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The twilight of the true gods: Cristoforo Colombo, I Medici and the construction of Italian history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Luca Zoppelli
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Extract

In little more than a year, between October 1892 and November 1893, the Italian operatic repertory acquired two ambitious and monumental works, similar in their choice of a national–historic subject and in their dramatic form: Alberto Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo and Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici. After a few revivals scattered over several decades, both disappeared from circulation, and recent productions have confirmed doubts about their stageworthiness, notwithstanding some convincing passages (particularly in Colombo) and the enormous investment of intellectual and historical reflection that had attended their birth. Ideological motivations determined the musico-dramatic structures of the two operas, and are closely related to the failure of their projects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , November 1996 , pp. 251 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Some of Alberto and Raimondo Franchetti's many letters to the librettist, preserved in the Fondo Illica at the Biblioteca Passerini-Landi in Piacenza, will be cited below.Google Scholar

2 Since Boito wrote to Verdi on 16 March 1894 (with reference to Fior d'alpe) that ‘Franchetti, who navigated well with Christopher Columbus, has drowned in a teacup, or rather wanted to make a storm in a teacup and was shipwrecked’, Colombo may have been valued in Verdi's circle. The Verdi—Boito Correspondence, ed. Conati, Marcello and Medici, Mario, trans. Weaver, William (Chicago, 1994), 217.Google Scholar

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4 The autograph score, preserved in the Ricordi Archives in Milan, bears obvious signs of cuts and substitutions. The whereabouts of the deleted material, which would permit a reconstruction of the original version of the opera, is unknown.Google Scholar

5 See the letter by Franchetti, to Giulio Ricordi, 16 08 1892 (Archivio Ricordi, Milan).Google Scholar

6 See the letter by Franchetti, to Carlo Clausetti of 19 09 1922 (Archivio Ricordi, Milan).Google Scholar

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9 For a more detailed discussion, see my ‘I Medici e Wagner’, in Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo. Atti del primo convegno Internazionale di studi su Ruggero Leoncavallo, ed. Maehder, Jürgen and Guiot, Lorenza (Milan, 1993), 149–62.Google Scholar

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23 Undated letter, possibly spring 1892.Google Scholar

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38 The rispetto is a typical Tuscan variant of a popular lyric form, widespread from the beginning of the fifteenth century. However, the metrical form chosen by Leoncavallo (AABBCCDD) is that of a genre close to it, the strambotto, while the rispetto usually has alternating rhymes with or without a final rhymed couplet. See Elwert, W. Th., Versificazone italiana dalle origini ai nostrigioni (Florence, 1989), 148.Google Scholar

39 The metrical form used by Leoncavallo (a5BA) is actually that of the stomello, widespread from the fifteenth century on. Cf. Elwert, Versificazione, 150–51. The error in nomenclature is puzzling, given that Carducci also wrote stornelli, but beyond his generic literary infatuation one should recall that Leoncavallo's philology course at the University of Bologna was very brief.Google Scholar

40 The reference to Tannhäuser is obvious. Lorenzo, challenged by two popular singers, improvises here on an interesting kind of ornate declamation: the text is actually taken from ‘La Nencia di Barberino’ by Lorenzo de' Medici, but the metrical treatment is anything but veristic, as Leoncavallo extracts an octave and a half from non-consecutive verses (I.1–8, X. 1–4) and treats them as if they were three strophic quatrains.

41 A ballad by Angelo Poliziano, one of the most celebrated pieces in the history of Italian poetry.Google Scholar

42 Letter to Illica, 3 01 1890.Google Scholar

43 Caroso, Fabrizio, Selva Amorosa (Venice, 1600);Google Scholar published by Chilesotti, Oscar, one of the pioneers of Italian musicology, in Darze del secolo XVI, Biblioteca di Rarità Musicali, 1 (Milan, 1883). The dance is reproduced in my ‘I Medici e Wagner’ (see n. 9 ), 159. Respighi subsequendy used the same collection for his Antiche arie e danze per liuto, though without citing it, pretending instead to have consulted the original tabulature.Google Scholar

44 To Giulio Ricordi, 21 08 1894, in Abbiati, , Verdi, IV, 551–2.Google Scholar

45 See Dahlhaus, Carl, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas (Cambridge, 1979), 88–9.Google Scholar

46 See Groos, Arthur, ‘Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger’, 19th-century Music, 16 (1992), 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar