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The Tourist Gaze and Rossini's Operas about Others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2023
Abstract
This article reconsiders two of Rossini's exoticist farces, L'italiana in Algeri (1813) and Il turco in Italia (1814), in the light of recent theoretical studies in tourism. These operas appeared at the juncture between the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and nineteenth-century mass tourism, and they became implicated in multiple layers of tourist experience. Travellers from faraway countries went to see productions in Italy, yet the operas tell stories of journeys between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. These operas were an object of the tourist gaze even as they perpetuated that gaze through imaginary encounters with exotic others. In the article, I explain the role of Italian opera in tourism at the turn of the eighteenth century and suggest ways in which tourist theory might help us understand Stendhal's operatic encounters, which in turn form part of the documentary basis of my study. I conclude that Rossini and his librettists upended many of the established hierarchies of tourism in these works, offering a fascinating critique of the tourist gaze in the process.
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References
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12 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 3.
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14 According to historian Jeremy Black, the eighteenth-century increase in tourism was a ‘general European development’ which involved numerous German, French, Russian and Polish travellers in addition to the British; see his article ‘On the Grand Tour in 1771–1773’, Yale University Library Gazette 66/1–2 (1991), 33–46.
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17 See the chapter on ‘Activities’ in Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven, 2003), 118–41; and Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates: Travel & Sex (London, 2001).
18 Black, The British Abroad, 253; Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 175.
19 Letter of 27 October 1775 to his aunt, Mrs Jonathan Wharton, WHA.168/8. This letter, along with those cited in notes 20, 33 and 34, is part of the Wharton Papers collection at the Palace Green Library of Durham University; see Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections, Wharton Papers, GB-0033-WHA.
20 Letter of 27 October 1781 to Robert Wharton, WHA.556.
21 John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy, 2 vols. (London, 1813), II: 563; this book was reprinted in many editions over the next several decades. Eustace was one of the few British tourists to make a successful tour of Italy in the short window facilitated by the Treaty of Amiens (draft negotiated autumn 1801; treaty signed March 1802), which temporarily ceased hostilities between France and Britain.
22 As one writer put it in a 1770 issue of the London Museum: ‘Will not the soft transporting voice of our beauteous countrywomen captivate the soul, without raking amongst the nerveless sons of Italy for eunuchs! Shall all the advantages of a tour be centred in a catamite, a fiddler, and a voice! … Shall the highest of our highest nobles devote their time to private consorts and strum a guittar, instead of firing at the sound of a cannon!’ Cited in Frederick C. Petty, Italian Opera in London, 1760–1800 (Ann Arbor, 1980), 3–4. For more on Italian opera in London and its reception, see Theodore Fenner, Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785–1830 (Carbondale, IL, 1994); Curtis Price, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, vol. 1: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995); and Thomas McGeary, ‘Gendering Opera: Italian Opera as the Feminine Other in Britain, 1700–42’, Journal of Musicological Research 14/1 (1994), 17–34.
23 Cited and translated in Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1991), 655; it is important to note that the context of this epigram renders it far more ambiguous than is generally understood.
24 For more on Goethe's influence and reception among later tourists and travel writers, see Karin Baumgartner, ‘Travel, Tourism, and Cultural Identity in Mariana Starke's Letters from Italy (1800) and Goethe's Italienische Reise (1816–17)’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 83/3 (2014), 177–95; and idem, ‘Packaging the Grand Tour: German Women Authors Write Italy, 1791–1874’, Women in German Yearbook 31 (2015), 1–27.
25 Cited and translated in Boyle, Goethe, 655; italics in Boyle. The visitor was the distinguished philologist Christian Gottlieb Heyne, who was about twenty years older than Goethe himself.
26 Letter of 6 January 1787, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786–1788, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York, 1962), 145.
27 The account of Goethe's second stay in Rome, which is sometimes anthologised with the Italienische Reise, was not published until 1829.
