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Delirious Hopes: Napoleonic Milan and the Rise of Modern Italian Operatic Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2015

Emanuele Senici
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Abstract

This article explores the relationship between politics, society and culture in Napoleonic Milan (1796–1814) on the one hand, and opera reviews published in the city’s periodical press at the time on the other. This relationship is worth discussing for two reasons: first, Milan under French rule constituted the earliest, embryonic instance of the modern city in Italy; second, it was there that for the first time in Italy operatic criticism shifted from an undivided focus on the performance, mostly treated as a social occasion, to a prominent concern for the work being performed, which became the object of lengthy critical scrutiny. The article focuses specifically on the function of the periodical press as a crucial link between the discourse of opera and that of the city, exploring the complex ways in which Milanese society, culture and ideology, especially as represented in the city’s newspapers, are connected to the epoch-making shift from performance to work in the opera reviews published there.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 97 - 127
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Emanuele Senici, University of Rome La Sapienza; [email protected]. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the conferences ‘Italian Opera and Urban Culture, 1810–1870’ (University of California, Berkeley), ‘The History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Musical Canon’ (in honour of James Webster, Cornell University), ‘Operatic Geographies, Urban Identities’ (Oxford University), and at colloquia at Harvard and Toronto. I am grateful to colleagues and friends for their invitations, especially Mary Ann Smart and Suzanne Aspden (organisers of the Berkeley and Oxford conferences respectively), to audiences for their questions and to Flora Willson, an anonymous reader, and the editors for their comments and suggestions.

References

1 ‘[S]arei per iscommettere che nell’anno prossimo, oppur nell’altro, avremo all’improvviso un operone superbo’, Giornale italiano (2 January 1804).

2 ‘Allora il magnifico e troppo vasto teatro della scala [sic] potrà bensì servire di luogo d’appuntamento per affari, di comodo per i doveri sociali, di pascolo all’ozio, ma principalmente vedrassi consacrato allo scopo, che gli spettatori accorrenti hanno in mira, e comprano col loro denaro. Così ragionava e prevedeva ne’ suoi sogni un delirante che spera. – E così sia!’

3 For two early and influential volumes focusing on the same city, Paris (certainly the most discussed thus far in operatic urban studies), see Johnson, James, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar and Gerhard, Anselm, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago, 1998; original German edn, 1992)Google Scholar. An even earlier and isolated but eventually influential study is Siegfried Kracauer, Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (London, 1937; original German edn 1937). For a recent volume that focuses on a specific work, see Sala, Emilio, The Sounds of Paris in Verdi’s ‘La traviata’ (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For two recent studies that make extensive use of the periodical press, see Walton, Benjamin, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar and Hall-Witt, Jennifer, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham, NH, 2007)Google Scholar.

5 For a genre-based point of view, see, for example, Crittenden, Camille, Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar. Naturally, operas that explicity dramatise the city have invited particular scrutiny in this regard: see, among other texts, Huebner, Steven, ‘Between Anarchism and the Box-Office: Gustave Charpentier’s Louise ’, 19th-Century Music 19 (1995–6), 136–160 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Schwartz, Arman, ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music 31 (2007–8), 228–244 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Verdi’s Don Carlos – an opera which cannot be said prominently to dramatise the city – has enjoyed a surprising fortune in this respect, with at least three recent essays devoted to its relationship with three different cities – Bologna, Milan and Paris – and their newspapers: see Newark, Cormac, ‘“In Italy we don’t have the Means for Illusion”: Grand opéra in Nineteenth-Century Bologna’, Cambridge Opera Journal 17 (2007), 199–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vella, Francesca, ‘Verdi’s Don Carlo as Monument’, Cambridge Opera Journal 25 (2013), 75–103 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Willson, Flora, ‘Of Time and the City: Verdi’s Don Carlos and Its Parisian Critics’, 19th-Century Music 37 (2013–14), 188–210 Google Scholar.

6 The series ‘Musikkulturen europäischer Metropolen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, published by Böhlau in Vienna, includes a few studies on the intersection between opera and the city, mainly focused on institutions: see, among others, Toelle, Jutta, Bühne der Stadt: Mailand und das Teatro alla Scala zwischen Risorgimento und Fin de Siècle (2009)Google Scholar; Nieden, Geza zur, Vom Grand Spectacle zur Great Season: Das Pariser Théâtre du Châtelet als Raum musikalischer Produktion und Rezeption (1862–1914) (2010)Google Scholar; Prokopovych, Markian, In the Public Eye: The Budapest Opera House, the Audience and the Press, 1884–1918 (2014)Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, McColl, Sandra, Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar. A few studies which discuss urban culture, society, politics and ideologies to varying degrees are mentioned below. For a recent theoretical reflection, see Ellis, Katharine, ‘Opera Criticism and the Paris Periodical Press’, Revue belge de musicologie 66 (2012), 127–131 Google Scholar.

8 ‘[C]ercò un altro cielo, più tempestoso, cercò un vortice dove slanciarsi. Milano, divenuta la capitale della neonata repubblica cisalpina, ed una specie di colonia che accordava la sua cittadinanza a tutti i patrioti raminghi d’Italia, fu la residenze che egli prescelse. Milano soltanto due anni prima, calma, silenziosa, dove si menava una vita agiata e molle, ma languida e soporifica, tutto ad un tratto era diventata il teatro di continui cangiamenti … Gl’Italiani di tante provincie che non si conoscevano neppur di nome, sebbene non discosti gli uni dagli altri più di cinquanta, trenta, venti miglia, si trovarono come per arte magica, tutti raccolti in questa città: … Tutto era nuovo; uomini, nomi, linguaggio, vestiti, emblemi … Se Foscolo avesse continuato a vivere nella placida Venezia, avrebbe finito a scrivere qualche favola arguta, dei sonetti per monache, a’ quarant’anni sarebbe stato Arcade, e tutt’al più sarebbe salito alla gloriuzza del Gozzi di buon prosatore e versoscioltajo.’ Pecchio, Giuseppe, Vita di Ugo Foscolo (Lugano, 1830), 41–42 Google Scholar, 47.

9 I am not sure I agree with John Foot when he states that ‘[t]he myth of Milan as Italy’s moral capital began to take concrete shape with the industrial exposition of 1881’; Milan Since the Miracle: City, Culture and Identity (Oxford, 2001), 168: it depends on the meaning one assigns to ‘concrete’ and on the compass one grants to the sphere of the ‘moral’. In any case, the seeds of this myth were planted at the turn of the ninteenth century.

10 For the political and cultural history of Milan during the Napoleonic period, I have relied on volume 15 of the old but still useful Storia di Milano: L’ età napoleonica (1796–1814) (Milan, 1959). A more historiographically alert perspective is provided by the essays collected in Della Peruta, Franco et al., I cannoni al Sempione: Milano e la ‘Grande Nation’ (1796–1814) (Milan, 1986)Google Scholar, especially Marco Cerruti, ‘Da giacobini a napoleonici: la vicenda degli intellettuali’, 317–63, and by the monumental tome by Pillepich, Alain, Milan capitale napoléonienne, 1800–1814 (Paris, 2001)Google Scholar.

11 These conclusions are based primarily on information gathered from the contemporary newspapers that I will discuss below. See also Malipiero, Riccardo, ‘I teatri a Milano’, in I cannoni al Sempione, 277–315 Google Scholar, and Pillepich, , Milan, 385–392 Google Scholar. For a discussion of the institutional aspects of Milanese operatic activity at the time, see Ivano Bettin, ‘La volontà di riforma dei teatri milanesi durante il periodo napoleonico’, doctoral diss., University of Milan (2011).

12 Nick Hayes, ‘The “Local Rag” and Urban Histories’, paper delivered at the conference ‘Mediapolis: Media practices and the political spaces of cities’, Open University, Milton Keynes, 9–10 June 2008, available at www.mediapolis.org.uk (accessed 30 October 2011).

13 Monti, Daniel J., Jr., The American City: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford, 1999), 5 Google Scholar.

14 For a recent discussion of the cultural authority of capital cities from the point of view of opera, one that takes the periodical press into direct account, see Weber, William, ‘Opera and the Cultural Authority of the Capital City’, in Opera and Society in France and Italy from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher and Thomas Ertman (Cambridge, 2007), 160–180 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the circulation of Milanese newspapers outside Milan, see the studies mentioned in the following footnote.

