Encountering theimprovvisatricein Italian Opera

Abstract

Giovanni Pacini's Saffo (1840), while virtually unknown today, was wildly popular with nineteenth-century audiences and critics, who called the opera Pacini's most sophisticated and unusual to date. This Romanticized portrayal of the fabled poet/singer from ancient Greece ends with the heroine's suicidal leap and features a musical structure built upon dramatic, confrontational ensembles. Saffo's final mad scene, however, centers around the character's performance of a supposedly improvised solo song. I suggest this moment was Pacini's attempt to represent not only the ancient poet but the modern improvvisatrice, that female improviser of sung poetry made famous in Madame de Staël's 1807 novel Corinne. Now overshadowed by caricatures of capricious divas, the figure of the improvvisatrice offers new ways of understanding both the popularity of Pacini's opera and the era's shifting balance of power between singers and composers. This article places Saffo in a broader context of nineteenth-century poetic improvisation and compares it to Rossini's earlier Il viaggio a Reims, which also featured an improvvisatrice. I argue that the figure of Sappho embodied an ideal of performance in which creation and execution were fused and thus illuminates both the collaborative and elusive nature of nineteenth-century operatic authorship.

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