Laura Vasilyeva | Johns Hopkins University (original) (raw)

Edited Volumes by Laura Vasilyeva

Articles and Reviews by Laura Vasilyeva

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2021

In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a conce... more In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a concert addressed to 2,292 plants, one in each seat of a red velvet-lined auditorium at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. These hand-selected plants are the leafy audience at a performance of Puccini's 'Crisantemi' string quartet, conducted in honour of healthcare workers amid lockdown measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. Once the usual announcements about silencing cell phones have been made, the camera closes in on four musicians as each bows to the verdant audience and takes a seat. When the music starts, our view advances from behind the musicians into the opera house: the camera scans the initial rows of the orchestra stalls, then moves into the boxes and balconies. In each successive section of the theatre we see the avatars chosen to listen in place of us. Our representatives are docile and beatific-Puccini seems to soothe them. For a moment the wondrous intrusion of the outside world indoors even starts to seem natural, as if the auditorium can hold the whole world within it, as if there is no outside to this windowless world. Opera houses were for most of their existence microcosms to which one could retreat. This has at least been a tenet of their architectural construction. As Eugene J. Johnson tells us in Inventing the Opera House, when the dramatic scene underwent a renaissance in the late 1400s with revivals of ancient Roman comedies, these were soon mounted indoors (12). At the court of Ercole I d'Este in Ferrara in the 1480s, a room was repurposed for drama in which 'curtains were drawn over the windows to make the hall dark, and torches lit to illuminate the scene'. At Mantua in 1501, meanwhile, a theatre was built ex novo that featured a turquoise cloth 'starred with those signs which that very evening were appearing in [the] hemisphere' (16) pinned across the ceiling, thus creating the illusion that the theatre indeed contained the whole world within it. In the decades that followed, theatres were constructed that did sometimes have windows in their auditoria. These tended to be added for ventilation purposes and covered with cloth during performances (40). In the absence of natural light, theatre designers have experimented with various means of illumination and various ways of distributing the light between the auditorium and the stage. By the late 1800s, however, most artificial illumination in the hall during performances had been eliminated. With near-total darkness comes disorientation, the sensation that it is almost impossible to measure where one is in relation to another. In the most

Cambridge Opera Journal , Mar 2017

When the grands opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer were introduced to London audiences as a cluster in t... more When the grands opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer were introduced to London audiences as a cluster in the mid 1800s, critics identified moments of understated musical and dramatic expression, and made little mention of more sensational dimensions, such as their impressive staging. With a focus on the 1849 staging of Le Prophète at the brand-new Royal Italian Opera in London, this article demonstrates that numerous critics were keen to endorse this new opera house, where most of the composer’s works were mounted, and that, to this end, they zeroed in on the most bare and restrained elements in his works so as to invest them with moral and intellectual relevance for Victorian audiences. Approaching Le Prophète as various London critics did is to see it anew and to consider alternatives to recent narratives which have taken material excess as a starting point for understanding the success of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras on the continent.

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2016

Conference Presentations by Laura Vasilyeva

This paper focuses on the moment in the late 1800s when it was first understood that buildings-in... more This paper focuses on the moment in the late 1800s when it was first understood that buildings-including opera houses-were instrumental in climate deterioration. The realization came amid broader research into the carbon cycle-the natural process by which carbon moves between sea, land and air and thus maintains life. First described in the late 1700s, the carbon cycle would soon be revealed to be a vulnerable mechanism. As geologist Antonio Stoppani would declare across a series of remarkable but little studied works in the 1870s, we were in the "anthropozic era," in which the dominant influence on the environment was mankind. Men had "ransacked the earth" for materials, above all to construct and maintain architectural structures, and thus consumed precious carbon resources.

That the built environment was central to Stoppani's discussion of the anthropocene was strikingly prescient: in 2021 the construction, maintenance and destruction of architecture accounts for some 50% of current climate deterioration (Costa Meyer). Built in the thousands across the 1800s alone, opera houses contributed, as all architectural forms would, to environmental deterioration.

