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Rossini's noisy bodies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2009

MELINA ESSE
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Abstract

Rossini's comic finales consistently foreground the propensity of noise to overwhelm the senses, to both signify and induce madness or confusion, and to transform the bodies on stage into noisy automata. Such mechanical noisiness may appear ‘naturally’ comic and dramatically appropriate – and therefore hardly in need of comment. But the din of Rossini's operas was a point of contention for critics; even Stendhal, normally the composer's staunch advocate, displays a kind of ambivalence about the sheer physical force of Rossini's music. This ambivalence mirrors a larger division between fans and critics, a bifurcation that produced an immense volume of printed matter as Rossini's music became a nexus for debates about the place of reason versus sensation and the troubled relationship between physiological and moral stimulation. These tensions are especially apparent in two operas from 1817, La Cenerentola and La gazza ladra. Both works tend to subvert the conventions of sentimental comedy by ironizing sentimental display, mocking tender feelings or, most tellingly, juxtaposing tears with violent cacophony – tactics that did not always sit well with critics. Using Stendhal's Vie de Rossini as a focal point, this essay situates Rossinian noise and the controversy surrounding it in the context of pervasive concern about the sensible body in a post-sentimental era. Because it seemed to act on the body in such powerful ways, noise very easily allowed commentators to invoke a whole panoply of overlapping discourses – of politics, sentimentality and sensibility, morality, medicine and physiology – in their attempts to account for Rossini's popularity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 27 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, 2 vols. (Paris, 1929), II, 80. Translation mine, although I have consulted Richard Coe's version. See Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (New York, 1970), 80. Subsequent references to the Coe edition will appear in the text; places where my translation differs from his are indicated in the footnotes.

2 Lorenzo Bianconi has written about this moment in detail, comparing Rossini's approach to the partition of musical time in this finale with other scenes of shock and surprise in the composer's oeuvre; see his ‘“Confusi e stupidi”: di uno stupefacente (e banalissimo) dispositivo metrico’, in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro, 1994), 129–62. For a clear account of the form of Rossini's first act finales, see Philip Gossett, ‘The “candeur virginale” of Tancredi’, The Musical Times, 112 (1971), 326–29. For more on the structure and dramatic function of comic finales in general, see Scott Balthazar, ‘Mayr, Rossini, and the Development of the Early Concertato Finale’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (1991), 236–66, and Daniel Heartz, ‘The Creation of the Buffo Finale in Italian Opera’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 104 (1977–8), 67–78.

3 One notable exception is Paolo Gallarati's ‘Per un'interpretazione del comico rossiniano’, in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro, 1994), 3–12. This fascinating essay explores many of the themes I touch on here – including comedy as a profoundly physical medium infused also with themes of power, coercion and the mechanical – from a theoretical framework influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque. In so doing, Gallarati hopes to reclaim the positive, life-affirming immediacy of Rossinian laughter.

4 The supposedly ‘natural’ link between comedy and mechanicity was theorized in Henri Bergson's 1900 Le rire: essai sur la signification du comique, translated as Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York, 1937).

5 Janet Levy, for example, has taken such an approach in her ‘“Something Mechanical Encrusted on the Living”: A Source of Musical Wit and Humor’, in Convention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor of Leonard G. Ratner, ed. Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Janet M. Levy and William P. Mahrt (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 225–56. Steven Huebner has explored Bergson's notion of mechanism, connecting it to Ravel's modern aesthetic of the surface in ‘Laughter: In Ravel's Time’, this journal, 18 (2006), 225–46.

6 This may be why some scholars have been puzzled by Rossini's comic style. Charles Brauner, for example, attempts to define it, noting that it features repetition of both text and music. But Brauner maintains that it is difficult to understand why the composer chose to use markers of the comic style even in serious moments. Brauner's answer reaches towards the realm of absolute music; he claims that Rossini was interested in ‘purely musical’ concerns rather than writing music suitable for the dramatic situation. (See Charles Brauner, ‘“No, no, Ninetta”: Observations on Rossini and the Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary of Opera Buffa’, in Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri, 25–47.) My answer to this dilemma is to define these ‘comic’ moments not as essentially comic but as mechanical. The mechanical may be frightening, boring, poignant, comic or tragic, depending on the situation and the context. In other words, there is a topos at work here, but it is not necessarily a comic one.

7 Such techniques were not new. See Stefano Castelvecchi's discussion of Mozart's parodies of sentiment in his ‘Sentimental and Anti-Sentimental in Le nozze di Figaro’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53 (2000), 1–24.

8 Part of this multivalence may stem from the fact that Rossini's critics are recalling ideological battles from decades earlier; each invocation of noise layers new meanings upon older ones. See Charles Dill's ‘Ideological Noises: Opera Criticism in Early Eighteenth-Century France’, in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2006), 65–84.

9 My approach to Stendhal is indebted to Benjamin Walton's excellent chapter ‘Deciphering Hyperbole: Stendhal's Vie de Rossini’ in his Rossini in Restoration Paris (Cambridge, 2007), 24–67 (esp. 28).

10 On Stendhal's plagiarism, see Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris, 29n10.

11 Marcello Conati, ‘“…una certa malattia, la quale può denominarsi contagio fantastico”’, in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome, 1994), 101. Translation mine.

12 Il corriere delle dame, 19 October 1816, 331.

13 See Il corriere delle dame, 14 December 1816, 395–7, and 21 December 1816, 402–4. For an account of the Staël debate and its influence on Italian Romanticism, see Gary Tomlinson, ‘Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: An Essay in their Affinities’, 19th Century Music, 10 (1986), 43–60.

14 For a more in-depth comparison of the two operas, see Fedele D'Amico, ‘Der Barbier von Sevilla’, Salzburger Festspiele (1968), 61–2; and Volker Scherliess, ‘Il barbiere di Siviglia: Paisiello und Rossini’, Analecta Musicologica, 21 (1982), 100–27.

15 See Stefano Castelvecchi, ‘Sentimental Opera: The Emergence of a Genre, 1760–1790’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Chicago, 1996).

16 Carlida Steffan, ed. Rossiniana: antologia della critica nella prima metà dell'Ottocento (Pordenone, 1992) xvii–xxvii.

17 For Stendhal's perspective on the exchange, see Life of Rossini, trans. Richard Coe, 103–8.

18 The essay was written in 1825 and reprinted in 1826. Armide was presented at the Opéra, Semiramide at the Théâtre-Italien and La Dame blanche at the Opéra-Comique.

19 Margery Stomne Selden, ‘Henri Berton as Critic’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 24 (1971), 293–4.

20 Selden, ‘Henri Berton’, 294.

21 Selden, 294.

22 See Roland Barthes's discussion of Stendhal's writings on Italy in ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves’, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1986).

23 Fink, for example, asserts that ‘Stendhal's mechanistic position in 1824 was remarkably similar in motivation to my own: he believed that in constructing an aesthetic for music that dignifies it as an intellectual pursuit, we risk losing contact with the essentially physical side of the musical experience – and thus the ability to appreciate a composer, like Rossini, whose music is uniquely physical’. Robert W. Fink, ‘Arrows of Desire: Long-range Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy’, Ph.D. diss. (University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 57. See also Stephen Downes, ‘Musical Pleasures and Amorous Passions: Stendhal, the Crystallization Process, and Listening to Rossini and Beethoven’, 19th Century Music, 26 (2003), 235–57.

24 Downes, ‘Musical Pleasures’, 243.

25 This is clear from the way Downes consistently translates Stendhal into the words of modern critics such as Terry Eagleton (‘Stendhal's analysis … established the possibility of a move from hedonistic, sensuous pleasures to intoxicating or transcendent reveries … Aesthetics is thus “born as a discourse of the body” to use Terry Eagleton's description’), Jim Samson (‘A“post-Beylist” interpretive approach might therefore be one that, to use Jim Samson's description of certain analytical projects, “take[s] its impetus from pleasure and intensity” …’) and Rose Subotnik (‘The listening desired or imagined by Stendhal requires an attempt to understand what Subotnik calls …’). See Downes, ‘Musical Pleasures’, 236, 238–9.