15 This paragraph and the following ones rely primarily on Castronovo, Valerio, Ricuperati, Giuseppe and Capra, Carlo, Storia della stampa italiana. Vol 1: La stampa italiana dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, 2nd edn, ed. Valerio Castronovo and Nicola Tranfaglia (Rome-Bari, 1999)Google Scholar, especially the chapter by Capra, ‘Il giornalismo nell’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica’, 373–537, and the concluding pages of the one by Ricuperati, ‘Giornali e società nell’Italia dell’ancien régime (1668–1789)’, 67–372. See also Murialdi, Paolo, Storia del giornalismo italiano (Bologna, 1996), 24–33 Google Scholar, and Pillepich, , Milan, 437–445 Google Scholar.

16 ‘Periodici di frontiera’: see Cuaz, Marco, ‘Per un inventario dei periodici settecenteschi’, in Periodici italiani di antico regime, ed. Alberto Postigliola and Nadia Boccara (Rome, 1986), 101–161 Google Scholar, at 105. On music-related news items in the Gazzetta enciclopedica and the Giornale enciclopedico, see Delpero, Dascia, ‘Il Giornale enciclopedico di Milano (1782–1797) e la Gazzetta enciclopedica di Milano (1780–1802): due nuove fonti per la storia della musica milanese’, Fonti musicali italiane 4 (1999), 55–111 Google Scholar, with extended anthology. The Giornale enciclopedico changed name twice, first becoming Il Corriere di Gabinetto (1786) and then Gazzetta di Milano (1796): for ease of reference I will use its original name for all periods.

17 ‘Si è finalmente dato lo spettacolo in questo teatro della scala; ma chi non avrebbe creduto, che v’influisse assai più lo spirito dell’arciduca assente, che de’ pretesi amici della libertà!’; Salfi, Francesco Saverio, ‘Teatro. Lettera agli estensori, 4 January 1797’, in Termometro politico della Lombardia, ed. Vittorio Criscuolo, 4 vols. (Rome, 1989–1996)Google Scholar, II: 7–9, at 8. Among Salfi’s articles, especially interesting are those published on 26 July 1796, 13 September 1796, 1 March 1797, 20 September 1797 and 30 December 1797 (a long ‘Lettera del cittadino S… alla cittadina D’O…’ entitled ‘Sul presente spettacolo del teatro alla Scala’). For Salvi’s multifaceted dealings with theatre and opera in Jacobin Milan, see Daolmi, Davide, ‘Salfi alla Scala’, in Salfi librettista, ed. Francesco Paolo Russo (Vibo Valentia, 2001), 133–177 Google Scholar; for an attempt at a political interpretation of the librettos of a few operas performed in Milan between 1797 and 1803, see Nocciolini, Monica, ‘Il melodramma nella Milano napoleonica: teatro musicale e ideologia politica’, Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana 29 (1995), 5–30 Google Scholar.

18 The periodicity of the Giornale italiano varied later on: for a while, starting from June 1805, it was published daily. In 1804 Le Moniteur universel, founded in 1798, was called Gazette nationale ou Le Moniteur universel.

19 It is interesting to compare the Corriere delle dame with late eighteenth-century Viennese periodicals intended for female readers, studied from a music-historical perspective by Caryl Clark: despite many similarities, the presence of regular fully fledged opera reviews marks out the Milanese periodical. See Clark, , ‘Reading and Listening: Viennese Frauenzimmer Journals and the Sociocultural Context of Mozartean Opera Buffa’, The Musical Quarterly 87 (2004), 140–175 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See Capra, , ‘Il giornalismo nell’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica’, 495 Google Scholar.

21 These quotes come from reviews dating from the initial and final years of the Giornale enciclopedico di Milano, 4 January 1782 and 28 December 1795 respectively; see Delpero, , ‘Il Giornale enciclopedico’, 67 Google Scholar, 94.

