antitheses, and it serves to highlight the particular terms from which comparisons are often made. In this book some of the leading and most innovative music scholars challenge this view, suggesting that as we become more distant from the nineteenth century, we may see that Verdi and Wagner confronted largely similar problems, and even on occasion found similar solutions. But more than this, Analyzing Opera sets out to demonstrate the richness and variety of modern analytical approaches to the genre. As the editors point out in their introduction, today's musical scholars increasingly question the usefulness of organicist theories in analytical studies, and, as they do so, opera seems to become an ever more central area of investigation. Opera is peculiar: its clash of verbal, musical, and visual systems can produce incongruities and extravagant miscalculations. It invites a multiplicity of approaches, challenges orthodoxy, and embraces ambiguity. The sheer variety of essays presented here is witness to this fact and suggests that analyzing opera is one of the liveliest (and most polemical) areas in modern-day musical scholarship. Contributors: Philip Gossett, John Deathridge, James A. Hepokoski, Joseph Kerman, Thomas S. Grey, Matthew Brown, Anthony Newcomb, Martin Chusid, David Lawton, and Patrick McCreless. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520310810

Book preview

Analyzing

Verdi and Wagner

California Studies in

19TH CENTURY MUSIC

Joseph Kennern, Generid Editor

1. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by Mary Whittali

2. Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation, by Walter Frisch

3. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After, by Lawrence Kramer

4. The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory, by Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson, and Robert Winter

5. Nineteenth-Century Music, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by J. Bradford Robinson

6. Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, edited by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

Analyzing

Verdi and Wagner

EDITED BY CAROLYN ABBATE AND ROGER PARKER

University of California Press

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

The publication of this book

was made possible in part by a grant

from the American Musicological Society.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1989 by

The Regents of the University of California

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Analyzing opera: Verdi and Wagner I edited by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker.

p. cm.—(California studies in 19th century music; 6) Papers originally presented at the Cornell Verdi-Wagner Conference, Cornell University, October 1984.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-520-06157-8 (alk. paper)

1. Verdi, Giuseppe, 1813-1901. Operas—Congresses.

2. Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883. Operas—Congresses.

3. Operas—Analysis, appreciation—Congresses. I. Abbate, Carolyn. II. Parker, Roger, 1951- . III. Cornell University.

IV. Cornell Verdi-Wagner Conference (1984). V. Series.

MT95.A59 1989

782.1'092'2—de 19 88-21072

CIP

MN

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Citations

Introduction On Analyzing Opera

Chapter 1 The Composition of Ernani

Chapter 2 Through the Looking Glass Some Remarks on the First Complete Draft of Lohengrin

Chapter 3 Opera as Symphony, a Wagnerian Myth

Chapter 4 Verdi’s Composition of Otello The Act II Quartet

Chapter 5 Verdi’s Groundswells Surveying an Operatic Convention

Chapter 6 Isolde’s Narrative From Hauptmotiv to Tonal Model

Chapter 7 Ritornello Ritornato A Variety of Wagnerian Refrain Form

Chapter 8 Motives and Recurring Themes in Aida

Chapter 9 The Tonality of Rigoletto

Chapter 10 Tonal Systems in Aida, Act III

Chapter 11 Schenker and the Norns

Index

Acknowledgments

It is customary for the editors to compliment contributors on their courtesy and promptness, virtues indispensable for the completion of a volume such as this. We are indeed happy to do so: all our contributors were courteous; most were prompt; we are grateful to them all.

