Manon Lescaut: La Scala 1930

Abstract

I want to start polemically. To do so was apt when this article had its first outing, at a musicological conference, and for various reasons I now remain trapped in its mode, one to which I otherwise like to think myself temperamentally unsuited.1 To diminish embarrassment, to frame and distance the tone, I decided then and have decided now to banish for a brief spell the first person singular. In 1983, then, a young British musicologist who shall be temporarily nameless, specializing in nineteenth-century Italian opera and recently domiciled in upstate New York, was offered the opportunity to assist in a significant (and, as it happens, quite lucrative) scholarly fantasy. He was invited to join with others in what Stephen Greenblatt has famously called “the dream of the master text.”2 This dream has of course been spinning on for many centuries, and it will continue to spin, even when we twenty-first-century scholars have become the objects of forgetting. But back then in 1983, in the second half of the last century, the dream was at a musicological high point: encouraged by late modernism's project, it had expanded its purview and hardened its rhetoric; fueled by technological progress, it had taken on a formidable corporeality.

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