28 Letter dated 5 January 1788, in Goethe's Travels in Italy: Together with His Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy, trans. Charles Nisbet (London, 1885), 470. W. H. Auden's translation omits this letter.
29 Martin Anderson, ‘Tourism and the Development of the Modern British Passport, 1814–1858’, Journal of British Studies 49/2 (2010), 258–82, at 263; see also Ian Ousby, The Englishman's England: Taste, Travel, and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge, 1990).
30 James Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), 44–5.
31 Emanuele Senici, Music in the Present Tense: Rossini's Italian Operas in Their Time (Chicago, 2019), 7. In these arguments, Senici draws extensively on the writings of nineteenth-century poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi.
32 Senici, Music in the Present Tense, 7–8.
33 Letter of 13 November 1792 to Robert Wharton, WHA.708.
34 Letter of 1 December 1792 to Robert Wharton, WHA.709.
35 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 1.
36 See, for example, Stephen Downes, ‘Musical Pleasures and Amorous Passions: Stendhal, the Crystallization Process, and Listening to Rossini and Beethoven’, 19th-Century Music 26/3 (2003), 235–57; Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge, 2007); and Melina Esse, ‘Rossini's Noisy Bodies’, Cambridge Opera Journal 21/1 (2009), 27–64. For a systematic study of Stendhal's writings about Rossini, see Stéphane Dado and Philippe Vendrix, ‘Stendhal et Rossini: Une étude documentaire’, Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di studi 39 (1999), 21–67. For an en passant discussion of Stendhal as tourist critic, see Ralph P. Locke, ‘Doing the Impossible: On the Musically Exotic’, Journal of Musicological Research 27/4 (2008), 338–44.
37 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 1. Coe's version is a notoriously free translation, but – after consulting the parallel passages in Stendhal's Vie de Rossini, 2nd edn, vol. 1 (Paris, 1824) – I've chosen to use his familiar renderings anyway. There is one case towards the end of this article where Coe's rendition is loose enough to affect my argumentation; I've flagged the passage and included the original French in the footnote. I am grateful to Ralph P. Locke for alerting me to this potential problem (private correspondence).
38 For Roland Barthes, this liminal status was essential to Stendhal's aesthetic mobility, enabling his peculiar combination of intimacy and critical distance: ‘Italy is the country where Stendhal, being neither entirely a traveller (a tourist) nor entirely a native, is voluptuously delivered from the responsibility of the citizen’; see his essay ‘One Always Fails of Speaking of What One Loves’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1986), 299.
39 For an older but still valuable summary of Stendhal's travels in Italy, see Richard N. Coe's foreword to Stendhal, Rome, Naples, and Florence, trans. Richard N. Coe (London, 1959), xiii–xxii; see also Robert Alter and Carol Cosman, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal (Cambridge, MA, 1986).
40 ‘Ma vie fut renouvelée et tout mon désappointement de Paris enterré à jamais’; cited and translated in Alter and Cosman, A Lion for Love, 47. For the rest of the anecdote, see chapter 46 of Stendhal, Vie de Henri Brulard (Paris, 1913), 2: 187–96.
41 See Walton's chapter ‘1824. Deciphering Hyperbole: Stendhal's Vie de Rossini’, in his Rossini in Restoration Paris, 24–67.
42 There are many recent medical and literary studies on Stendhal syndrome, far more than can be usefully summarised here. The condition was so named by Graziella Magherini, a doctor at a hospital near the Uffizi, and described in her book La sindrome di Stendhal (Florence, 1989).
43 Jonathan Culler, ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, American Journal of Semiotics 1/1 (1981), 127–40, at 127; Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 3.
44 Ruud Welten, ‘Stendhal's Gaze: Towards an Hermeneutic Approach of the Tourist’, Tourist Studies 14/2 (2014), 168–81, at 170.
