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Verdi's Don Carlo as Monument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2013

Francesca Vella
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Abstract

When Verdi's Don Carlo made its debut at La Scala in March 1868, it was hardly the latest operatic news; since its 1867 premiere at the Paris Opéra, it had been widely performed and written about. One aspect of the debates in the Milanese and the Italian press, however, deserves special attention: the depiction of the opera as a ‘monument’. Although the work's astonishing length (compared to that of most of Verdi's previous operas) and the composer's increasing prestige as a national figure might both have been reasons for this impression of monumentality, there were clearly others. The article explores some of these reasons in relation to post-Unification urban renewal, the increasing success of la musica dell'avvenire and the beginning of a slow rediscovery of ‘ancient’ musical works. It argues that Don Carlo was thought of as a monument primarily because it was perceived as standing between the past and the future, and as such was the epitome of contemporary attitudes towards these temporal categories.

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Articles
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Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 75 - 103
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis, 1980), 8Google Scholar.

2 Mefistofele had its premiere on 5 March 1868; Don Carlo on 25 March; see Cambiasi, Pompeo, La Scala 1778–1889: note storiche e statistiche (Milan, 1889), 302–3Google Scholar. The version of Mefistofele now commonly performed is a second, shorter version dating from 1875. For the first performances and information about the first version, see Nardi, Piero, Vita di Arrigo Boito (Verona, 1942), 249–320Google Scholar, and Nicolaisen, Jay, ‘The First Mefistofele’, 19th-Century Music, 1/3 (1978), 221–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Premiered at the Paris Opéra on 11 March 1867 (as Don Carlos, and in French), Verdi's opera was first performed in Italy under Angelo Mariani's baton at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna on 26 October 1867 (in the Italian translation by Achille de Lauzières). Subsequent stagings took place in Turin (25 December 1867) and Rome (9 February 1868). For a list of performances in Italy and abroad, see Kaufman, Thomas G., Verdi and His Major Contemporaries: A Selected Chronology of Performances with Casts (New York and London, 1990), 497–527Google Scholar. I will mostly refer to the opera with its Italian title, except when the French version is explicitly invoked.

3 See Cambiasi, La Scala, 302–3.

4 In Milan as elsewhere: ‘colossal creation’ (Il mondo artistico, 29 March 1868, 1); ‘colossal forms of musical epic’ (Il pungolo, quoted from Supplemento al n. 13 della Gazzetta musicale di Milano [henceforth GMM], 1868, 3); ‘grandiose score’ (GMM, 5 April 1868, 108); ‘colossal score’ (Il tergesteo, quoted from GMM, 8 November 1868, 366); ‘colossal opera’ (GMM, 31 January 1869, 34); ‘gigantic work’ (Il mondo artistico, 25 April 1869, 3). All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. I will provide the original Italian only when the quotation is of considerable length.

5 ‘a wonderful creation and an imperishable monument of art’: a critic for Il tergesteo, quoted from GMM, 8 November 1868, 366; ‘nobody any longer questions that Don Carlo should be numbered among the most distinguished musical monuments of the modern age’: a critic for a performance in Brussels, quoted from GMM, 22 March 1868, 94; ‘monument of the true progress of the Italian [musical] school’: Sangiorgi, in Monitore di Bologna, 28 October 1867, 1–2, quoted from Luigi Verdi, ed., Le opere di Giuseppe Verdi a Bologna, (Lucca, 2001), 158; ‘It is a superb work, a wonderful creation, an imperishable monument of art!’: Corinno Mariotti, in GMM, 29 December 1867, 410.

6 The expression musica dell'avvenire had been circulating in Italy since the late 1850s and was common in Milan around 1860. Wagner's music, with which the term was often associated, was first heard in Italy in the late 1860s in the form of a few overtures performed in Milan, followed by the famous Bologna performance of Lohengrin in 1871. Thus it was Wagner's writings, rather than his music, that mainly fuelled debates during the 1860s; see Carlos del Cueto, Opera in 1860s Milan and the End of the Rossinian Tradition, Ph.D. diss. (Cambridge University, 2011), 71–5.

7 See Gartioux, Hervé, ed., Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlos: Dossier de presse parisienne (1867) (Heilbronn, 1997), 6–9Google Scholar, and Del Cueto, Opera in 1860s Milan, 181.

8 As is well known, Don Carlo exists in multiple forms. The main ones are the 1867, French, five-act version (translated into Italian by de Lauzières); the 1872 Italian edition (made for Naples and containing only two revised numbers); the 1884 four-act and the 1886 five-act versions, both first performed in Italian, premiered at Milan and Modena respectively. On the genesis of the opera and its various revisions, see Porter, Andrew, ‘The Making of Don Carlos’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 98 (1971–2), 73–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Günther, Ursula, ‘La genèse de Don Carlos’, Revue de musicologie, 58/1 (1972), 16–64Google Scholar; 60/1–2 (1974), 87–158; Günther, , ‘La genèse du Don Carlos de Verdi: nouveaux documents’, Revue de musicologie, 72/1 (1986), 104–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the preface to Günther, Ursula, ed., Don Carlos: Edizione integrale delle varie versioni in cinque e in quattro atti di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1980)Google Scholar; and Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (repr. Oxford, 2002), vol. 3, From Don Carlos to Falstaff, 31–57.

9 Venice and Rome would become part of the Italian Kingdom in 1866 and 1870 respectively.

10 These works of urban renewal clearly echoed those started in Paris by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s. Paris was the model to which many Italian cities, particularly Milan, looked on their way to modernisation; see Colombo, Elisabetta, Come si governava Milano: politiche pubbliche nel secondo Ottocento (Milan, 2005), 38–9Google Scholar.

11 Francesco Crispi was Prime Minister in 1887–91 and 1893–6, during which time he persistently encouraged the cult of national heroes; see Duggan, Christopher, ‘Francesco Crispi, “Political Education” and the Problem of Italian National Consciousness, 1860–1896’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2/2 (1997), 141–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 157–8.

12 See Colombo, Come si governava Milano, 41–2.

13 See Venosta, Felice, The Traveller's Guide of Milan and Its Environs, the Certosa near Pavia with a Description of Brianza and the Lakes, trans. E. C. Cornaro (Milan, 1873), 47–8Google Scholar.

14 See Storia di Milano, 16 vols. (Milan, 1953–62), 15, Nell'Unità italiana (1859–1900), 387–455, esp. 395–424.

15 See Colombo, Come si governava Milano, 37.

16 Colombo underlines that the works of renovation had both practical functions (improving hygienic conditions and communications) and more subtle political and cultural aims; see Colombo, Come si governava Milano, 37–9. In his recent work on Bologna, Axel Körner has called for a re-examination of the traditional image of fine secolo Italy as ‘a nation obsessed with its own traditions’, indifferent to foreign debates about modernity. He has suggested that Italian cultural policies in the decades following Unification were often a means of engaging with the European experience of modernity in its aesthetic manifestation represented by modernism; see Körner, Axel, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (New York and London, 2009), esp. 2–3 and 264–6Google Scholar. The reference for an ‘imagined national community’ is, of course, to Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rept. London and New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

17 Arrigo Boito, ‘“Case nuove” o le rovine di Milano’ (1866), in Boito, Arrigo, Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi (Verona, 1942), 11Google Scholar. Similar shouts of dismay were heard in France and came from poets such as Baudelaire, Hugo and Bouilhet; see Di Benedetto, Arnaldo, ‘“Case nuove” o le rovine di Milano’, in Arrigo Boito, ed. Morelli, Giovanni (Venice, 1994), 15–33Google Scholar.

18 ‘ogni giorno sparisce una memoria antica, per raddrizzare una contrada, per far luogo ad una casa più grande’: Romussi, Carlo, Milano nei suoi monumenti (Milan, 1875), 396Google Scholar.

19 ‘[Milano] non è la necropoli archeologica […] Milano non ha ad ogni piè sospinto le lapidi indicatrici della grandezza passata, ma quelle che indicano la grandezza presente; non ha i monumenti della morte…’: Sacconi, Luigi, Auguri all'Italia ed omaggio a Milano (Milan, 1870), 10Google Scholar. The obvious implied term of comparison here is Rome, a city burdened with the weight of its past.

20 Most of the essays are available in an English translation in either of the two following editions: Nora, Pierre, ed., Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, 4 vols., trans. Mary Trouille (Chicago, 2001–10)Google Scholar, and Nora, Pierre, ed., Realms Of Memory: The Construction Of The French Past, 3 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 1996–8)Google Scholar.

21 Nora himself uses the term ‘crystallized’ in his ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989), 7–24, 7.

22 For Italy see, for instance, Tobia, Bruno, Una patria per gli Italiani: Spazi, itinerari, monumenti nell'Italia unita, 1870–1900 (Bari, 1991)Google Scholar; Isnenghi, Mario, ed., I luoghi della memoria, 3 vols. (Bari, 1996–7)Google Scholar; and Porciani, Ilaria, La festa della nazione: rappresentazione dello Stato e spazi sociali nell'Italia unita (Bologna, 1997)Google Scholar.

23 Nora, ‘General Introduction’, in Rethinking France, 1, The State, vii–xxii, here xviii. The increasing unpredictability of the future, as the modern, linear concept of time arises in the late eighteenth century, is also the main reason for the proliferation of ‘memory sites’ in the nineteenth century. On the modern concept of time, see Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985)Google Scholar.

24 Rigney, Ann, ‘Embodied Communities: Commemorating Robert Burns, 1859’, Representations, 115/1 (2011), 71–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 77.

25 Of course, the model is more complicated: memory can remain static for a given period of time, and some aspects of it are more prone to change than others.

26 Mosse, George L., The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca and London, 1996), 7–8 and 50–51Google Scholar.

27 Agulhon, Maurice, ‘La “statuomanie” et l'histoire’, Ethnologie française, 8/1 (1978), 145–72Google Scholar.

28 See, for instance, Cohen, William, ‘Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31/3 (1989), 491–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tobia, Una patria per gli Italiani; and Quinault, Roland, ‘The Cult of the Centenary, c. 1784–1914’, Historical Research, 71/176 (1998), 303–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 ‘Uomo di pietra’ (in Milanese dialect ‘omm de preja’) is the name of an ancient Roman sculpture in Milan representing a man wearing a toga. Its location changed several times and the original head was removed and replaced with a new one in the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the Milanese used to leave satirical political messages near the sculpture, a practice that gave its name to a satirical paper (L'uomo di pietra, 1856–9); see Ogliari, Francesco, Le statue di Milano (Pavia, 2002), 45–7Google Scholar.

30 The poem, dedicated to sculptor Jean-Pierre Dantan, was published in an article by Ralph, , ‘Une soirée chez Verdi’, L'Art musical, 22 February 1866, 92–3Google Scholar, here 92. For an English translation of this article, see Conati, Marcello, ed., Encounters with Verdi, trans. Stokes, Richard (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 44–53Google Scholar.