26 Giuseppe Carpani was an influential librettist, writer and one-time editor of the Gazzetta di Milano; he was forced to move to Vienna during the French occupation of Lombardy due to his political opinions. He remained there until his death in 1825. Le Rossiniane, published in 1824, collected a number of Carpani's essays previously published in journals.

27 Giuseppe Carpani, Le Rossiniane (Padua, 1824), 182. Also reprinted in Steffan, Rossiniana, 117. Translation mine.

28 ‘l'organo della vista non è come quello dell'odorato, del palato e dell'udito, destinato dalla natura a forte agire su di noi colla fisica sua azione diretta. Egli è veicolo delle idee, piuttosto che mezzo a produrre corporee e marcate sensazioni di vario genere e di rimarchevole effetto.’ Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 182.

29 This move on Carpani's part suggests that the emergence of a new, so-called Romantic way of listening to music – one thought to be concerned primarily with absolute music and the ineffable – is not as simple as it seems. James Johnson's Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995) argues that Rossini's noisy orchestral passages and melismatic vocal writing prepared audiences for contemplative appreciation of Beethoven. In her review of Johnson's book, Mary Ann Smart proposes instead that ‘the atmosphere of breathless attention at a Rossini performance was akin to that of a circus or an athletic competition, with all attention focused on the singers’ confrontation with the technical challenges of the vocal writing; the quasi-religious silence inspired by Beethoven must have been another matter entirely’. See 19th Century Music, 20 (1997), 294.

30 Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 182–3.

31 Carpani's Le Haydine (1812) was a significant source for Stendhal's own Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (1814). It is likely that much of Stendhal's writing on Rossini was influenced by – if not outright borrowed from – Carpani and other Italian journalists. See Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris, 29n10, and Patricia Lewy Gidwitz, ‘Carpani, Giuseppe’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/04992 (accessed 24 November 2008).

32 Although Stendhal claims to have first attended the opera in Trieste and refers to the inhabitants of the city in his descriptions of the audience, Coe points out that Stendhal did not travel to Trieste until 1830 (see Life of Rossini, trans. Coe, 240 and 499).

33 Coe translates ‘beau idéal’ as ‘idealism’. I have chosen to use the more literal translation here, though, as we will see, Stendhal's use of the phrase does suggest a more generalized notion of the ‘ideal’ as well.

34 Although Ferretti based his libretto on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault, it also owes much to the earlier librettos by Charles-Guillaume Etienne for Nicolas Isouard's Cendrillon (1810, Paris) and Francesco Fiorini for Stefano Pavesi's Agatina, o La virtù premiata (1814, Milan).

35 Of course, Cenerentola abandons this restrained simplicity later in the opera; when she achieves her marriage to the Prince, she begins to sing in a much showier style.

36 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, II, 6. For Coe's version, see Life of Rossini, 243–4.

37 Stendhal, II, 7. Coe's translation (Life of Rossini, 244–5) makes it seem as if Stendhal is xenophobically disparaging Polish immigrant shopkeepers, but a glance at the original French makes it clear that Stendhal is arguing that people from different places may not have the same ‘disagreeable impression’ (‘Le Polonais ou habitant de Trieste ne peut avoir cette impression désagréable…’).

38 Mary Ann Smart has suggested that this passage (and others) show Stendhal's concern with Cenerentola's ‘permeation with the tastes and values of the rising middle class’ in her ‘A Shop off the Rue Saint-Denis’, programme note for La Cenerentola, Glyndebourne Festival Opera (2005), 57–61.

39 Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), 1–4.

40 For a different interpretation of Stendhal's use of the terms ‘true’ and ‘noble’, see Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris, 31–57.

41 See translator Richard Coe's annotation in Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 487. Stendhal himself makes reference to Cabanis's notion of the ‘six temperaments of man’ in his discussion of ‘phlegmatic’ spectators (51).

42 Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore and London, 1998), 1–2.

43 Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, ed. George Mora, trans. Margaret Duggan Saidi (Baltimore, 1981), 695–706.