Here however I make a bolder claim. If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has articulated it, "most of our [modern] freedoms are energy intensive," the opera house was critical in securing those freedoms. It was at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan that Giuseppe Colombo, a colleague of Stoppani's, collaborated with Thomas Edison to showcase the first-ever networked distribution of electrical power in continental Europe (1883). This mobilized an untold trend in which rapid expansion of networked power relied on electricity's promotion at theaters. This also, however, led to an exponential increase in the amount of carbon combusted and shunted back into the atmosphere in order to generate electricity. Even as Colombo connected La Scala to the electrical grid, moreover, he warned, across several publications, that fossil fuels would be exhausted and at an uneven rate across the world, unleashing geopolitical chaos. The opera house was thus at once a critical site for the establishment of modern energy infrastructures and a focus for discussion about the environmental and political stakes involved.

While scholars have characterized the nineteenth century as a time of important material transfor... more While scholars have characterized the nineteenth century as a time of important material transformations in opera, in which auditoriums were darkened and new- ly-constituted audiences learned to sit in absorbed silence, color transformation with- in auditoria has eluded discussion. Archival sources can nonetheless confirm what scholars have on occasion surmised (Banu, 1989): the now-iconic theatrical aesthetic of red and gold within European opera houses was an invention of the nineteenth century. Until 1800, blue and green predominated in most European theater interi- ors, while red was less common. By the second half of the century, however, hundreds of theaters across Europe were decorated to boast a uniform wash of red with gold trim. Whence this dramatic shift to red and gold? In his 1871 treatise Le Théâtre, architect Charles Garnier details how a predominance of red in auditoria enhances the flush on white-skinned females and flatters their faces with new hues. Much as red tint colored onto black and white photos at mid-century imbued faces with color and motion, the red ambience, reflected from the colored surfaces, would lend such faces character. This paper charts the ascendance of crimson opera-house interiors in Europe, with a focus on representative theaters in France and Italy. In turn, it traces the immediate discursive foundations on which Garnier’s politics of color rested. Other theater architects and critics had also been conscious that red theater surfaces were capable of selective enhancement of the (white) human face in an era in which men and women had ceased to paste white lead onto their faces to conceal their natural hue. This was matched with an awareness that red could, if needed, make faces disappear: as Helmholtz demonstrated at mid-century, red could absorb all but the highest wavelengths of light, and thus was an instrument of near total darkness when auditorium illumination was dimmed. If scholars have started to theorize the role theater walls had in nineteenth-century architectural acoustics, this paper insists the time is ripe for an examination of how their color created visual filters with their own rich cultural histories.

When Richard Wagner created a lowered orchestra pit at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in the 1870s he... more When Richard Wagner created a lowered orchestra pit at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in the 1870s he famously described the decision in terms of concealment; an attempt to hide the means of sound production. In view of the modifications made to numerous opera houses in the decades that followed to create similar orchestra pits, scholars have tended to assume that the Festspielhaus was both the stimulus and model for such spaces. If this tends to flatten out important variations in architectural design among theaters, it also narrates the introduction of orchestra pits from the perspective of audience members alone. While lowered orchestral platforms might have functioned as so-called “mystical chasms” from which sound floated upwards towards awed spectators, these also had a crucial role in the creation of enclosed, protected spaces for musicians.

The 1907 construction of the so-called “golfo mistico” at the preeminent Teatro alla Scala in Milan, under the supervision of Arturo Toscanini, was to a considerable extent an experiment in the creation of a more professional atmosphere than performance at audience level allowed. However much the term golfo mistico betrays a Romantic conception of the space, it was not, I argue, merely coincidental that the pit was constructed in the same moment that trade unions for musicians were establishing themselves. Meanwhile, musicians were also becoming familiar with other sorts of enclosures calibrated to control acoustics and eliminate distractions, in the form of the earliest sound studios. Placing La Scala’s golfo mistico in the context of these dual developments in the music industry at the time, I reveal the extent of the orchestra pit’s entanglements in a musical landscape which increasingly placed musicians at one remove from their audiences; in tandem, I offer a new framework in which to make sense of the new (and enduring) fashion for this architectural innovation.

In 1893 hundreds of critics came to Milan from all over Europe to hear a work that shimmered with... more In 1893 hundreds of critics came to Milan from all over Europe to hear a work that shimmered with a sound until now never associated with its composer. Giuseppe Verdi’s comic opera Falstaff stimulated talk of innovation from the outset: critics remarked that it had infused the Italian musical scene with a new brilliance, and was even an “isolated monument in the history of art”. Recent criticism too has detached this work from its contemporaneous musical landscape; a fetishized anomaly, it has been described as “almost a freak” and “musically and dramatically eccentric”.

Considering the opera from the perspective of sound studies, my paper repositions this “eccentric” work squarely within a nexus of fine secolo operas that reconfigured the relationship between sound, audience, and stage action. While Verdi distanced himself from the 1890s verismo operas of Mascagni and Leoncavallo—and scholars have continued to reinforce that distance—Falstaff’s shifting acoustic planes reveal an untold debt to these composers.

At first blush the idea of Verdi as a deliberate manipulator of acoustic planes seems anachronistic, and sound studies a mere substitute for more familiar discourses about the noumenal and phenomenal. But focus on acoustic parameters enables us to articulate what makes Falstaff distinctive in Verdi’s oeuvre with a precision and concreteness which other approaches lack. The 1890s’ Italian operatic scene is best understood not in terms of
discrete musical initiatives but a broader experiment with sound in which Verdi, much as the veristi, had a stake.

It is a commonplace that in the decades that followed Italian Unification (1859–61), the romance ... more It is a commonplace that in the decades that followed Italian Unification (1859–61), the romance of the risorgimento faded as the obstacles Italians faced in the new nation became all the more visible. The political historian Federico Chabod has shown that the Italians’ more sober outlook was one that post-unification politicians, themselves invested in a new political realism, in fact wanted to promote. Italians were told to "hurry [their] pace and pursue reality, leaving behind affections, dreams, and the sentimental ideal," as one politician put it in 1871, "in order to grasp vigorously hold of the only things that [are] solid and secure: positive science, productivity, and the force that [comes] from both." While we tend to think of nineteenth-century realism in the Italian musical context as an aesthetic associated with the narrative and musical devices of veristi operas from the 1890s in particular, my paper considers this earlier moment in Italian realist thought, and its influence on musical aesthetics. In tandem with the shifts that Chabod describes, music critics started to replace the overstated rhetoric commonly used to describe instrumental and operatic performance in earlier decades with terms that assessed more measurable achievement, such as precision and accuracy. Taking Milanese musical criticism as a case study, this paper explores the influence of political realism on dramatic criticism. It assesses how the terms used to describe conductors and soloists shifted across the 1860s, seventies and eighties and suggests ways in which performance aesthetics changed as conductors and soloists started to conform to new critical ideals.

In 1864 the eminent Italian vocal instructor Francesco Lamperti issued a disclaimer in his new vo... more In 1864 the eminent Italian vocal instructor Francesco Lamperti issued a disclaimer in his new vocal treatise that there was nothing innovative about it. A decade later, the Italian baritone Enrico Delle Sedie opened his new (and now little-known) vocal treatise with a remarkably similar announcement. Both methods went on to become the most influential vocal treatises in Italian conservatoires at the fine secolo, at a time when vocal instruction at these institutions was in crisis. Since the 1850s the crisis had been a recurrent topic in Italian periodicals. Commentators first attributed the crisis to Bellini and Verdi, whose new and unusual canto declamato vocal lines threatened voices in a manner that so-called bel canto vocal lines never had, and left conservatoires unsure how to train their students. These same alarmed commentators insisted that the conservatoires must hold fast to bel canto ideals even as the theater welcomed the fashionable canto declamato. In this climate it was hard to find a vocal treatise that did not insist on its lack of newness in order to make clear its debt to bel canto. But despite Lamperti and Delle Sedie’s disclaimers, the latter’s treatise in fact set Italian vocal instruction on a controversial new course that strained voices further and stimulated intense debate about vocal wear and the limits of human productivity. I reconstruct how these treatises transformed vocalism at the fine secolo and show how the establishment of “fatigue studies” at this time informed all these concerns about vocal wear.

“Franco Faccio has demonstrated that without being famous, nor a baron, nor a knight . . . he can... more “Franco Faccio has demonstrated that without being famous, nor a baron, nor a knight . . . he can conduct an Italian orchestra admirably.” In this snippet from an 1870 article in the Gazzetta Musicale di Milano, Faccio is contrasted with the self-important Hans von Bülow, who visited Milan to conduct the 1870 Beethoven centenary celebrations when Faccio was new at La Scala. Over the next twenty years, Faccio too became famous—but he remained understated. Critics loved the sturdiness of a man no less measured in his moral than musical comportment. Four words spilled continually from their pens: mathematical, precise, consci- entious and scrupulous.
Such a characterization stands out amid the overstated rhetoric of Italian dramatic criti- cism of the 1870s and ’80s. In this paper, I probe the historical and cultural contexts that allowed Faccio to flourish in Milan, and explore how his conducting style meshed with broader aesthetic concerns. Drawing on the minutes of La Scala’s Artistic Commission, the correspondence of leading Milanese intellectuals, and reviews in contemporary periodicals, I piece together a vivid picture of Milanese music history in the period, and of Faccio’s place within that world.
In the 1870s Italians soured on the romance of the Risorgimento and began to desire a Bismarck-inspired political expediency. Letters of Italian politicians indicate that the Milanese wanted to banish the sentimental in favor of the pragmatic. I demonstrate that critics were drawn to Faccio’s clean, reliable execution because it embodied this new mode of action and in the public forum of the theater no less, thus showing Milan to be championing new direc- tions. But critics did not understand singers in these terms—the orchestra could be better co-opted to the civic cause than itinerant soloists, who were valued still for their pathos on stage.
The notion of “precision” in conducting today almost inevitably evokes Toscanini’s stern demands for accuracy, which some claim reveal his desire to emulate Mussolini. But Toscanini also emulated Faccio. Although Toscanini’s authoritarianism was unprecedented in degree, I show that it would have been inconceivable without earlier Liberal ideals and their realization at La Scala under Faccio.

Dictionary Entries by Laura Vasilyeva

The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia, 2014

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2021

In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a conce... more In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a concert addressed to 2,292 plants, one in each seat of a red velvet-lined auditorium at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. These hand-selected plants are the leafy audience at a performance of Puccini's 'Crisantemi' string quartet, conducted in honour of healthcare workers amid lockdown measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. Once the usual announcements about silencing cell phones have been made, the camera closes in on four musicians as each bows to the verdant audience and takes a seat. When the music starts, our view advances from behind the musicians into the opera house: the camera scans the initial rows of the orchestra stalls, then moves into the boxes and balconies. In each successive section of the theatre we see the avatars chosen to listen in place of us. Our representatives are docile and beatific-Puccini seems to soothe them. For a moment the wondrous intrusion of the outside world indoors even starts to seem natural, as if the auditorium can hold the whole world within it, as if there is no outside to this windowless world. Opera houses were for most of their existence microcosms to which one could retreat. This has at least been a tenet of their architectural construction. As Eugene J. Johnson tells us in Inventing the Opera House, when the dramatic scene underwent a renaissance in the late 1400s with revivals of ancient Roman comedies, these were soon mounted indoors (12). At the court of Ercole I d'Este in Ferrara in the 1480s, a room was repurposed for drama in which 'curtains were drawn over the windows to make the hall dark, and torches lit to illuminate the scene'. At Mantua in 1501, meanwhile, a theatre was built ex novo that featured a turquoise cloth 'starred with those signs which that very evening were appearing in [the] hemisphere' (16) pinned across the ceiling, thus creating the illusion that the theatre indeed contained the whole world within it. In the decades that followed, theatres were constructed that did sometimes have windows in their auditoria. These tended to be added for ventilation purposes and covered with cloth during performances (40). In the absence of natural light, theatre designers have experimented with various means of illumination and various ways of distributing the light between the auditorium and the stage. By the late 1800s, however, most artificial illumination in the hall during performances had been eliminated. With near-total darkness comes disorientation, the sensation that it is almost impossible to measure where one is in relation to another. In the most