31 Verdi's second librettist for Don Carlos was Camille du Locle. News that the bust had been finished appeared in L'Art musical on 1 and 8 February 1866 (70 and 79). The latter issue also quoted comments on the sculpture by M. de Thémines (alias Achille de Lauzières), writing in La Patrie. The episode was thus clearly advertised in several French newspapers.

32 See Pougin, Arthur, Vita aneddotica di Verdi (repr. Florence, 2001), 121Google Scholar; Alberti, Annibale, ed., Verdi intimo: Carteggio di Giuseppe Verdi con il Conte Opprandino Arrivabene (1861–1886) (Milan, 1931), 75Google Scholar; and Conati, Verdi, 48–9. Verdi himself commented on the bust in letters to Tito Ricordi (28 January 1866) and Arrivabene (16 February 1866); see Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford and New York, 1993), 509 and 853Google Scholar; and Verdi intimo, 68–9. Three copies of this bust, slightly different in size but all dating from 1866, are preserved at the Musée Carnavalet; see Sorel, Philippe, ‘Catalogue sommaire des œuvres sérieuses de Dantan Jeune conservées au Musée Carnavalet’, in Dantan Jeune: Caricatures et portraits de la société romantique, Collections du Musée Carnavalet (Paris, 1989), 181–252, here 236Google Scholar.

33 The traditional view of Verdi as a ‘political’ composer has received considerable musicological attention in recent years. For a revisionist perspective on Verdi reception in connection with the Italian Risorgimento, see Parker, Roger, “Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati”: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma, 1997), esp. 19–30 and 83–97Google Scholar; Smart, Mary Ann, ‘Liberty On (and Off) the Barricades: Verdi's Risorgimento Fantasies’, in Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (Oxford and New York, 2001), 103–18Google Scholar; and Stamatov, Peter, ‘Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi's Operas in the 1840s’, American Sociological Review, 67/3 (2002), 345–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more or less strenuous support of the traditional view, see Martin, George W., ‘Verdi, Politics, and “Va, pensiero”: The Scholars Squabble’, The Opera Quarterly, 21/1 (2005), 109–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gossett, Philip, ‘“Edizioni distrutte” and the Significance of Operatic Choruses During the Risorgimento’, in Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Johnson, Victoria, Fulcher, Jane F. and Ertman, Thomas (Cambridge, 2007), 181–242CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 See Basini, Laura, ‘Cults of Sacred Memory: Parma and the Verdi Centennial Celebrations of 1913’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 13/2 (2001), 141–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 142–3. The sheer increase in the number of Verdi medals issued after 1901 is apparent in the collections described in Pagani, Giorgio Nataletti-Antonio, ‘Le medaglie di Giuseppe Verdi’, in Verdi: studi e memorie (Rome, 1941), 401–82Google Scholar and Tintori, Giampiero, ‘Le medaglie verdiane nelle collezioni del Museo teatrale alla Scala’, in Atti del III° congresso internazionale di studi verdiani (Parma, 1974), 587–606Google Scholar.

35 Among the earliest (not only Italian) tributes to Verdi of this kind are a few medals dating from 1850, 1867 and 1872. They are all reproduced in Nataletti-Pagani, Le medaglie di Giuseppe Verdi, 403–6.

36 As is well known, the opera's premiere in Paris was hardly a success; it is usually described as a succès d'estime; see Budden, Julian, Verdi (London, 1993), 96Google Scholar. Critics’ responses overall reflected the national (besides musical) importance of the event. For a selection of press articles, see Gartioux, Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlos.

37 See Walker, Frank, ‘Vincenzo Gemito and his Bust of Verdi’, Music & Letters, 30/1 (1949), 44–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As early as 1854, however, Tito Ricordi had commissioned a bust of Verdi from Vincenzo Luccardi. The sculpture was intended for Ricordi's house, although it remained exposed in the Ricordi shop for some time together with a bust of Rossini. Apparently, the Verdi bust was also displayed at the Rome Exposition that year. In 1859, by then unhappy with the sculpture, Luccardi decided to produce a new one, which, to Verdi's great regret, was damaged en route to Sant'Agata in 1860; see the correspondence in Genesio, Laura, ed., Carteggio Verdi–Luccardi (Parma, 2008), 123–4, 130–33 and 138–42Google Scholar; and Walker, Frank, The Man Verdi (London, 1962), 310–11Google Scholar.

38 Paris did not hear Aida until April 1876, when the opera was first staged at the Théâtre Italien. The premiere at the Opéra took place on 22 March 1880; see Kaufman, Verdi, 530–31.

39 ‘La idea che si eriga un monumento marmoreo ad un illustre vivente mette i brividi dello sgomento a certuni’: Dottor Verità [Leone Fortis], ‘Arte italiana. La statua a Verdi’, Il pungolo, 20–21 April 1880, 3. Similar comments can be read in an article from L'illustrazione italiana, 18 April 1880, 243, reproduced in Petrobelli, Pierluigi, Di Gregorio Casati, Marisa and Matteo Mossa, Carlo, eds., Carteggio Verdi-Ricordi: 1880–1881 (Parma, 1988), 244Google Scholar.

40 ‘Certo l'uomo illustre che deve essere tradotto in statua di marmo deve essere di una statura scultoria – moralmente parlando – […] certo bisogna che la sua fama, che la sua gloria sieno ormai, per virtù propria, sottratte alla discussione contemporanea – che l'una e l'altra siano tali da rendere impossibile che nulla più le offuschi o le scemi’ (‘Of course the famous man whose portrait is made in marble needs have a statuesque stature – morally speaking – […] of course his fame and glory need already to be certain to his contemporaries – and unlikely to fade’): Fortis, ‘Arte italiana’. The most famous exception made for a living composer in Italy is that of Rossini, whose monument in Pesaro was built in 1864. On a much earlier example abroad, Louis-François Roubiliac's Handel monument in Vauxhall Gardens from 1738, see Aspden, Suzanne, ‘“Fam'd Handel Breathing, tho’ Transformed to Stone”: The Composer as Monument’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 55/1 (2002), 39–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 ‘È parso che quei quattro sommi dovrebbero avere qualcosa da dirsi in fatto di arte, e che a metterli assieme non si farebbe che tradurre in marmo la storia della musica italiana del nostro secolo’ (‘It seemed that those four greats should have something to tell each other as to art, and that by bringing them together one would express through marble the history of Italian music of our century’): Fortis, ‘Arte italiana’. The statue of Verdi was sculpted by Francesco Barzaghi, while that of Bellini by Ambrogio Borghi. For more on these events, see the letters and newspaper articles in Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi: 1880–1881, 31–4, 40–43, 94–8, 242–61 and 313–16.

42 See Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi: 1880–1881, 243. The prefect was the representative sent by the Italian government; see La perseveranza, 26 October 1881, 2.

43 ‘L'onore reso ad un maestro vivente sarà stimolo e guida ai giovani, che non sempre si commovono agli onori d'oltre tomba’: Lodovico Melzi, speech printed in La perseveranza, 26 October 1881, 2.

44 Performances took place in the summer and autumn 1868 at the Teatro Brunetti in Bologna, the Teatro Re in Milan, the Teatro Gallo San Benedetto in Venice and possibly in Bergamo; see Filebo, ‘Critica e rassegna musicale’, Rivista bolognese di scienze, lettere, arti e scuole, June 1868, 550–8; Il mondo artistico, 11 October 1868, 7; and Il matrimonio segreto … riprodotto nel Teatro Gallo San Benedetto in Venezia l'autunno 1868, printed libretto (Milan, n.d.).

45 ‘Cimarosa's opera Il matrimonio segreto is thus a monument of art and a majestic monument’: Corinno Mariotti, in GMM, 6 September 1868, 289. See also Filippo Filippi's statement, quoted later.

46 Filebo, ‘Critica e rassegna musicale’, 558. The ‘resurrectional’ idea was also common in France at around the same time. A rediscovery of the old operatic repertoire had been taking place there since the 1850s, while already in the first half of the nineteenth century early instrumental and choral music had become the object of a renewed interest; see Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 2005); and Willson, Flora, ‘Classic Staging: Pauline Viardot and the 1859 Orphée Revival’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 22/3 (2010), 301–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the changes in repertory and the formation of the music canon idea during the nineteenth century, see Weber, William, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar.

47 ‘[Il matrimonio segreto] era nuovo quanto ora ci apparisce arcaico e disusato siffattamente da trovarsi perciò troppo lontano dal gusto, dalle tendenze, dal progresso, dalle innovazioni tanto felicemente operate dai molti luminari che succedettero al fortunato allievo di Piccinni.’ (‘[Il matrimonio segreto] was once as new as it is now archaic and obsolete: too distant from the taste, the trends, the progress, the innovations so successfully brought about by the many luminaries that came after Piccinni's successful pupil.’): Mariotti, GMM, 6 September 1868, 289. For Mozart performances in Milan, see footnote 52.

48 Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 8. Hayden White has called attention to Nietzsche's critical views of nineteenth-century beliefs in history as an ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ discipline. According to White, Nietzsche's historical thought corresponded to the beginning of the ‘crisis of historicism’ and the opening of the ‘third’ phase of the nineteenth-century historical imagination; see White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1975), 40–41Google Scholar.

49 ‘Il nostro secolo è idolatra del passato. Archeologo instancabile, esso ricerca i monumenti de’ padri, ricompone faticosamente le spoglie del tempo, scrive storie, critiche, biografie’: Strafforello, Gustavo, ‘Saggi filosofici: Natura’, Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, 17/58 (1869), 246–60Google Scholar, here 246.

50 ‘Noi siamo dei grandi restauratori e riparatori del passato […] il passato stesso è come divenuto sacro per noi’: Pasquale Villari, ‘L'insegnamento della storia: discorso inaugurale per l'anno accademico 1868–69’, originally printed in La scienza del popolo, 51/6 (1869), available at http://www.liberliber.it/mediateca/libri/v/villari/l_insegnamento_della_storia/pdf/l_inse_p.pdf (here 4, accessed 31 October 2012).

51 Historical consciousness is a prerequisite of modernity since a ‘modern’ standpoint makes sense only insofar as it is differentiated from a position situated in the past; see Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Lawrence, Frederick G. (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 6Google Scholar.