22 ‘La comune aspettazione è stata compiuta. La nuova Opera I Baccanali di Roma andata sulle Scene jeri sera al nostro Teatro alla Scala, ha riscosso gli universali applausi. Tutto quanto dipende dagli impresarj non fu ommesso [sic] in questa pezza, siccome nell’antecedente, per renderla degna del Pubblico. La bella poesia del citt. Luigi Romanelli romano; l’eccellente musica del cel. maestro di cappella Nicolini; le scene superbe del citt. Landriani; le grazie, sempre nuove e sempre care della brava prima donna la Catalani, che ci prova ogni giorno di essere inarrivabile per la dolcezza dell’armonica sua voce; i talenti e l’abilità nel canto delle altre prime parti Bianchi e Brizio; gli sforzi fatti dagli altri attori tutti per contribuire al buon esito della pezza; finalmente la ricchezza delle decorazioni e del vestiario, tutto in una parola ha contribuito alla riuscita del Dramma, ed a far rendere agli impresarj e agli attori quell’imparziale giustizia e quella corrispondenza di riconoscenza e di aggradimento, di cui ne diede jeri sera tante prove il Pubblico cortese.’ Corriere milanese (29 January 1801). In my translation I have somewhat simplified the convoluted syntax of the original.

23 ‘Gutta cavat lapidem, dice sentenziosamente il Giornale Italiano, che per primo insegnò al Corrier Milanese come tesser sensati articoli di buona critica teatrale. Il Corrier delle Dame peraltro, che a gloria del bel sesso a cui è dedicato, quantunque di piccola mole, aspira pure ad essere originale, dà il suo imparziale giudizio senza convenire per nulla cogli altri corrieri per grossi e grandi che sieno.’ Corriere delle dame (21 October 1804).

24 On this opera, whose music is by Francesco Bianchi, see Castelvecchi, Stefano, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge, 2013), 102–124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 For a concise biography of Benincasa, see Torcellan, Gian Franco, ‘Benincasa, Bartolomeo’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 8, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Rome, 1966)Google Scholar, www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bartolomeo-benincasa_(Dizionario-Biografico) (accessed 30 October 2011).

26 A sense of the kind of opera criticism published in Paris and London newspapers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century can be gained from such books as Petty, Frederick C., Italian Opera in London, 1760–1800 (Ann Arbor, 1980)Google Scholar, Cannone, Belinda, La Réception des opéras de Mozart dans la presse parisienne (1793–1829) (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar and Mongredien, Jean, Le Théâtre-Italien de Paris (1801–1831), chronologie et documents, 8 vols. (Lyon, 2008)Google Scholar, vol. 1, 1801–1816, which include substantial excerpts from reviews; Fenner, Theodore, Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785–1830 (Carbondale, IL, 1994), 13–50 Google Scholar, discusses the rapid evolution of operatic criticism in London, with reviews expanding considerably between 1785 and 1800. For insightful interpretations of this body of criticism, see Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford, 2001), especially Katharine Ellis, ‘A Dilettante at the Opera: Issues in the Criticism of Julien-Louis Geoffroy, 1800–1814’, 46–68 (on the critic of the Journal des débats and its feuilleton), with further bibliography; Cowgill, Rachel, ‘“Wise Men from the East”: Mozart’s Operas and Their Advocates in Early Nineteenth-Century London’, in Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, ed. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford, 2000), 39–64 Google Scholar; and Cowgill, , ‘Mozart Productions and the Emergence of Werktreue at London’s Italian Opera House, 1780–1830’, in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing Thomas (Aldershot, 2006), 145–186 Google Scholar.

27 That Lattanzi might have been a little nervous about her claim is perhaps revealed by her unwarranted implication that originality and independence of judgement are connected.

28 ‘È questo uno di quei drammi a cui applicare si può il detto del poeta che anche ripetuto dieci volte piacerà sempre. La semplicità e la varietà vi sono così egregiamente accoppiate, che tengono ognora vivo l’interesse nell’animo dello spettatore. La melodia dell’accompagnamento è sempre dentro i limiti della proporzione, sicché non cuopre mai od offusca la voce del cantante. Nulla di ricercato o di gotticismo [sic] nelle introduzioni alle arie ed ai pezzi concertati; nulla di quei lunghi e intralciati labirinti negli istromenti obbligati. Questa musica insomma tende al vero scopo comune a tutte le arti ingenue che le sono sorelle all’imitazione cioè della vera e bella natura. I cori stessi che nelle due passate opere erano dissonanti al pari delle vespe e delle rane di Aristofane vi sono con saggia parsimonia collocati soltanto nell’introduzione e ne’ due finali. Che bella cosa se fossero da’ nostri teatri del tutto esclusi i cori, poiché manchiamo cotanto di soggetti che atti siano a sostenerli!’ (emphasis in the original).

29 The reviewer was well aware that this opera had been composed ‘many years ago’, as he plainly states.

30 For music criticism in the Corriere delle dame, see Mascari, Giuseppina, ‘Il Corriere delle dame: spoglio e indici delle notizie musicali (1804–1818)’, Fonti musicali italiane 7 (2002), 31–126 Google Scholar, with substantial anthology.

31 The first quote is from the first issue of Il Monitore cisalpino, ‘6 fiorile, anno VI repubblicano’ (25 April 1798); the second from Torcellan, ‘Benincasa’. On this paper, see Capra, , ‘Il giornalismo nell’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica’, 436–438 Google Scholar.

32 Torcellan, , ‘Benincasa’; the quotation is from Saggio sulla genealogia, natura ed interessi politici e sociali della Repubblica Italiana (Milan, 1803), 204 Google Scholar.

33 ‘[Q]uesto che a ragione può chiamarsi importantissimo ramo di pubblica istruzione’, ‘una morale che additi all’uomo la desiata meta della felicità nella pratica dei doveri sociali e delle virtù cittadine’; Londonio, Carlo Giuseppe, Succinte osservazioni di un cittadino milanese sui pubblici spettacoli teatrali della sua patria (Milan, 1804), 20 Google Scholar; extended excerpts are found in Bettin, ‘La volontà di riforma’, 111–21.

34 ‘È condannato a multe od a un anno di prigione chiunque nasconda un disertore o coscritto ec. Noi siamo ricercati da Brescia di accennare sul nostro foglio, che il giorno 31 luglio andò su quelle scene per la solita fiera l’Andromaca di Paesiello.’

35 I have looked at a few issues of the Giornale degli amici della libertà e dell’uguaglianza, L’Italiano imparziale, Il censore italiano, Il difensore della libertà, Giornale senza titolo, Lo spettatore politico, Giornale degli amici della libertà italiana, Gazzettino del popolo, L’amico della libertà italiana, beside the already mentioned Monitore italiano, Monitore cisalpino, Termometro politico della Lombardia and Giornale de’ patrioti d’Italia.

36 See Giornale de’ patrioti d’Italia, ed. Paola Zanoli, 3 vols. (Rome, 1988–1990), I: 249–52. This giornale was published between January 1797 and February 1798.

37 Tracing the rise of a work-centred musical culture between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is by now a well-trodden musicological path; in this context, opera constitutes a particularly interesting case because it conforms only partially to a historiographical model based mainly on instrumental music. Perhaps inevitably, so far attention has focused mostly on places and events that support the view of an increasing work-centredness of operatic culture: see, for example, such studies on the reception of Mozart’s operas in London as Senici, Emanuele, ‘“Adapted to the modern stage”: La clemenza di Tito in London’, Cambridge Opera Journal 7 (1995), 1–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cowgill, ‘Mozart Productions’. There is a growing sense, however, that this focus obscures as much as it illuminates: see, for example, chapter 1 (‘Opera as an “event”: The aesthetics of audience behaviour’) of Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 23–56. For further reflections on opera’s Sonderweg in this respect (but perhaps the exception was instrumental music after all), see Parker, Roger, ‘Opera, Place, Repertory: London in the 1830s’ (forthcoming), which also focuses on London but comes to partly different conclusions from the essays just mentioned, to be read together with his ‘Two Styles in 1830s London: “The Form and Order of a Perspicuous Unity”’, in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge, 2013), 123–138 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (I am grateful to Roger Parker for sharing his unpublished text with me).

38 ‘[I]n un articolo di Varietà si comprenderà tutto ciò, che in materia di politica, di pubblica economia, di morale, di storia, e di belle arti può interessare i colti Repubblicani’. Il Monitore cisalpino (25 April 1798).

39 After a careful search in several Milanese libraries, I was able to consult only the initial two and a half months of the Monitore cisalpino, from late April to early July 1798: since the paper was published every other day, I saw around 35 issues; my conclusions are based on this representative sample.

