Pierpaolo Polzonetti | University of California, Davis (original) (raw)

Books by Pierpaolo Polzonetti

https://www.lim.it/it/saggi/100-tartini-e-la-musica-secondo-natura-9788870962567.html, 2011

Tartini e la musica secondo natura. Lucca: LIM, 2001, reprinted in 2022. 197 pp. Winner of the In... more Tartini e la musica secondo natura. Lucca: LIM, 2001, reprinted in 2022. 197 pp. Winner of the International Prize in Music Studies, “Premio Internazionale Latina di Studi Musicali.”

https://www.lim.it/it/saggi/100-tartini-e-la-musica-secondo-natura-9788870962567.html

This book is a study of Tartini's theories and aesthetics of music, namely how Tartini intended to reproduce natural creative processes. The book also identifies the repertory of oral tradition that Tartini used as a model, showing how he abstracted from that model a set of principles governing music, principles that he freely reapplied in some of his original compositions.

Biography of Giuseppe Tartini: Proofs (bozze): Polzonetti, “Giuseppe Tartini, in Dizionario Biogr... more Biography of Giuseppe Tartini: Proofs (bozze): Polzonetti, “Giuseppe Tartini, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 95 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2019), 95-99.

Eisenstädter Haydn-Berichte 11, 2019

“Haydn und der Mond: von der Utopie zur Revolution.” In Joseph Haydn & die “Neue Welt” (Eisenstäd... more “Haydn und der Mond: von der Utopie zur Revolution.” In Joseph Haydn & die “Neue Welt” (Eisenstädter Haydn-Berichte 11). Edited by Walter Reicher, Christine Siegert, and Wolfgang Fuhrmann, 265-284. Vienna: Hollitzer, 2019

“Librettos and Librettists.” The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia. Edited by Caryl Clark and Sarah Da... more “Librettos and Librettists.” The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia. Edited by Caryl Clark and Sarah Day-O’Connell, 191-196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. An overview of libretti and their literary sources for Haydn's operas and oratorios.

"Mozart and the American Revolution." In The Eighteenth Centuries: An Interdisciplinary Investiga... more "Mozart and the American Revolution." In The Eighteenth Centuries: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, ed. David T. Gies and Cynthia Wall, 202-232. Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 2018.

“Don Giovanni Goes to Prison: Teaching Opera Behind Bars.” Musica Docta: Rivista digitale di Peda... more “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison: Teaching Opera Behind Bars.” Musica Docta: Rivista digitale di Pedagogia e Didattica della musica 6 (2016): 99-104. ABSTRACT: Teaching opera in prison presents challenges, such as limits imposed on printed and recorded material to study it, or the audio-visual technology in the classroom space, yet, no other experience can be so inspiring and rewarding for everybody involved. This essay focuses on teaching opera, in particular Mozart’s Don Giovanni, to imprisoned students in America. It addresses pedagogical challenges on how to teach opera in prison and advocates for the need to leave the ivory tower of academia and engage in social action. If opera is still perceived as an elitist art form, it is because it is artificially kept that way by being practiced, taught, studied, and promoted only among an exclusive sector of our population.

The book investigates Giuseppe Tartini’s original fusion of neo-platonic mysticism and Galilean p... more The book investigates Giuseppe Tartini’s original fusion of neo-platonic mysticism and Galilean pragmatism in his late treatises (1750-1770), and defines his aesthetic of “music according to Nature” in his violin concertos and sonatas written after 1740, when he ceased to exploit the technical virtuosic possibilities of the instrument and started to explore more “natural” approaches to music composition and performance. Some of his late compositions are complex re-elaborations of music of oral tradition. Accordingly, the author of this book offers an interpretation of his musical sketches illustrating the different stages of Tartini’s creative process from transcription to re-composition, and tracks down some of the oral sources used by this musician as models for his own compositions. The study shows that – in line with his scientific orientations – Tartini observed music of oral tradition as if it were a natural phenomenon, and – in line with his neo-platonic beliefs – he did not re-produce these models by imitation, but rather re-created new compositions following the “natural” laws he discovered. This study is the first attempt to find a common denominator between Tartini’s most abstract neo-Platonic and scientific conjectures and his music. It does so by relating the music and ideas of this musician to artistic and scientific trends circulating in Europe during the Age of Sensibility (1740-1760), showing how Tartini and other artists and intellectuals of his time paved the path for Goethe’s concept of organic artistic creation.