52 In Milan, particularly from the late 1870s, the forgotten eighteenth-century comic opera repertoire started to be rediscovered. Some theatres, such as the Santa Radegonda, were more prone than others to reviving this repertoire. In this respect, see the ‘revivalist’ proposal by Pompeo Cambiasi, originally in GMM, 12 April 1878, quoted in Valsecchi, Raffaella, ‘Teatri d'opera a Milano: 1861–1880’, in Milano musicale: 1861–1897, ed. Antolini, Bianca Maria (Lucca and Milan, 1999), 3–20, here 13–14Google Scholar. Music critic Francesco D'Arcais also encouraged revivals of ‘ancient’ Italian operas in Turin and Milan in the 1860s, many of which were in fact staged in Florence during those years; see Bianca Maria Antolini, ‘Rappresentazioni rossiniane e dibattito critico in Italia nel decennio 1860–70’, in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi, Atti dei convegni Lincei, 110 (Rome, 1994), 121–48, esp. 133–4. Mozart performances in Milan remained, however, extremely rare. Don Giovanni was the only Mozart opera staged (twice, in 1871 and 1881) at La Scala from 1836 until the end of the century. The most often performed Mozart opera, it appeared overall seven times on Milanese stages between 1861 and 1897; see Cambiasi, La Scala, 278–9, 304–5 and 308–9; and Raffaella Valsecchi and Bianca Maria Antolini, ‘Cronologia sintetica delle rappresentazioni d'opera nei teatri milanesi: 1861–1897’, in Milano musicale, 43–59. On the reception of two Mozart operas in Italy during the nineteenth century, see Petrobelli, Pierluigi, ‘Don Giovanni in Italia: la fortuna dell'opera ed il suo influsso’, Analecta musicologica, 18 (1978), 30–51Google Scholar, and Beghelli, Marco, ‘La precoce fortuna delle “Nozze di Figaro” in Italia’, in Giacomo Fornari, ed., Mozart: gli orientamenti della critica moderna, Atti del convegno internazionale, Cremona, 24–26 novembre 1991, ed. Giacomo Fornari (Lucca, 1994), 181–224Google Scholar.

53 See Filebo, ‘Critica e rassegna musicale’, 554–8, 558.

54 ‘Il pubblico ha ragione d'entusiasmarsi […] ma hanno torto gli esagerati di gridare al miracolo ad ogni nota, ad ogni battuta, mentre in buona fede io credo che gridino e si scalmanino tanto per ingannare in qualche modo l'effetto reale e spontaneo dello sbadiglio, a cui si avrebbero abbandonato 10 anni fa, quando non c'era questa febbre di reazione d'oggidì, questa smania d'anti-progresso, a cui tutto serve di pretesto, anche il nome rispettabile di Cimarosa’: Filippo Filippi, ‘Il matrimonio segreto e la musica prerossiniana’, Il mondo artistico, 19 July 1868, 2–3, here 2.

55 I take Filippi's use of the term ‘historical’ in Alois Riegl's sense: ‘Everything that has been and is no longer we call historical’; Riegl, Alois, ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin’, Oppositions, 25 (1982), 21–51Google Scholar, here 21.

56 Busts appeared at the Teatro Carcano in Milan, in Trieste and in a church in Genoa; see GMM, 22 November 1868, 380, and Carlo Matteo Mossa, ‘Una “Messa” per la storia’, in Messa per Rossini: la storia, il testo, la musica, ed. Michele Girardi and Pierluigi Petrobelli, Quaderni dell'ISV 5 (1988), 11–78, here 18. The idea that a composer had to attend the premieres or important performances of his works had still not been completely abandoned, not in Italy at least, and might have played a part in the proliferation of busts when he was not present.

57 Andreas Huyssen has argued that a desire for permanence lies at the very heart of the need for the monumental, particularly in the nineteenth century, when an increasing awareness of the ephemeral had been arising; see Huyssen, Andreas, ‘Monumental Seduction’, New German Critique, 69 (1996), 181–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 188 and 192.

58 See Philip Gossett, ‘Omaggio a (liberazione da) Rossini’, in Messa per Rossini, 7–10, here 7–8.

59 ‘monumenti eterni che il tempo non valse a distruggere, e che ora risplendono di luce più viva che mai’: Francesco d'Arcais, L'opinione, quoted from GMM, 22 November 1868, 379. It is interesting to observe, as Matthew Head has done for the German-speaking countries in an earlier period, how the practice of building memorials to composers developed hand in hand with a new way of thinking about their compositions, with the formation of a long-lasting music canon; see Head, Matthew, ‘Music with “No Past”? Archaeologies of Joseph Haydn and The Creation’, 19th-Century Music, 23 (2000), 191–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 197–8.

60 D'Arcais, L'opinione, in GMM, 22 November 1868, 379; and GMM, 6 December 1868, 399 (‘il più splendido monumento che si potesse erigere alla memoria di Rossini’).

61 For a thorough account of historical and musical aspects concerning the Mass, see Messa per Rossini.

62 ‘una semplice opera d'arte’, ‘un semplice concerto musicale’: Verdi, letters to Camillo Casarini (10 November 1869) and Giulio Ricordi (18 November 1869), in Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 217–19, here 217 and 218. For Verdi's wish that the Mass be locked away in an archive, see his proposal published in the GMM, 22 November 1868, 379.

63 See Rehding, Alexander, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York and Oxford, 2009), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Rehding draws, for instance, on Nora's concept of ‘memory site’ (12–13), nineteenth-century historicism and philological interests (chapter 5) and Wagner's personal views on monuments and monumentality (chapter 3, esp. 82–4).

65 Rehding, Music and Monumentality, 27.

66 In his review of Rehding's book, James Garratt makes a similar point, warning against ‘the quest to retain a unified conception of monumentality’: Garratt, , review in Music & Letters, 92/3 (2011), 489–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 491.

67 I am aware that one implication of my use of the adjective ‘anti-monumental’ is that all monuments are ‘big’. However, I am using this adjective here only to suggest that the opposite is the case.

68 ‘Ei si nomò: due secoli, / l'un contro l'altro armato, / sommessi a lui si volsero, / come aspettando il fato; / ei fe' silenzio, ed arbitro / s'assise in mezzo a lor’ (‘He proclaimed himself: two centuries, / set armed against each other, / turned to him, subdued and / as if waiting for their fate. / He hushed them up, and arbiter / he sat between them’). It is hard not to think of Verdi when one reads these and other lines from Alessandro Manzoni's Il cinque maggio (1821). Manzoni wrote his ode immediately after Napoleon's death in Saint Helena, an event that deeply struck him and encouraged him to reflect on the passing of time and human glory. In his youth, Verdi composed a setting of this ode; see Phillips-Matz, Verdi, 30.

69 ‘noi crediamo che in questo eclettismo intelligente stia il principale carattere della musica Verdiana – e naturalmente in un'epoca di transizione come la nostra, in questo carattere sta il suo pregio, e la causa prima del grande successo anche del Don Carlos’: Fortis, Il pungolo, 27 March 1868, 1–2, here 1.

70 The premiere took place on 10 January 1884. The opera had last been performed at La Scala in the 1878–9 carnival season.

71 See Del Cueto, Carlos, ‘The Death of Italian Opera’, Opera, 62/5 (2011), 510–18, esp. 510 and 512Google Scholar.

72 Don Carlos for the Paris Opéra and La forza del destino (1862) for the Imperial Theatre of St Petersburg.

73 One of the consequences of these difficulties was the shift from the central to the municipal management of the theatres. On the Milan case, see Piazzoni, Irene, ‘La cessione dei teatri demaniali ai comuni: il caso di Milano (1860–1872)’, Storia in Lombardia, 13/1 (1994), 5–72Google Scholar. While a sense of musical, cultural and political crisis was no doubt widespread in post-Unification Italy, it has, perhaps, been overemphasised in literature on the period. For a revisionist stance, see Körner, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy.

74 Del Cueto makes a similar point; see his Opera in 1860s Milan, 185.

75 ‘quel colosso che è anello fra un grande passato ed un più grande avvenire’: Sangiorgi, Monitore di Bologna, 28 October 1867, 1–2, quoted from Le opere di Giuseppe Verdi a Bologna, 157; ‘arbitro fra due secoli, fra due scuole, fra due genti’: Corinno Mariotti, GMM, 29 December 1867, 410.

76 For other reviews underlining the variety of styles characterising Verdi's opera, see Filippi, article for La perseveranza, reprinted in GMM, 10 November 1867, 353–6, esp. 354; and Filippi, ‘Studio analitico sul Don Carlo di Giuseppe Verdi (I),’ GMM, 31 January 1869, 33–5, esp. 34–5.

77 See Verdi's letter to Emile Perrin, 21 July 1865, in Günther, ‘La Genèse de Don Carlos’ (1972), 30.

78 ‘Così nel D. Carlos sento sempre parlare di qualche Duetto, dell'aria del V atto, ma giammai del Terz'atto che è veramente il punto culminante, e, dirò così il cuore del Dramma; né mai della scena dell'Inquisizione che si eleva di qualche poco sugli altri pezzi’: Verdi's letter to Giulio Ricordi, 7 August 1869, quoted in Oberdorfer, Aldo, ed., Giuseppe Verdi: autobiografia dalle lettere (Milan, 2006), 469, f. 19Google Scholar; English translation of this quotation in Chusid, Martin, ‘The Inquisitor's Scene in Verdi's Don Carlos: Thoughts on the Drama, Libretto, and Music’, in Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, ed. Wolf, Eugene K. and Roesner, Edward H. (Madison, 1990), 505–34, here 505Google Scholar. Verdi's concern for the duet was also described by some nineteenth-century observers: ‘Sappiamo però che Verdi ci tiene moltissimo – ed a ragione – e che non si stancò mai di raccomandare la esecuzione di questo duetto’ (‘We know, however, that Verdi cares a lot about it – and he is right – and that he has never grown tired of urging the performance of this duet’): Fortis, Il pungolo, 28 March 1868, 1–3, 1.

79 See Martin Chusid, ‘The Inquisitor's Scene’, 528–30. For other occasions on which Verdi recalled this scene, see his letter to Cesare De Sanctis, 22 March 1871, in Giuseppe Verdi: autobiografia dalle lettere, 466–7; and his letter to Giulio Ricordi, 18 May 1883, in Cella, Franca, Ricordi, Madina and Di Gregorio Casati, Marisa, eds., Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi: 1882–1885 (Parma, 1994), 109–10Google Scholar. For more details on the 1900 excerpt, and for a study of the reception of the Inquisitor scene and Don Carlos in connection with listening practices in Paris in the 1860s, see Flora Willson's forthcoming article on the topic. My thanks to Flora for sharing an early version of this article with me.

80 ‘L'indeterminatezza delle forme è tale, il dramma è così rigorosamente espresso, la parola seguita con tanto acume di filosofia, che l’aria di Filippo II e il duetto così detto dell'inquisizione, si possono chiamare aria e duetto nientre altro che per modo di dire…’: Filippi, ‘Lettere parigine (I): D. Carlos di Verdi’, La perseveranza, 19 March 1867, 1–2, here 2.

81 The innovative character of Filippi's study resides in its being one of the earliest Italian attempts, apart from Abramo Basevi's Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Florence, 1859), at a close reading of a music score.