44 Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral, 541. See also his extended discussion of sympathy (582–601), which begins with the statement ‘By a law that is general and subject to no exceptions, the parts of matter tend toward one another’.

45 Cabanis, 524.

46 See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), esp. 83–125.

47 Vila has argued that French authorities may have found practitioners of Mesmerism threatening because they appropriated certain elements of mainstream medical vitalism and infused them with elements of the occult, ‘mimick[ing] the eighteenth-century medical concept of sensibility while stripping it of its positivistic, monistic foundations’. In this sense, the Mesmerists, it could be argued, contributed to long-standing debates about sensibility (Enlightenment and Pathology, 297–300).

48 Heather Hadlock, ‘Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53 (2000), 507–42.

49 For example, Walton discusses the wild claims surrounding Rossini's Moïse et Pharaon (and its Italian version, Mosè in Egitto): that the work caused multiple attacks of brain fever in young women and even prompted enthusiastic spectators to launch themselves from the opera-house balcony. See Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris, 160.

50 This passage appears in Marcello Conati, ‘“…una certa malattia, la quale può denominarsi contagio fantastico”’, 117–18. Translation mine.

51 Steffan, Rossiniana, 130. Eleuterio Pantologo was probably the pseudonym of Conte Torriglione. Under this name, Torriglione published La musica italiana nel secolo XIX. Ricerche filosofico-critiche (Florence, 1828). Portions of this work are reprinted in Steffan, Rossiniana, 122–44. Translations mine.

52 Steffan, Rossiniana, 130–1.

53 Steffan, 123.

54 Steffan, 127.

55 Darnton, Mesmerism, 124–5.

56 Reprinted in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome, 1994), 255. Translation mine.

57 Life of Rossini, trans. Coe, 267, 500.

58 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, II, 39. For Coe's translation, see Life of Rossini, 269.

59 James Johnson notes that one contemporary deportment manual characterized the dilettante as a ‘musical organ that stretches from head to toe’. See Johnson, Listening in Paris, 192.

60 Anselm Gerhard, ‘Coloratura for a Serving-Girl: Rossini's “The Thieving Magpie” – opera semiseria or melodramma romantico?’ trans. Judith Sheridan, liner notes for Sony Classical recording S3K 45 850 (1990).

61 For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between Rossini's opera and the melodrama that was its source, see Emilio Sala, ‘On the Track of La pie voleuse’, trans. William Ashbrook, Opera Quarterly, 13 (1997), 19–40. Sala has also explored how the opera's ‘happy ending’ draws on melodramatic conventions in his L'opera senza canto: Il mélo romantico e l'invenzione della colonna sonora (Venice, 1995), 100–20. The text of the original melodrama can be found in Sala, ed., ‘La gazza ladra’, I libretti di Rossini, vol. II (Pesaro, 1995).

62 Emanuele Senici has discussed the cultural-historical implications of Rossini's supposed abandonment of mimesis in ‘“Essentially Theatrical”: Reality and Representation in Rossini's Italian Operas’, given at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Washington DC, October 2005. We have already encountered the Corriere delle dame's complaint about Il barbiere's ‘music that could be heard miles away’ at a moment when the text speaks of the need for quiet; this is only one of many comments on Rossini's apparent lack of interest in matching music closely to the text. Rossini himself seems to have thought such close relationships were to be avoided; see Paolo Fabbri, ‘Rossini the Aesthetician’, trans. Tim Carter, Cambridge Opera Journal, 6 (1994), 19–29.

63 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, II, 63. For Coe's version, see Life of Rossini, 291.

64 Jacques Joly has discussed the opera's ‘mechanism of Justice’ in terms of the story's competing claims to realism and to evoking a ‘pathetic aura’. He concludes that the presence of the magpie softens the opera's political message because the miscarriage of justice (the false accusation and wrongful conviction of Ninetta) can be blamed on an external force rather than on human (or institutional) failure. See Joly, ‘Le Fidelio de Rossini’, in Rossini: La pie voleuse (L'Avant-scène Opéra, June 1988, 110), 11–16, esp. 14.

65 Jaques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: 1985), esp. chapter 1.

66 See Johnson, Listening in Paris, 225–26.