45 On Stendhal's earlier theatrical experiences, see Alter and Cosman, A Lion for Love, 26–7.
46 Senici, Music in the Present Tense, 8.
47 Welten, ‘Stendhal's Gaze’, 172.
48 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 69–70.
49 Stephen Wearing, Deborah Stevenson and Tamara Young, Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place, and the Traveller (London, 2010), 55.
50 Daniel J. Boorstin, ‘From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel’, in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1992), 106.
51 Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, 1998), ix.
52 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 46.
53 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 70.
54 Wolff, Larry, The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford, 2016), 257 and 266Google Scholar.
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56 Osborne, Richard, Rossini: His Life and Works, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2007), 214CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this rarely performed substitute aria, Isabella plots how their entire company will escape disguised as travellers, mixing delights and horrors among a thousand oddities and a few half-truths among many lies: ‘Sullo stil de’ viaggiatori / nelle piene compagnie / fra ben mille bizzarrie / mischieremo delizie, orrori; / e fra un sacco di bugie / qualche mezza verità.’
57 On these operas and the transcultural interactions that inform them, see chapters 5–8 of Wolff, The Singing Turk, 146–282.
58 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 145–6.
59 Corriere delle dame (20 August 1814), cited and translated in Osborne, Rossini, 27.
60 Roberts, Rossini and Post-Napoleonic Europe, 49.
61 Osborne, Rossini, 27.
62 Turner, Louis and Ash, John, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (London, 1975), 292Google Scholar; cited in Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 8.
63 All libretto translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
64 ‘Un naviglio! Turco pare. / In disparte ad osservare / noi starem chi approderà.’
65 Translation of this passage adapted by the author from Wolff, The Singing Turk, 291.
66 Meta-humour, i.e. self-referential humour, in this case of the variety that pokes fun at the conventions of its own appearance. On metatheatricality in Rossini's operas, including Il turco, see chapter 6, ‘Dramaturgy’, in Senici, Music in the Present Tense, 103–16.
67 ‘Debbe arrivar stasera / certo principe turco, il qual viaggia / per visitar l’ Italia, ed osservare / i costumi Europei.’
68 Zaida: ‘Mi sembra strano / che salti in testa a un turco / questa curiosità’. Poeta: ‘Il caso è molto raro in verità.’
69 Wolff, The Singing Turk, 287.
70 ‘Atto primo, scena prima – / il poeta per l'intrico / dal marito e dall'amico / bastonate prederà’.
71 Wolff, The Singing Turk, 301.
72 Wolff, The Singing Turk, 304.
73 Wolff, The Singing Turk, 304.
74 MacCannell, Dean, The Ethics of Sightseeing (Berkeley, 2011), 57Google Scholar.
75 See Bellman's ‘Musical Voyages and their Baggage’ for a recent defence of music's ability to navigate difference ethically. Locke also discusses whether and how we might ethically perform problematic works in his Musical Exoticism, 38–42, 79–84 and 312–27; and in his Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart, 11–16. For a well-known counterpoint on this issue, see Sindhumathi Revuluri's review of Locke's, Ralph P. Musical Exoticism in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 64/1 (2011), 253–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing, 62.
77 MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing, 158.
78 MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing, 158–9.
79 Welten, ‘Stendhal's Gaze’, 169.
80 MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing, 175.
81 Welton, ‘Stendhal's Gaze’, 169.
82 MacCannell, The Ethics of Tourism, 169–70.
83 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 145.
84 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 145.
85 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 145. The parallel passage reads: ‘Cette impertinence reprehensible eut un succès incroyable; il y eut de la progression dans les plaisirs du public. D'abord, quelques personnes seulement s'aperçurent qu'il y avait un grand rapport entre le désespoir de Paccini et celui du duc de ***. Bientôt le public tout entier reconnut les gestes et le mouchoir du pauvre duc, qu'il tenait sans cesse à la main lorsqu'il parlait de sa femme, pour essuyer les larmes du désespoir’; Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, I: 184.
86 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 145–6.
87 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 146.