How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? The opera... more How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? The operas studied in this volume are populated by gun-toting and slave-holding Quakers, handsome Native Americans, female middle-class political leaders, rebellious British soldiers and generous businessmen. Most of them display an unprecedented configuration of social and gender roles, which led leading composers of the time, including Mozart, Haydn, Anfossi, Piccinni and Paisiello, to introduce far-reaching innovations in the musical and dramatic fabric of Italian opera. Polzonetti presents a fresh perspective on the European cultural reception of American social and political identity. Through detailed but accessible analysis of music examples, including previously unpublished musical sources, the book documents and explains important transformations of opera at the time of Mozart's masterpieces, and its long-term consequences up to Puccini. Shedding new light on familiar and less-familiar operatic works, the study represents groundbreaking research in music, cultural and political history.

Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings togeth... more Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.

Papers by Pierpaolo Polzonetti

Culture, Context, and Criticism, 2012

Naxos Musicology International, 2020

“Is it Proper to Eat or Drink while Listening to Classical Music?” Naxos Musicology International... more “Is it Proper to Eat or Drink while Listening to Classical Music?” Naxos Musicology International (February 11, 2020), https://www.naxosmusicology.com/
The essay is a reflection on the values and rituals of fasting or feasting while listening to music, challenging the modern notion that it is always a good habit to abstain from food and drinks in public concerts of classical music.

and Keywords This article explores how food and drink in opera convey meaning, define relationshi... more and Keywords This article explores how food and drink in opera convey meaning, define relationships, trigger psychophysical reactions, and denote dramatis and singers' personae. It proposes a basic theoretical foundation of " operatic gastromusicology " by outlining five primary functions of food in opera: social, intimate, denotative, medicinal, and dietary. These five functions are exemplified through the analysis of gastronomic signs in Verdi's Traviata. The opera and its performance history illustrate how the production of this opera reflects the changing culture of food and the body. Luchino Visconti's production in Milan's La Scala in 1955, with Maria Callas as the consumptive protagonist, was in this respect a watershed in the history of opera. The singer's rapid and prodigious weight loss prior to this performance triggered an epochal shift in opera culture toward an unprecedented conflation of the dramatis and singer's persona.

“Haydn, Joseph.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Bible and Arts, edited by Timothy Beal. 2 vols. Ox... more “Haydn, Joseph.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Bible and Arts, edited by Timothy Beal. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
The article explores Haydn's enlightened approach to the Bible.

“Opera as Process.” In The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, edited by Anthony R. ... more “Opera as Process.” In The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, edited by Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti, 3-23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

“La scuola de’ maritati de Da Ponte y Martín y Soler (1795): representación de la familia durante... more “La scuola de’ maritati de Da Ponte y Martín y Soler (1795): representación de la familia durante el Terror.” In Los siete mundos de Vicente Martín y Soler: Actas del congreso internacional de Valencia, 14-18 noviembre 2006, ed. Dorothea Link and Leonardo Waisman, 296-307. Valencia: Instituto Valenciano de la Música, 2010.
La scuola de’ maritati (“The School for Spouses”), created in 1795 for the King’s Theatre in London by Da Ponte and Martín y Soler, presents significant points of intersection with Da Ponte’s previous schooling opera buffa set by Mozart, La scuola degli amanti, or Così fan tutte. Both dramatize infidelity as a way to represent, within the safe boundaries of domesticity, centrifugal forces unsettling the bonds of the primeval social nucleus: the couple. La scuola de’ maritati presents a Goldonian reverse-world plot of a domineering and libertine wife called Ciprigna (a modern Venus, as the name suggests), upsetting domestic harmony. The opening Sinfonia, by introducing the storm music appearing later in the opera, has the effect of tearing down the imaginary walls of the domestic indoor space, evoking in the listeners’ minds the perils of a stormy open landscape. This use of Sturm-und-Drang topoi in the opera alerts the audience that the domestic setting stands for a much broader social system.
The representation of female subversion is also derived from Goldoni’s domestic comedies and reverse-world libretti, invariably ending with the taming of the subversive woman and the re-establishment of the patriarchal order. Unlike pre-revolutionary Goldonian comedies or Così fan tutte, however, La scuola de’ maritati displays an unusual amount of physical violence (for example, Ciprigna threatens her husband with a gun). In addition, La scuola de’ maritati ends with an ambiguous finale restoring the upright hierarchy, but staging the taming of the shrew in the context of an oriental masquerade for which Martín y Soler uses Janissary music. Considering the western cultural archetype – still powerful today –that the East (especially the Middle East) is identified with tyranny and barbarity, and the West with progress and democracy, the question is, what does the Orient stand for in this finale? A larger question that this paper addresses is the significance of the representation of family and sexual politics during the revolutionary era. In Così fan tutte Da Ponte and Mozart ridicule Kornman’s Mesmeric group, which in the 1780s maintained that the woman’s role in harmonious society should be confined to the domestic sphere. In the early 1790s, especially after Marat’s assassination by Madame Corday, ancien-régime tyranny was often identified with allegedly corrupted aristocratic women, leading to the Jacobins’ violent silencing of women during the Terror. Considering Da Ponte’s documented anti-Jacobin position, his characterization of the tyrannical female protagonist in La scuola de’ maritati needs to be interpreted in the context of the complex game of reflections and appropriations of progressive French culture in English anti-Revolutionary literature. The result is a seemingly conventional, but in fact splendidly multilayered work, filled with metaphors and symbols typical of London’s theatrical productions during the years of the French Revolution. The comparison with the first school of lovers, Così fan tutte, shows the impact of the fin-de-siècle ideology on the world of opera and helps to clarify the political significance of both Mozart’s and Martín y Soler’s contributions to Da Ponte’s “school.”

Eighteenth-Century Music, 2007

Abstract This is a study of eighteenth-century operatic representations of slavery in America, fo... more Abstract This is a study of eighteenth-century operatic representations of slavery in America, focusing primarily on two Italian comic works: Ranieri de'Calzabigi's libretto for Amiti e Ontario (1772) and its adaptation, Le gare generose, or 'The Contests in Generosity'(1786 ...

from "Bibliolore: the RILM blog: In opera, eating and drinking function largely as they do in soc... more from "Bibliolore: the RILM blog:
In opera, eating and drinking function largely as they do in society—they define social relationships. The antisocial act of refusing to share food or drink with merry people carries a negative connotation and implies an unfortunate result. Further gastromusicological laws may be deduced from Verdi’s operas:

A meal is never sad.
Hunger is never happy.
A shared meal or drink is a socially cohesive event.
The presence of food or drink precludes immediate catastrophe (unless poison is involved).
The act of feasting is a morally neutral event, but a feasting group or individual is morally negative when contrasted with a positive hungry group or individual.
The hero is a sober individual.
Music and text may lie, but the gastronomic sign never does.

The interaction between these gastronomic codes and other interweaving codes is often complex.

In the Dictionnaire de musique Jean-Jacques Rousseau repeatedly praises Tartini’s Trattato di mus... more In the Dictionnaire de musique Jean-Jacques Rousseau repeatedly praises Tartini’s Trattato di musica (Padua, 1754) for presenting a better music-theory system than the one proposed by Rameau in his Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique (Paris, 1754). The affinity between Tartini and Rousseau is inescapable. They are both forerunners of ethnomusicology and in search of natural links between music and language. By deploying Tartini’s theories against Rameau, Rousseau extends to the realm of theory the argument in favor of the superiority of Italian music and language over French music and language, which he vehemently upheld during the operatic and ideological war known as the Querelle des Bouffons (1752-1754). Surprisingly, Tartini responded to Rousseau with an anonymous pamphlet correcting the philosophers’ misunderstanding of his Trattato. The disagreement between Tartini and Rousseau is striking and has escaped the attention of scholars. Tartini dismisses the differences among national traditions that are so crucial to Rousseau and believes instead in the existence of a kind of natural and universal music that transcends linguistic and national barriers.

This is the introduction to a book about how revolutionary America appeared to European audiences... more This is the introduction to a book about how revolutionary America appeared to European audiences through their opera glasses. The operas studied in this volume are populated by gun-toting and slave-holding Quakers, handsome Native Americans, female middle-class political leaders, rebellious British soldiers, screwed servants, and generous businessmen. Most of them display an unprecedented configuration of social and gender roles, which led leading composers of the time, including Piccinni, Paisiello, Haydn, and Mozart, to introduce far-reaching innovations in the musical and dramatic fabric of Italian opera.

https://www.lim.it/it/saggi/100-tartini-e-la-musica-secondo-natura-9788870962567.html, 2011

https://www.lim.it/it/saggi/100-tartini-e-la-musica-secondo-natura-9788870962567.html

Eisenstädter Haydn-Berichte 11, 2019

Culture, Context, and Criticism, 2012

Naxos Musicology International, 2020

Eighteenth-Century Music, 2007

The interaction between these gastronomic codes and other interweaving codes is often complex.

Article directed to the general public about film-maker Luchino Visconti's passion for Verdi and ... more Article directed to the general public about film-maker Luchino Visconti's passion for Verdi and operatic aspects in his films.

This article explores, for the first time, the nexus between Giuseppe Tartini’s concertos for vio... more This article explores, for the first time, the nexus between Giuseppe Tartini’s concertos for violin and orchestra, written for the Franciscan Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, and the devotion to this Saint’s tongue, still preserved as a relic. Anthony’s tongue, hagiographers write, was the instrument of a rhetoric that transcended verbal signification, able to move people of different languages and even animals. Soon, the tongue of Saint Anthony became a powerful symbol of universal language. In the eighteenth century, the Catholic Church, and especially the followers of Saint Anthony, revitalized their global mission to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers. Commissioning orchestral church music was part of this strategy. Like Anthony’s preaching, Tartini’s music was informed by the utopian goal to reach out to a pluralist community. Not surprisingly, his music and ideas attracted the attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Burney, both engaged in contemporary debates on the quest for universality of music in a multicultural world. In this essay Tartini’s ideas are discussed in relation to this broad topic, taking into account the ritualistic purpose of his music. Newly discovered evidence sheds light on the liturgical context of Tartini’s violin concertos, as well as on religious rituals of music making and listening that left long-lasting traces of sacrality in the secular rites of production and consumption of instrumental music.

A notorious adultery scandal involving Guillaume Kornman (a co-founder and sponsor of the French ... more A notorious adultery scandal involving Guillaume Kornman (a co-founder and sponsor of the French mesmeric society) and Beaumarchais, who defended Kornman's unfaithful wife, should be considered one of the main sources of inspiration for Così fan tutte. A pamphlet war between the two broke out in 1787, when Salieri was living with Beaumarchais in Paris. Significantly, the earliest sources of the opera -Salieri's first unfinished setting of La scola degli amanti, Da Ponte's original libretto, and Mozart's autograph -all spell the name of Guglielmo as 'Guilelmo.' A study of this real-life Parisian drama helps to clarify several dramatic and musical elements of the opera, including the use of mesmeric references, which is more pervasive than previously recognized. In this new light, the opera appears to offer a political response to the radical ideas on the regulation of sexual and social matters disseminated by Kornman's mesmeric circle.

The appearance of the American Quaker in opera buffa during the age of the American Revolution ha... more The appearance of the American Quaker in opera buffa during the age of the American Revolution had the effect of shaking a system that was still fundamentally based on stock characters. The American Quaker in fact eludes typical or traditional behaviors and social conformity. Yet the Quaker becomes a quintessentially American type, constantly entangled in almost tragicomic situations that were endemically American (like the reconciliation of freedom and slavery in Calzabigi's Amiti e Ontario). The article also suggests the continuity of representations of America in Italian opera from Piccinni (the first Italian composer to use North American subjects) to Puccini and spaghetti Western movies by Sergio Leone. The protagonist of Piccinni's I napoletani in America, or the gunslinger Quaker lady of Guglielmi's La quakera spiritosa (reset as a pasticcio opera in Vienna including music by Mozart, Haydn, and Cimarosa) are remarkably similar to Minnie in Puccini's La fanciulla del West. From Piccinni to Puccini, America infused Italian opera with new mythological implants that had the far-reaching consequence of regenerating and reinvigorating Italian opera by redefining or subverting important dramatic, musical, and social conventions.

Reflections on the Canon and Classical music and culture: opening year address University of Notr... more Reflections on the Canon and Classical music and culture: opening year address University of Notre Dame, Program of Liberal Studies.
“How to Load a Canon: Opening Charge.” Programma: A Newsletter for the Graduates of the Program of Liberal Studies 37 (2013): 9-18.