The present collection evolved from a conference devoted to Verdi and Wagner that took place at Cornell University in the autumn of 1984. (For a detailed account of the papers given there, see the present writers’ Osservatorio: The Cornell Verdi-Wagner Conference, October 1984, Studi verdiani III [1985],131—37.) The conference could not have taken place without generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities,1 from Princeton University, and from many sources at Cornell; nor would it have been so smooth-running (in the circumstances, one fears, only a relative term) without the assistance and support of Lenore Coral, Joanna Greenwood, Don Randel, and James Webster. We should also like to acknowledge with thanks and no small regret a group of further contributors to the conference, whose excellent papers could not, for one reason or another, fit into the somewhat restricted focus of the present volume. These contributors included William Ashbrook, Robert Bailey, Will Crutchfield, Arthur Groos, Ursula Günther, Harold Powers, Gary Tomlinson, and James Webster. Ashbrook’s paper has since appeared as "The First Singers of Tristan und Isolde," Opera Quarterly III, no. 4 (1985/86), 11—23; Günther’s as "Wagnerismen in Verdi’s Don Carlos von 1867?" in Carl Dahlhaus and Egon Voss, eds., Wagnerliteratur— Wagnerforschung (Mainz, 1985), 101—8; Tomlinson’s as "Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: An Essay in Their Affinities, " 19th-Century Music\(1986), 43—60; Webster’s as To Understand Verdi and Wagner We Must Understand Mozart, 19th-Century Music XI (1987), 175—93; and Groos’s as "Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: In Defense of the Libretto," Music and Letters 69 (1978), 465-81.

As the book took shape, others gave much-needed help: Diana Waltman typed the editors’ introduction more times than we care to remember; Adelyn Peck and Alice Clark were invaluable editorial assistants; Doris Kretschmer represented the University of California Press with tact and good humor. Joseph Kennan was an exemplary series editor. He advised in numerous ways from a very early stage, and his interventions have saved the editors many embarrassments, both large and small. Finally we want to thank Harold Powers, who first suggested the idea of a conference on Verdi and Wagner, and who, from that time onward, encouraged, assisted, and admonished us at regular periods.

1 The opinions set forth do not necessarily reflect those of the Endowment.

A Note on Citations

Wagnerian passages are cited either by text cues (Hagen, was tatest du?), or, where greater precision is demanded, by measure numbers or reference to the Schirmer vocal scores (using page/system/measure within system: 50/3/1—4). This method of citation allows readers to find their way without undue difficulty in any one of the many full-score editions rather than requiring them to use one particular edition.

The Verdi scores available present, if anything, an even more chaotic situation than that for Wagner. The articles onEmani måRigoletto, which grew out of work on the Complete Verdi edition, make direct reference to the relevant volumes of that edition. The remainder of the Verdi citations refer to the standard Ricordi vocal scores (again using page/system/measure within system) unless the nature of the discussion requires another method.

Needless to say, reference to vocal scores is solely for the convenience of readers and is not meant to suggest that consultation of the full orchestral scores is anything less than indispensable for those who wish to analyze this repertoire.

Introduction

On Analyzing Opera

CAROLYN ABBATE AND ROGER PARKER

A commonsense definition of analyzing opera would impute no esoteric meaning to the phrase. For most people analyzing an opera would mean interpreting an opera or explaining an opera, to contribute to a richer understanding of the work. Classic books such as Ernest Newman’s The Wagner Operas or Edward J. Dent’s The Mozart Operas, both highly literate commentaries on matters such as background, plot, and music, are analyses of opera in this sense. Both volumes tell the story in familiar and friendly words.

For some purposes, analyzing opera need go no further than this, but for the musician, music historian, or theorist, the idea of analyzing opera—indeed, of analyzing any musical genre—will evoke something different. Analysis, broadly defined, is a detailed and complex investigation into the substance of a musical work, one taking the musical text as its primary object. At its best, musical analysis nourishes what Joseph Kerman has called a comprehensive, ‘humane,’ criticism of music,1 an interpretation of text guided by the musicality and intellect of a gifted writer. Theodor Adomo has written bluntly that all criticism of any value is founded in analysis; to the extent that this is not the case, criticism remains stuck with disconnected impressions, for "analysis has to do with das Mehr [the above-and-beyond] in art; it is concerned with that abundance which unfolds itself only by means of analysis,… the truly ‘poetic’ in poetry; and the truly poetic in poetry is that which defies translation."2

The analysis that merely describes musical events is like the translation that passes over all meaning, that passes over the truly poetic. To go beyond mechanical conversions of musical notation into written words, analysis must uncover something beyond or behind the mere sonic surface.3 That beyond and behind might be the relation of the critic’s stance toward the piece and his knowledge of its reception. It might be the connection of the piece to other musical works, its intertextuality. It might be the unveiling of relationships between different musical gestures in the piece and a demonstration of how these relationships define the unique universe within which the piece unwinds on its own special terms. Such an analysis, even if couched in language that may be abstruse and intricate, may reward the reader with insight into both the marvelous and the shocking in a familiar work.