82 ‘Appena il conte di Lerma ha annunziato l'arrivo del Grande Inquisitore, dai primi accordi dell'orchestra si capisce che si ha da fare con una musica nuova, piena di sensi reconditi e fatali. […] i suoni dell'orchestra escono dalla sue [dell'Inquisitore] viscere, le più profonde. […] questo passo […] è il lugubre ritornello di tutto il duetto, ma con passaggi ed accordi variatissimi, sopra un movimento ritmico insistente. […] e così finisce lo stupendo duetto che il pubblico non può gustare subito, ma che diviene con parecchie udizioni una delle cose più interessanti, più belle, più filosofiche dello spartito’: Filippi, ‘Studio analitico sul Don Carlos di Giuseppe Verdi (VII)’, GMM, 19 September 1869, 327–30, here 328–30.

83 Among the most interesting reviews, besides Filippi's, see those in the Gazzetta di Milano (26 and 31 March 1868), Il pungolo (27 and 28 March 1868) and the Gazzetta di Venezia (reprinted in ‘Supplemento alla GMM’, 21 March 1869). For some French reviews, see Paris-Magazine (17 March 1867), Le Moniteur universel (18 March 1867) and La Gazette de France (19 March 1867), all in Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlos: Dossier de presse parisienne.

84 Printed sources, on the other hand, usually defined it a ‘scène et duo’ or ‘duetto’; see de Van, Gilles, Verdi's Theatre: Creating Drama through Music (Chicago and London, 1998), 275Google Scholar.

85 ‘F. F.’ was also the signature to an article about the musica dell'avvenire in the Gazzetta di Milano, 19 March 1868, 1–2. Rosita Tordi suggests that Giuseppe Rovani, co-owner of the Gazzetta and opponent of Wagner and his school, was the commissioner of both articles (which were certainly not by Filippi); see Tordi, Rosita, Il manto di Lindoro: Rovani e il teatro d'opera (Rome, 1995), 65–70Google Scholar.

86 Fortis, Il pungolo, 26–27–28 March 1868.

87 ‘a scrivere oramai tutta un'opera sul modello di quel duetto fra Filippo II e il Grande Inquisitore, che è, lo ripetiamo, la più completa condanna del sistema wagneriano-mefistofelico’: ‘F. F.’, in Gazzetta di Milano, 31 March 1868, 1–2, here 2.

88 ‘Quel duetto è un miracolo di arte, ma è il nec plus ultra a cui può giungere il recitativo indeterminato, la melopea senza misura ritmica’: ‘F. F.’, in Gazzetta di Milano, 31 March 1868, 2. During the 1860s, the term melopea was of common use in Italy and stood for a melody lacking well-defined rhythmic qualities (which were thought to characterise Italian melodies). Melopea generally identified with the melodies of Wagner and the school of the future; see Bernardoni, Virgilio, ‘La teoria delle melodia vocale nella trattatistica italiana: 1790–1870’, Acta Musicologica, 62/1 (1990), 29–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 57–61.

89 ‘quel pezzo di musica senza melodia ritmica, dove la linea melodica segue inflessibilmente la parola con una brevità classica […] è insieme una gloriosa vittoria conseguita da Verdi costrettosi a rinnegare la spontaneità del suo ingegno per far della melopea, e la disfatta dei musicisti dell'avvenire; nessuno della scuola antimelodica e antiritmica arriverà certo a far cosa più classicamente indiscutibile…’: ‘F. F.’, Gazzetta di Milano, 26 March 1868, 1–2, here 2.

90 While modernity rebels against tradition, it in fact also establishes its own tradition: what is ‘new’ (that is, not merely stylish) today will one day become antiquity, a classic; see Baudelaire, Charles, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), in Jonathan Mayne, ed. and trans., The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York, 1964), 1–40, here 13–4Google Scholar; and Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique, 22 (1981), 3–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 4.

91 On the various revisions of the duet, see in particular Rosen, David, ‘Le quattro stesure del duetto Filippo-Posa’, in Atti del II° congresso internazionale di studi verdiani (Parma, 1971), 368–88Google Scholar; Budden, From Don Carlos to Falstaff, 80–98; and Parker, Roger, ‘Philippe and Posa Act II: The Shock of the New’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 14/1–2 (2002), 133–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Most of Verdi's correspondence concerning the duet at the time of its last revision in the early 1880s is reproduced in Günther, Ursula and Carrara Verdi, Gabriella, ‘Der Briefwechsel Verdi–Nuitter–Du Locle zur Revision des Don Carlos’, Analecta musicologica, 15 (1975), 334–401Google Scholar.

92 Roger Parker has explored some of the implications of Verdi's late revisions in his ‘Philippe and Posa Act II’ and in chapter four of his Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, 1997). On a completely different type of revision, which applied to most of Verdi's early operas, see Lawton, David and Rosen, David, ‘Verdi's Non-definitive Revisions: The Early Operas’, in Atti del III° congresso internazionale di studi verdiani, 189–237Google Scholar.

93 Letter to Francesco Florimo, 5 January 1871, in I copialettere, 232–3, here 233.

94 For an introduction to the scapigliatura, see Farinelli, Giuseppe, Scapigliatura: profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti (Rome, 2003)Google Scholar and the much longer, classic account of Mariani, Gaetano, Storia della Scapigliatura (Caltanisetta and Rome, 1967)Google Scholar. On music and the scapigliatura, see Salvetti, Guido, ‘La Scapigliatura milanese e il teatro d'opera’, in Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. Pestelli, Giorgio (Turin, 1977), 567–604Google Scholar, and Kimbell, David, Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 569–95Google Scholar.