40 Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), 9 Google Scholar.

41 Bowie, Andrew, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd edn (Manchester, 2003), 255 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While I find Bowie’s suggestion insightful, I wonder whether Habermas’s public sphere is the aptest conceptual field in which to place the issue. From the standpoint of Napoleonic Milan, and in light of my interpretation of the features and functions of opera criticism there in the 1800s, I find Eagleton’s theories about the aesthetic more historically appropriate and hermeneutically stimulating than Habermas’s public sphere, which seems (at least potentially) to imply a more politically assertive and, with the benefit of hindsight, to my mind an unjustifiably rose-tinted view of the matter. I owe the suggestion to read Eagleton, and Bowie to Robert Currie, James, ‘Impossible Reconciliations (Barely Heard)’, Music and Letters 88 (2007), 121–133 Google Scholar, which contains further insightful reflections.

42 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 25.

43 During 1816, opera, ballet and (very few) concert reviews, all of performances at La Scala, appeared in the Gazzetta di Milano on 12 February, 18 April, 1 and 4 June, 3 August, 5 September, 1, 25 and 28 October, 6 November, 7, 8, 12, 21 and 29 December.

44 An overview of opera criticism in Italian newspapers of the second and third decade of the nineteenth century can be acquired by consulting the bibliography on the reception of Rossini’s operas, since many contributions reprint a significant number of reviews either in their entirety or in sizeable excerpts. Among other studies, see De Angelis, Marcello, ‘Presenza di Rossini a Firenze e in Toscana durante l’epoca granducale’, Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi 17 (1977), 37–60 Google Scholar; Rossini, Gioachino, Lettere e documenti, ed. Bruno Cagli and Sergio Ragni, 4 vols. to date (Pesaro, 1992–2004)Google Scholar; Bini, Annalisa, ‘Echi delle prime rossiniane nella stampa romana dell’epoca’, Rossini a Roma – Rossini e Roma, no ed. (Rome, 1992), 165–198 Google Scholar; Conati, Marcello, ‘Una certa malattia, la quale può denominarsi contagio fantastico’ and ‘Gioachino Rossini nella stampa periodica italiana (1812–1825): antologia’, both in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi, no ed. (Rome, 1994), 101–119 Google Scholar and 251–84 respectively; Emanuele, Marco, L’ultima stagione italiana. Le forme dell’opera seria di Rossini da Napoli a Venezia (Turin-Florence, 1997)Google Scholar. For a non-Rossini-centred study, see Licciardi, Fabiana, ‘La Gazzetta del teatro come specchio della vita teatrale del suo tempo’, Le fonti musicali in Italia 5 (1991), 131–155 Google Scholar (on a Roman paper published between 1802 and 1804). An interesting comparative perspective from the point of view of instrumental music is provided by Morrow, Mary Sue, ‘Late Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music from the Perspective of the Italian Press’, Florilegium Musicae: Studi in onore di Carolyn Gianturco, ed. Patrizia Radicchi and Michael Burden (Pisa, 2004), 713–735 Google Scholar.

45 ‘Sabbato 14 si aprì il Nobiliss. Teatro la Fenice coll’Opera intitolata Vonima e Mitridate, musica del celebre defunto Maestro Nasolini, in cui però a comodo di alcuno de’ Cantanti fu posto qualche pezzo di musica fatto comporre dal Sig. Maestro Gnecco, che si distinse con la consueta sua bravura.’

46 The only other explicit reference to another paper that I have come across in the reviews of the Quotidiano veneto in 1803 and 1804 is to the Journal des débats, in a report on Paisiello’s Proserpine at the Parisian Théâtre de la République published on 15 April 1803. For a survey of Venetian opera criticism in the early nineteenth century with a specific focus on the Quotidiano veneto, see Miggiani, Maria Giovanna, ‘Osservazioni su repertorio farsesco e critica giornalistica nelle fonti periodiche di primo Ottocento (1797–1815)’, in La scala di seta, L’occasione fa il ladro, Il signor Bruschino ossia Il figlio per azzardo, ed. Miggiani (Pesaro, 1998), 9–45 Google Scholar, especially 14–25.