“Edizioni distrutte” and the significance of operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

Abstract

This article seeks to develop new tools for understanding the importance during the 1840s of operatic choruses to the formation of an Italian national identity. It does so by focusing on Verdi's activities during 1848 and by drawing a parallel between those activities and the repertory of patriotic choruses and hymns written and published in Milan in the wake of the Cinque giornate (March 18–22, 1848). By tracing the conceptual path in this repertory of patriotic hymns and choruses from metaphor during the pre-1848 years through explicit political statement during the revolutionary period in which Milan was temporarily freed from Austrian censorship, it suggests a model for reading the similar path from metaphor in works such as Verdi's Nabucco (1842) to explicit patriotic sentiments in his La battaglia di Legnano (1848). In recent years there has been an effort to question the extent to which post-unification idealization of Verdi's pre-unification role has falsified the historical record. It seems to me that this effort, while worthy, has gone too far and, in its own way, has begun to falsify the historical record. There was, of course, ample reason for the post-unification generation to single Verdi out as the principal musical vate of the Risorgimento. By 1860 his works held a unique position in Italian culture and they maintained that position until his death in 1901 and beyond, with no Italian composer emerging as a serious challenger until Puccini's popularity blossomed at the turn of the twentieth century.

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