95 The revised La forza del destino was first performed at La Scala in February 1869; L'africana and Romeo e Giulietta premiered there in March 1866 and December 1867.

96 See Verdi's letter to Clara Maffei, 13 December 1863, in Giuseppe Verdi: autobiografia dalle lettere, 420–22.

97 ‘l'artista deve scrutar nel futuro, veder nel caos nuovi mondi; e se nella nuova strada vede in fondo in fondo il lumicino, non lo spaventi il buio che l'attornia: cammini, e se qualche volta inciampa e cade, s'alzi e tiri diritto sempre’: Verdi's letter to Vincenzo Torelli, 23 December 1867, in I copialettere, 618–19, here 619.

98 See Verdi's letter to Giuseppe Piroli, 30 May 1868, in Marchesi, Gustavo, ‘Gli anni della forza del destino’, Verdi: bollettino dell'ISV, 2/6 (1966), 1505–42Google Scholar, here 1523.

99 ‘dalle molte bellezze armoniche ed istromentali’, ‘turba degli imitatori’: letter to Florimo, 5 January 1871, 233. The accusation was often heard, both in France and in Italy, at the time of the first performances of Don Carlo.

100 The letter, published in Il pungolo (Naples) on 17 January 1871, was reprinted in the GMM, 22 January 1871, 35.

101 See ‘Rassegna musicale’, Nuova antologia, 30/12 (1875), 876–86, here 877, and 34/8 (1877), 970–9, here 979. Interestingly enough, both articles are signed by G[irolamo] A[lessandro] Biaggi.

102 Laura Basini lists these among the meanings attached to the motto in various sets of late nineteenth-century writings on music; see her ‘Verdi and Sacred revivalism in Post Unification Italy’, 19th-Century Music, 28/2 (2004), 133–59, esp. 145–7. For further examples of the use of the motto, see Filippi's reviews of Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlo, in La perseveranza, 25 March 1881 and 14 January 1884, reproduced respectively in Hans Busch, ed. and trans., Verdi's Otello and Simon Boccanegra (Revised Version) in Letters and Documents, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1988), vol. 2, 666–72, here 669, and Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi: 1882–1885, 405–9, here 408. Filippi sees Verdi's instruction exemplified in the brief ‘benediction’ (the ‘Sostenuto religioso’) of the Gabriele–Fiesco duet of Act I of the new Boccanegra, and in the new prelude to Act II of the revised Don Carlo.

103 ‘Avrei voluto, per così dire, porre un piede sul passato, e l'altro sul presente, e sull'avvenire, ché a me non fa paura la musica dell'avvenire’: Verdi's letter to Florimo, 5 January 1871, 232.

104 Letter to Florimo, 5 January 1871, 233.

105 ‘Dunque, né passato né avvenire! È vero che io ho detto: “Torniamo all'antico”, ma io intendo l'antico, che è base, fondamento, solidità; io intendo quell'antico che è stato messo da parte dalle esuberanze moderne, ed a cui si dovrà ritornare presto o tardi infallibilmente. Per ora lasciamo che il torrente straripi. Gli argini si faranno dopo’: Verdi's letter to Giulio Ricordi, 26 December 1883, in I copialettere, 629.

106 As it happens, Don Carlo fell out of the repertory in Italy as elsewhere in the late nineteenth century, and was rarely staged until at least the second decade of the twentieth century; for a brief performance history, see Giorgio Gualerzi, ‘Un secolo di “Don Carlo”’, in Atti del II° congresso internazionale di studi verdiani, 494–504.

107 The ‘unoperatic’ (political) quality of the material for these pieces was also remarked upon by some nineteenth-century commentators. In France, Théophile Gautier stated that ‘cette conversation politique et religieuse n'était pas aisée à mettre en musique, mais Verdi s'en est tiré magistralement’ (‘this political and religious conversation was not easily to render in music, but Verdi came through it brilliantly’): Le Moniteur universel, 18 March 1867, quoted from Gartioux, Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlos, 105. Fortis claimed that in Philip and the Inquisitor one could see synthesised ‘due principi da secoli in lotta, l'Altare e il Trono, quell'atmosfera storica e morale, che la musica soltanto può rendere’ (‘two principles which have been in fight with each other for centuries, the Altar and the Throne; that historical and moral atmosphere which only music can represent’): Il pungolo, 28 March 1868, 1. The Philip–Posa duet was described as being ‘di un genere affatto nuovo; è la politica trasportata nel campo della musica’ (‘of an entirely new kind; it is politics brought into music’): Gazzetta di Venezia, 12 March 1869, reprinted in ‘Supplemento alla GMM’, 21 March 1869, 3. See also Budden, From Don Carlos to Falstaff, 16.

108 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 8. Of course, this emphasis on the present, on the contingent had already been indicated as an important feature of modern art by Baudelaire in his The Painter of Modern Life; see Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC, 1987), 46–58Google Scholar.

109 Kermode, Frank, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1983), 16Google Scholar.

110 Musil, Robert, ‘Monuments’, in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (Hygiene, 1987), 61–4, 61Google Scholar.

111 Verdi's letter to Arrigo Boito, 29 March 1862, quoted from Conati, Marcello and Medici, Mario, eds., The Verdi-Boito Correspondence, trans. Weaver, William (Chicago and London, 1994), xiiiGoogle Scholar.

112 Arrigo Boito, ‘Un torso’ (1862), in Boito, Tutti gli scritti, 15–8, here 15.