Given our broad definition of the term and our generous characterization of the art, it seems that analysis can only enrich our conceptions of a musical work. Why, then, should the notion of analyzing music seem to many a less than lively pursuit?

The word analysis easily associates itself in music with the idea of all that is dead, sterile, and farthest removed from the living work of art. One can well say that the general underlying feeling towards musical analysis is not exactly friendly. … One will encounter this antipathy again and again, above all in the rationalization represented by that absurd though utterly inextinguishable question: "Yes, everything you say is all very well and good, but did the composer himself know all this—was the composer conscious of all these things?"4

Adorno here implies that hostility toward analysis grows out of a kind of philosophical immaturity, a childish hankering after irrelevant biographical legends. Concern for the human composer and his foibles can, he argued, be kept separate from the work as an object of scrutiny, even though this detachment may seem hard-hearted and win for analysis little sympathy.5

Are the flaws of analysis, however, only in the eyes of Adorno’s unsophisticated beholder? The kind of analysis we attempted to characterize above is an ideal, and one that fully merits the respect Adomo accorded it. That ideal, sadly, is rarely attained; critics of analysis have a point. For one thing, too much analytical writing is overlaid with a protective sheen of technical jargon and couched in inexpressive prose.6 Style, of course, should not in itself deter us from evaluating substance, yet the critical reader may feel justified in doubting the sensitivity of a writer whose means of communication is unthinking, inelegant, or imprecise. More substantive criticisms can also be made. All too often, practitioners of musical analysis labor doggedly to discover the hallmarks of autonomous structure, or coherence, or organic unity in a work. By doing so, they may ignore a hundred rich contexts for their object, including those we might regard as historical: the conditions of its invention, its intertextuality. Perhaps betraying an atavistic urge toward the calmer waters of earlier generations’ critical battles, they end up producing a kind of New Criticism writ small.

But the point runs deeper, touches more directly the focus of the present volume. Many critics assume a priori that the musical object, to be of value, must be unified in certain conventional ways. This assumption is, of course, related to a naive insistence that interpretation can and ought to be wholly detached from its context. But analysis is at its worst when trapped in a tautological cage of value judgments predicated on musical unity, for dien it has no devices for coping with music that is ambiguous, with musical disasters within the piece analyzed, with the enigmatic. Indeed, a critical passage such as the following suggests that the myth of definable unity thrives unchallenged in certain circles:

The lack of a comprehensive theoretical model sometimes leads the author into equivocal expressions, as if to say: Well, it could be heard this way, but then, it could. be heard this other way. The inescapable conclusion is that the passage is rich in ambiguity. Of course, ambiguity in music does not really exist. Some musical phenomena can be understood in several ways… but surely one of the functions of analytical insight is to show how all but one of the apparent or theoretical possibilities are artistically untenable in a given context.7

The reviewer’s implication is that Beethoven wrote music that is unambiguous (and therefore good), music whose structure is limpid, whose workings are transparent. This does Beethoven a grave disservice. Furthermore, the notion reflects a kind of interpretive positivism that would surprise scholars and critics who work in related fields, and perhaps partially explains the dearth of dialogue between music analysts and those who deal in other arts.

In such an atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that opera has fared rather badly as an object of detailed and complex investigation into matters musical.8 For opera is not music alone; it lives in association with poetry and dramatic action, an association that has made it idiosyncratic and special, certainly different in fundamental ways from instrumental music. Those whose analytic staple is nonoperatic music may feel baffled by opera and may deal with it in inappropriate ways; they may be limited by their preoccupation with analytic modes whose criteria of value run to organic unity or Hanslickian virtues of formal perfection. At worst they may feel obliged to cram the music into a shell of coherence far too small to encompass it.9 Perhaps more often, they simply recoil, as Heinrich Schenker did. Schenker’s comments on Wagner seem to echo Nietzsche’s castigation of Wagner as musical miniaturist. Wagner’s music, Schenker wrote more than once, was unable to maintain its tonal syntax (hence, logic and structure) except in very brief patches.10 Made uneasy by such music, Schenker did not otherwise venture into the brackish waters of opera, not even as far as the illusory purity of the Mozartean set-piece.

Of course, any writer who, like Schenker, chooses to regard opera as music alone is seeing only one of the three primary colors. Analyzing opera should mean not only analyzing music but simultaneously engaging, with equal sophistication, the poetry and the drama. Analysis of opera might also attempt to characterize the ways that music in opera is unique; that is, to address the idiosyncrasies that set operatic music apart from the instrumental music that has shaped our notions of analysis.

These are, very broadly, the goals set by the essays presented here. The notion of juxtaposing those two operatic lions of the nineteenth century, Verdi and Wagner, is, of course, hardly new.11 But comparative studies have tended to assume that the two are radically dissimilar as musicians and music dramatists. Wagner and his symphonic opera set against Verdi the melodist is only the hoariest of many familiar antitheses, but it serves to highlight the particular terms according to which comparisons are usually made, and it reminds us of the potency of the instrumental norm. By bringing together writers whose critical stances could be expected to be contradictory, we hoped for highly charged exchanges, but also, more optimistically, for an emerging sense of common purpose.

In certain respects, the cumulative force of these essays is revisionist; fondly held views of the composers are refashioned. One example: the issue of words and music, with all it involves, lurks near the edges of some essays, while in others it takes on all the force of a dramatic Hauptmotiv. Traditional juxtapositions have tended to stress as the difference between Verdi and Wagner in this respect that Wagner, as author of his own libretti, must necessarily have subjugated the text to the music more effectively than did his Italian contemporary.12 But Verdi emerges here as the more absolute musician, and Wagner—in part— as an artist whose poetry controlled, and even fought against, his musical decisions.

Our larger purpose was that suggested in the title of this volume: to consider the analysis, and the criticism, of opera, the assumptions of such analysis, and the preoccupations of writers engaged in it. It was our view (though not necessarily that of all our colleagues) that if analysis deals with musical substance, then analysis of opera should confront nonmusical elements that may inform that substance. As Pierluigi Petrobelli has recently put it: In opera, various ‘systems’ work together, each according to its own nature and laws, and the result of the combination is much greater than the sum of the individual forces.13 Certain essays in the present volume embrace this clash of systems with some enthusiasm; others take the nonmusical systems as given; still others—with a certain self-consciousness—avoid interpreting them altogether. Even in the last case, however, the status of opera as a hybrid medium is tacitly acknowledged. This status seems bound to become an increasingly important aspect of our reaction to the medium.

Our focus on Verdi and W agner resulted in part from the wealth of interpretive writings that has, since the nineteenth century, been accruing to the accounts of both. Verdi and Wagner both had questionable reputations among musical purists and were accused of musical ineptitude by conservative (usually German) critics. Writers in the nineteenth century who were well or ill disposed toward one or the other were therefore nudged into closer consideration of musical matters in order to support their value judgments. Many preoccupations in late-twentieth-century analytical writings on the two composers can be traced to the preoccupations, and the conclusions, of this earlier tradition. The essays collected here are no exception. Some edge toward new analytic modes appropriate to opera while others react to canonic interpretations of specific works, but all should be viewed in light of their ancestry, through a review of the traditions against which they stand.

Analysis of operatic music on a grand scale began with the nineteenth-century interpretations of Wagner. For better or worse, changing fashions in Wagnerian interpretation have left imprints in critical writing on all other nineteenthcentury opera. In Verdians’ debates concerning tonality and drama we hear vague echoes of Alfred Lorenz’s interpretation of Tristan-, the idea of reminiscence motive inevitably, if wrongly, evokes the leitmotive. The difficulties in surveying the Wagnerian field of play reside not in locating participants but in sorting out the crowd, and complaints about the mass of verbiage that has attached itself to Wagner’s life and work are by now an obligatory opening gambit in any book on the subject. Yet it seems worth emphasizing that a surprising amount of that mass is devoted not to Wagner’s personality but to his music and his music-theoretical writings. We may choose to disregard much of this literature on the grounds that it is not analytical after our mock-technological fashion, but to do so is to risk overlooking work that is both rich and provoking.

