The decades between unification and World War I saw opera in Italy absorb multiple literary and musical influences from beyond the Alps, including exoticism and naturalism and, successively, the operas of Meyerbeer and Wagner. For the generation of the giovane scuola this was often characterised as a crisis of national musical style and identity, strongly linked to the post-Risorgimento imperative to create a compelling civic and political culture for the new nation. The religious question, and the battle between the Church and state, posed a further set of questions in developing this national identity, which can be traced through opera's engagement with foreign influences. Examining new Italian operas ranging from Franchetti's Asrael to Puccini's Tosca, this chapter will suggest that librettists and composers approaching religious themes were keenly aware of the need to create a vocabulary of religious images and sounds which the predominantly Catholic audiences across Italy could recognise, even when adopting ideas from French or German literary and musical models. Ultimately, this period was crowned with the arrival of Parsifal on Italian stages, when Catholic readings of Wagner's symbology and echoes of Palestrina promoted a particularly Italian interpretation of the opera’s meaning and musical language.

The chapter examines Alberto Franchetti’s Germania, written primarily for the Italian opera market and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1902); and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty, and premiered at the Berlin court opera in 1904. Starting with a brief summary of the two operas’ origins and plots, the chapter illustrates how in both cases operatic italianità was used to represent German national myths. Conventional concepts of operatic italianità were challenged through musical references to German folk songs. German critics employed generic meanings of italianità to articulate their disdain at these 'foreign' depictions of national identity, claiming an exclusive right for German composers to write on patriotic topics. As a consequence, productions of Franchetti’s and Leoncavallo’s works in Imperial Germany provoked some of the most hostile reactions ever articulated against Italian composers during the years before World War I. Furthermore, the defamation of Leoncavallo included a barely concealed criticism of the emperor himself.