Cambridge Opera Journal , Mar 2017

When the grands opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer were introduced to London audiences as a cluster in t... more When the grands opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer were introduced to London audiences as a cluster in the mid 1800s, critics identified moments of understated musical and dramatic expression, and made little mention of more sensational dimensions, such as their impressive staging. With a focus on the 1849 staging of Le Prophète at the brand-new Royal Italian Opera in London, this article demonstrates that numerous critics were keen to endorse this new opera house, where most of the composer’s works were mounted, and that, to this end, they zeroed in on the most bare and restrained elements in his works so as to invest them with moral and intellectual relevance for Victorian audiences. Approaching Le Prophète as various London critics did is to see it anew and to consider alternatives to recent narratives which have taken material excess as a starting point for understanding the success of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras on the continent.

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2016

This paper focuses on the moment in the late 1800s when it was first understood that buildings-in... more This paper focuses on the moment in the late 1800s when it was first understood that buildings-including opera houses-were instrumental in climate deterioration. The realization came amid broader research into the carbon cycle-the natural process by which carbon moves between sea, land and air and thus maintains life. First described in the late 1700s, the carbon cycle would soon be revealed to be a vulnerable mechanism. As geologist Antonio Stoppani would declare across a series of remarkable but little studied works in the 1870s, we were in the "anthropozic era," in which the dominant influence on the environment was mankind. Men had "ransacked the earth" for materials, above all to construct and maintain architectural structures, and thus consumed precious carbon resources.

That the built environment was central to Stoppani's discussion of the anthropocene was strikingly prescient: in 2021 the construction, maintenance and destruction of architecture accounts for some 50% of current climate deterioration (Costa Meyer). Built in the thousands across the 1800s alone, opera houses contributed, as all architectural forms would, to environmental deterioration.

Here however I make a bolder claim. If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has articulated it, "most of our [modern] freedoms are energy intensive," the opera house was critical in securing those freedoms. It was at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan that Giuseppe Colombo, a colleague of Stoppani's, collaborated with Thomas Edison to showcase the first-ever networked distribution of electrical power in continental Europe (1883). This mobilized an untold trend in which rapid expansion of networked power relied on electricity's promotion at theaters. This also, however, led to an exponential increase in the amount of carbon combusted and shunted back into the atmosphere in order to generate electricity. Even as Colombo connected La Scala to the electrical grid, moreover, he warned, across several publications, that fossil fuels would be exhausted and at an uneven rate across the world, unleashing geopolitical chaos. The opera house was thus at once a critical site for the establishment of modern energy infrastructures and a focus for discussion about the environmental and political stakes involved.

While scholars have characterized the nineteenth century as a time of important material transfor... more While scholars have characterized the nineteenth century as a time of important material transformations in opera, in which auditoriums were darkened and new- ly-constituted audiences learned to sit in absorbed silence, color transformation with- in auditoria has eluded discussion. Archival sources can nonetheless confirm what scholars have on occasion surmised (Banu, 1989): the now-iconic theatrical aesthetic of red and gold within European opera houses was an invention of the nineteenth century. Until 1800, blue and green predominated in most European theater interi- ors, while red was less common. By the second half of the century, however, hundreds of theaters across Europe were decorated to boast a uniform wash of red with gold trim. Whence this dramatic shift to red and gold? In his 1871 treatise Le Théâtre, architect Charles Garnier details how a predominance of red in auditoria enhances the flush on white-skinned females and flatters their faces with new hues. Much as red tint colored onto black and white photos at mid-century imbued faces with color and motion, the red ambience, reflected from the colored surfaces, would lend such faces character. This paper charts the ascendance of crimson opera-house interiors in Europe, with a focus on representative theaters in France and Italy. In turn, it traces the immediate discursive foundations on which Garnier’s politics of color rested. Other theater architects and critics had also been conscious that red theater surfaces were capable of selective enhancement of the (white) human face in an era in which men and women had ceased to paste white lead onto their faces to conceal their natural hue. This was matched with an awareness that red could, if needed, make faces disappear: as Helmholtz demonstrated at mid-century, red could absorb all but the highest wavelengths of light, and thus was an instrument of near total darkness when auditorium illumination was dimmed. If scholars have started to theorize the role theater walls had in nineteenth-century architectural acoustics, this paper insists the time is ripe for an examination of how their color created visual filters with their own rich cultural histories.

When Richard Wagner created a lowered orchestra pit at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in the 1870s he... more When Richard Wagner created a lowered orchestra pit at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in the 1870s he famously described the decision in terms of concealment; an attempt to hide the means of sound production. In view of the modifications made to numerous opera houses in the decades that followed to create similar orchestra pits, scholars have tended to assume that the Festspielhaus was both the stimulus and model for such spaces. If this tends to flatten out important variations in architectural design among theaters, it also narrates the introduction of orchestra pits from the perspective of audience members alone. While lowered orchestral platforms might have functioned as so-called “mystical chasms” from which sound floated upwards towards awed spectators, these also had a crucial role in the creation of enclosed, protected spaces for musicians.

The 1907 construction of the so-called “golfo mistico” at the preeminent Teatro alla Scala in Milan, under the supervision of Arturo Toscanini, was to a considerable extent an experiment in the creation of a more professional atmosphere than performance at audience level allowed. However much the term golfo mistico betrays a Romantic conception of the space, it was not, I argue, merely coincidental that the pit was constructed in the same moment that trade unions for musicians were establishing themselves. Meanwhile, musicians were also becoming familiar with other sorts of enclosures calibrated to control acoustics and eliminate distractions, in the form of the earliest sound studios. Placing La Scala’s golfo mistico in the context of these dual developments in the music industry at the time, I reveal the extent of the orchestra pit’s entanglements in a musical landscape which increasingly placed musicians at one remove from their audiences; in tandem, I offer a new framework in which to make sense of the new (and enduring) fashion for this architectural innovation.

In 1893 hundreds of critics came to Milan from all over Europe to hear a work that shimmered with... more In 1893 hundreds of critics came to Milan from all over Europe to hear a work that shimmered with a sound until now never associated with its composer. Giuseppe Verdi’s comic opera Falstaff stimulated talk of innovation from the outset: critics remarked that it had infused the Italian musical scene with a new brilliance, and was even an “isolated monument in the history of art”. Recent criticism too has detached this work from its contemporaneous musical landscape; a fetishized anomaly, it has been described as “almost a freak” and “musically and dramatically eccentric”.

Considering the opera from the perspective of sound studies, my paper repositions this “eccentric” work squarely within a nexus of fine secolo operas that reconfigured the relationship between sound, audience, and stage action. While Verdi distanced himself from the 1890s verismo operas of Mascagni and Leoncavallo—and scholars have continued to reinforce that distance—Falstaff’s shifting acoustic planes reveal an untold debt to these composers.

At first blush the idea of Verdi as a deliberate manipulator of acoustic planes seems anachronistic, and sound studies a mere substitute for more familiar discourses about the noumenal and phenomenal. But focus on acoustic parameters enables us to articulate what makes Falstaff distinctive in Verdi’s oeuvre with a precision and concreteness which other approaches lack. The 1890s’ Italian operatic scene is best understood not in terms of
discrete musical initiatives but a broader experiment with sound in which Verdi, much as the veristi, had a stake.

It is a commonplace that in the decades that followed Italian Unification (1859–61), the romance ... more It is a commonplace that in the decades that followed Italian Unification (1859–61), the romance of the risorgimento faded as the obstacles Italians faced in the new nation became all the more visible. The political historian Federico Chabod has shown that the Italians’ more sober outlook was one that post-unification politicians, themselves invested in a new political realism, in fact wanted to promote. Italians were told to "hurry [their] pace and pursue reality, leaving behind affections, dreams, and the sentimental ideal," as one politician put it in 1871, "in order to grasp vigorously hold of the only things that [are] solid and secure: positive science, productivity, and the force that [comes] from both." While we tend to think of nineteenth-century realism in the Italian musical context as an aesthetic associated with the narrative and musical devices of veristi operas from the 1890s in particular, my paper considers this earlier moment in Italian realist thought, and its influence on musical aesthetics. In tandem with the shifts that Chabod describes, music critics started to replace the overstated rhetoric commonly used to describe instrumental and operatic performance in earlier decades with terms that assessed more measurable achievement, such as precision and accuracy. Taking Milanese musical criticism as a case study, this paper explores the influence of political realism on dramatic criticism. It assesses how the terms used to describe conductors and soloists shifted across the 1860s, seventies and eighties and suggests ways in which performance aesthetics changed as conductors and soloists started to conform to new critical ideals.