In the broadest sense, the tradition of analyzing Wagner goes back to the 1850s, when a number of book-length studies of his music had already appeared, along with many critical articles in the German musical press. These earliest essays, when not puzzling over the prose in Ofer und Drama, tended to measure his four published operas—Rienzi to Lohengrin—against the traditional and contemporary repertory then most popular: Mozart, Weber, Bellini, Donizetti, Halévy, Meyerbeer. Warm approval of the conventional elements in Wagner’s early operas was commonplace and was invariably accompanied by vehement rejection of any device not codifiable within the usual—generally Italianate—constraints for numbers.14 Wagner’s use of reminiscence themes was often belittled as mere rhetorical effect, heavy-handed at that, and was criticized for creating musical illogicalities by allowing music to symbolize poetry with too great an intimacy.15

From the outset, then, Wagner’s early critics distinguished between a self- sufficient musical logic and an intrusive text-generated gesture. It is a distinction that has been maintained ever since, albeit in many different forms. In 1893 critic Christian von Ehrenfels extended the argument to Wagner’s later works; from him the dialectic of form-defining and referential passed to Lorenz, and has been often invoked since then.16 Wagner’s early partisans took the opposite position. Espousing the novel as a matter of pride, they fastened on just those rhetorical motivic and orchestral effects as a powerful means of new and specifically musical inventiveness, as well as an aid to dramatic exprèssion . Liszt’s 1851 essay on Tannhäuser and Lohengrin is a locus classicus, singling out the symbolic motives for particular praise and discussing their function as musical commentaries on the drama.

The performance and publication of Wagner’s music dramas in 1859—1876 created a Wagnerian analytic industry of considerable proportions. Like the criticism of the 1850s, this second wave included both critics and partisans, but the writers ill-disposed toward Wagner continued to measure his work against conservative musical precepts and traditional operatic models. If Eduard Hanslick had found Tannhäuser daring, he could hardly help experiencing Tristan as an amorphous chain of musical moments, each called up in reaction to a dramatic point; formlessness and harmonic illogicality were the catchwords of the opposition.17 What may seem puzzling is that the partisans—even those most intoxicated by Wagner’s music—also heard long stretches in the later works as extended ariosi of no particular coherence. They had been prodded to this perception by Wagner himself, for both his familiar formula of unendliche Melodie and his image of the symphonic web were calculated to capture an experience of music as narrative fabric. Wagner, of course, in response to his critics’ accusations had pointed to constant motivic repetition in his works as proof of their purely musical coherence. His explanation was specious, for coherence in this sense is so vague and fundamental that it might be applied to any music. But the partisans took their tone from the master. They felt no need to interpret his music as logical or structured by the standards of contemporary Formenlehre-, instead they merely appealed to vaguer aesthetic criteria to argue for its power and beauty. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Wagner’s defense was conducted in the same terms as the attacks against his music.

Hans von Wolzogen’s Ring analysis of 1877 stands at the turning point; it was the first systematic musical exegesis of Wagner’s later work, a map of thematic eddies in the Ring whose substance and method are heavily marked by Wagner’s image of the symphonic web. The book (along with Wolzogen’s essays on the other operas) is one source all Wagnerian analyses—indeed, all analyses of opera—must still confront. Wolzogen’s description of the Ring is cast solely in terms of motivic recurrences across all four operas. But more important, of course, he interpreted the motives as signs representing objects, characters, concepts in the drama—as leitmotives. Every time we make an apology for continuing to use Wolzogen’s labels we acknowledge the unshaken force of his example. More than this: by using the verbal tags, even if only as a convenience, we underline for any reader all the referential connotations of the motives, whether self-evident or ridiculous and whether or not we ourselves believe in them.

The misuses to which leitmotivic exegesis has been put encourage us to bemoan Wolzogen’s example. But regret may be tempered by other considerations. First, Wolzogen’s essay on the Ring was a product of discussions with Wagner and preserves something of Wagner’s view of his own work.18 Second, the referential connections are real, at least in the Ring. Finally, Wolzogen’s guide made no claim to expose a last secret of Wagner’s musical thought; it indexed a single phenomenon. The concept of form, for instance, is not ignored; it is, quite simply, passed over, rather casually at that. Wolzogen did make offhand references to Lenzlied or Isoldes Erzählung, to the passages we also regard as the more shaped and self-contained of Wagner’s web; it seems, then, that Wolzogen was not only well aware of but actually took for granted a distinction between closely structured and more diffuse music. But, unlike later generations, he was uninterested in examining or rationalizing his intuitions about form; Wagner’s motivic symbolism had absorbed him entirely.

A vast number of later publications were to replicate, translate, and expand Wolzogen’s basic guides, and, in a certain class of writings, taxonomy of motives became a sufficient explanation of Wagner’s music and, in part, an excuse for avoiding further inquiry into its workings. The labeling of motives prevails to this day as the most common popular mode of Wagnerian analysis, having been widely disseminated to an English-speaking audience in the work of Ernest Newman and Deryck Cooke. Both men accepted without hesitation the notion that finding, describing, and naming thematic fragments constituted a sufficient account of Wagner’s musical language. Indeed, the process of deciphering alleged musical symbols mutated in their hands into an exercise with a momentum all its own, pursued with comical doggedness.

For example, Newman puzzled long over recurrences of what Wolzogen called the Flight motive in parts of the Ring where flight is furthest from anyone’s mind.19 The Flight motive had in fact been badly named; Wolzogen had attached the label carelessly when he noted the figure in Rheingolti, as it accompanied Freia’s flight from the Giants. Newman took Wolzogen’s casual label literally, and in doing so was forced to the absurdity of scolding Wagner for misapplying the Flight motive when no one was fleeing, for making an error in a musical dictionary whose existence was merely assumed.20 Wolzogen’s misnomer was later rightly cited by Cooke as a piece of blatantly bungled labeling, one that went unquestioned for almost a hundred years. But Cooke drew the wrong moral from the story. It should have served as warning that motives, even in theRing, are hardly as precisely lexical as the hundreds of labels suggest. Instead, Cooke merely preached a rewriting of the dictionary, with truer identifications provided for every thematic scrap.21

***

The Verdians of the nineteenth century were, initially, not dissimilar to their Wagnerian counterparts; they were critics whose principal forum was the daily feuilleton or the weekly musical journal. Until Verdi’s death in 1901, the best writing about his music appeared in the press, often combining critical matters with the expository and the descriptive.

Especially in the first decade of his career, Verdi found himself the object of much polemical exchange. From the advent of Rossini on, Italian critical opinion became increasingly distant from popular taste, and Verdi’s success was often seen as an extreme celebration of Italy’s brash musical insularity, a symptom of the public’s demand for noise and effect over subtlety and adventure. Though most observers recognized immediately that a new force had arrived, not all approved of the novelty. Poco canto e molto rumore (little melody and much noise) was the leitmotive—with some even the idée fixe—of the opposition and, particularly in Germany, Verdi underwent frequent attack as a mangier of larynxes, an arch cabalettista, the man who changed bel canto into con belto.22 Even at the beginning, however, there were some surprisingly astute reactions, ones that pierced what must have seemed an uncomfortably forthright compositional exterior. As early as 1840, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung carried a long account of Oberto that recognized the appearance of an important new voice.23 By the mid to late 1840s, each new opera rallied a host ofbelletrists.

The recently collected journalistic reactions to Macbeth’s premiere in 1847 form a representative group. Value judgments appear by the barrow-load— the shorter the acquaintance, it seems, the easier it was to make up one’s mind; there are also interesting comments on Verdi’s relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries; some challenging attempts to discuss aesthetic questions—opera’s responsibility toward naturalism, its compatibility with the supernatural—but virtually nothing that we would call analysis. L. F. Casa- morata’s extended critique might seem an exception: it contains technical remarks and even some musical examples. Not so. The detailed comments are the least convincing and imaginative section of this valuable essay, their substance remorselessly Procrustean. Verdi sometimes places musical accents on unaccented syllables. At one point he has a Db in the melody against a C in the bass. With just a little more care, Casamorata suggests, such errors could have been put right.24

As we move to the second half of the nineteenth century and to the well-nigh universal acceptance of Verdi as Italy’s leading composer, it becomes clear that the Italian cultural scene will furnish no Wolzogens, no systematic attempts at description. But if Wagner’s seeming radicalism encouraged his commentators to explore new exegetical methods, the best Italian critics benefited from the other side of the coin, using Verdi’s persistence with traditional formal models as a point on which to sharpen their perceptions of his originality and power. The representative Verdian critic of the period is Àbramo Basevi, whose 1859 monograph on the composer is frequently cited in the modern literature and has recently been reprinted.25

Reasons for our continuing interest in Basevi are not hard to find. Basevi knew thoroughly the repertoire against which Verdi was writing; his division of Verdi’s work (up to Araldo) into four manners and two broad stylistic periods, with Luisa Miller as the dividing line, is in tune with modern-day views; and his lively discrimination about the comparative successes and failures of Verdi’s works, though occasionally rather de haut en bas, is refreshing when compared with the relentless hagiography of the later nineteenth century. Ba- sevi’s most valuable contribution lies in his taxonomies of traditional forms (in general more systematic than we find elsewhere) and in the acuteness with which he measures Verdi’s achievement against them. On a few occasions, his tone with Verdi is rather like Hanslick’s or Ludwig Bischoffs with the young Wagner—approving of conformity and the artful execution of known conventions, often disdainful of stylistic novelty. The Salve Maria from I Lombardi, for example, one of Verdi’s most radical formal experiments, went too far: "The first two periods… are a simple succession of notes, and nothing more, which do not bind together to form a musical concept-, for this reason they lack one fundamental of musical composition." On the other hand, Basevi was no diehard: the Sparafucile-Rigoletto Duet in Act I of Rigoletto met with his approval, even though it departs so completely from la solita forma de’ duetti.26

Despite all this, Basevi, like Hanslick, has probably absorbed too generous a share of attention from today’s scholars. The more we explore mid-nineteenthcentury music criticism, the more it becomes clear that Basevi’s uniqueness is in scope—he deals with all Verdi’s operas from Nabucco to Aroldo—rather than in method or critical prejudices; and, of course, he collected his essays (originally written for a weekly journal) into a book. In fact, a body of Italian criticism contemporary with and later than Basevi is equally acute but almost totally unknown. An assemblage of the best of this writing, by such figures as Francesco Regli and, later, Filippo Filippi, might transform our views of nineteenthcentury interpretations of Verdi.

* * *

It is during the mid-nineteenth century that our two composers first become entangled. Near the end of his monograph, discussing SinwnBoccanegra, Basevi sounds a note that will occasionally reappear in later nineteenth-century discussions of Verdi: "At least judging from die Prologue, I would say that it seems as though Verdi was following in the steps of the famous Wagner—from afar, but none the less following."27 Basevi had by that time already written some of the first articles on Wagner to be published in Italy.28 Soon the Wagnerian cause was taken up by Boito and the scapigliatura, although their impressions were arguably less than profound: the first Italian performances of Wagner (a run of Lohengrin in Bologna) did not occur until 1871, and knowledge of the Master’s work would have been through his theoretical writings or, at best, vocal scores. Burgeoning wagnerismo came to a crisis, perhaps not surprisingly, at Verdi’s operatic home of La Scala, Milan, where die 1873 performances of Lohengrin inspired some lively displays of cultural xenophobia. But the Wagnerian vogue, at least as it affected creative musicians, was rather short-lived in Italy (especially when compared to the situation in France); rationalism prevailed, as we can see from the fact that some of Verdi’s most sympathetic and intelligent critics (Arrigo Boito, Filippi) were also knowledgeable and enthusiastic Wagnerians. In spite of Verdi’s periodic complaints, his later operas were only occasionally tarred with the Wagnerian