In 1864 the eminent Italian vocal instructor Francesco Lamperti issued a disclaimer in his new vo... more In 1864 the eminent Italian vocal instructor Francesco Lamperti issued a disclaimer in his new vocal treatise that there was nothing innovative about it. A decade later, the Italian baritone Enrico Delle Sedie opened his new (and now little-known) vocal treatise with a remarkably similar announcement. Both methods went on to become the most influential vocal treatises in Italian conservatoires at the fine secolo, at a time when vocal instruction at these institutions was in crisis. Since the 1850s the crisis had been a recurrent topic in Italian periodicals. Commentators first attributed the crisis to Bellini and Verdi, whose new and unusual canto declamato vocal lines threatened voices in a manner that so-called bel canto vocal lines never had, and left conservatoires unsure how to train their students. These same alarmed commentators insisted that the conservatoires must hold fast to bel canto ideals even as the theater welcomed the fashionable canto declamato. In this climate it was hard to find a vocal treatise that did not insist on its lack of newness in order to make clear its debt to bel canto. But despite Lamperti and Delle Sedie’s disclaimers, the latter’s treatise in fact set Italian vocal instruction on a controversial new course that strained voices further and stimulated intense debate about vocal wear and the limits of human productivity. I reconstruct how these treatises transformed vocalism at the fine secolo and show how the establishment of “fatigue studies” at this time informed all these concerns about vocal wear.

“Franco Faccio has demonstrated that without being famous, nor a baron, nor a knight . . . he can... more “Franco Faccio has demonstrated that without being famous, nor a baron, nor a knight . . . he can conduct an Italian orchestra admirably.” In this snippet from an 1870 article in the Gazzetta Musicale di Milano, Faccio is contrasted with the self-important Hans von Bülow, who visited Milan to conduct the 1870 Beethoven centenary celebrations when Faccio was new at La Scala. Over the next twenty years, Faccio too became famous—but he remained understated. Critics loved the sturdiness of a man no less measured in his moral than musical comportment. Four words spilled continually from their pens: mathematical, precise, consci- entious and scrupulous.
Such a characterization stands out amid the overstated rhetoric of Italian dramatic criti- cism of the 1870s and ’80s. In this paper, I probe the historical and cultural contexts that allowed Faccio to flourish in Milan, and explore how his conducting style meshed with broader aesthetic concerns. Drawing on the minutes of La Scala’s Artistic Commission, the correspondence of leading Milanese intellectuals, and reviews in contemporary periodicals, I piece together a vivid picture of Milanese music history in the period, and of Faccio’s place within that world.
In the 1870s Italians soured on the romance of the Risorgimento and began to desire a Bismarck-inspired political expediency. Letters of Italian politicians indicate that the Milanese wanted to banish the sentimental in favor of the pragmatic. I demonstrate that critics were drawn to Faccio’s clean, reliable execution because it embodied this new mode of action and in the public forum of the theater no less, thus showing Milan to be championing new direc- tions. But critics did not understand singers in these terms—the orchestra could be better co-opted to the civic cause than itinerant soloists, who were valued still for their pathos on stage.
The notion of “precision” in conducting today almost inevitably evokes Toscanini’s stern demands for accuracy, which some claim reveal his desire to emulate Mussolini. But Toscanini also emulated Faccio. Although Toscanini’s authoritarianism was unprecedented in degree, I show that it would have been inconceivable without earlier Liberal ideals and their realization at La Scala under Faccio.