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On June 3, 1937, in the amphitheatre of the Boboli Gardens in Florence, L’incoronazione di Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi was performed by an ensemble of remarkable artists. It was the first stage performance of the opera in Italy in modern times. This article aims to reconstruct the historical context and details of this performance, which can be considered emblematic in many ways of the reception of ancient music in Italy in those years. In the first part I will discuss this performance in the context of Fascist Florence, showing how it served to celebrate Florence’s cultural primacy. In the second part, I will deal with L'incoronazione's prior performances in Italy and abroad. In the third part, I will reconstruct the production of the opera through unpublished documents conserved in Maggio Musicale Fiorentino's archive. In the fourth section I will consider the reaction of the critics, in comparison to the opinions of the artistic director(s). Finally, in the conclusions I will discuss the significance of this event in the context of the rediscovery of Monteverdi's operas, also indicating new paths to follow in this research.

Luca Ronconi staged Monteverdi's Orfeo in Florence, at Goldoni Theater in 1998. The present article discusses this production in the context of Ronconi's activity as opera director; the Baroque idea of "meraviglia" is also taken into account.

My research focuses mainly on official music making, that is promoted by the politic and religious power, in Palermo in the age of the Spanish domination. What I discuss in my chapter, is: 1) how music contributed specifically to shape the urban space, 2) which was the relation between musical experience and political power during the Spanish domination. I will focus on the second half of the seventeenth-century, the final years of the Spanish rule. In this period of time, two important events marked the musical shaping of the urban space: 1) in 1682, the creation of a permanent venue for performing music “en plein air”, the so-called “teatro della musica” in the Strata Colonna; 2) in 1693, the construction of the first Opera theater, the Santa Cecilia theater in the area called the Fieravecchia. Both facts had a great impact on the urban soundscape under different aspects that I discuss. I also discuss the use of visual sources and their meaning for urban musicologists; moreover, I make reference to ways of listening to music in Baroque Palermo.

Si traccia brevemente lo stato degli studi sulla musica a Palermo tra Cinque e Seicento, a partire dagli articoli contenuti nel fascicolo, individuando nuove tendenze di ricerca e lacune. This essay aims at reconsidering scholarly studies about musical life in Palermo in 16-17th centuries; new paths of investigation are also discussed.

In 1992, during the 15th Conference of the International Musicological Society, a round table about «Spanish and French Theater in Italian Opera of the Seventeenth Century» took place in Madrid. It was a seminal moment in the discussion about the influence of Spanish Siglo de Oro Theater on the Italian Opera of the Seventeenth Century. This influence is today beyond question and is being revealed as an important aspect to understand both the success of Venetian Opera and the dissemination of Siglo de Oro Theater outside Spain. This article aims at illustrating and discussing the results of twenty years of scholarly research on the subject; it also suggests new paths of investigation. En 1992, lors du XVe Congrès de la International Musicological Society, eut lieu à Madrid une table ronde portant sur «Dramaturgie espagnole et dramaturgie française dans l’opéra italien du XVIIe siècle», réunion qui constitua un moment important pour la réflexion sur le thème de l’influence du théâtre du Siècle d’or espagnol sur l’opéra italien de la même époque. Influence que l’on sait aujourd’hui décisive et qui permet de mieux comprendre et le succès de l’opéra vénitien et les modes de réception du théâtre auriséculaire hors d’Espagne. On trouvera ici un bilan des vingt dernières années d’étude de ce problème ainsi que de nouvelles perspectives pour la recherche. En 1992, en el XV congreso de la International Musicological Society, tuvo lugar en Madrid una mesa redonda sobre «Dramaturgia española y dramaturgia francesa en la ópera italiana del Seiscientos», que marcó un momento muy importante en la reflexión sobre el tema de la influencia del teatro del Siglo de Oro español en la ópera italiana del Seiscientos. Hoy sabemos que esta influencia fue relevante y que se trata de un elemento significativo para comprender a fondo tanto el éxito de la ópera veneciana como la recepción de la comedia áurea fuera de España. Este artículo intenta trazar un balance de veinte años de estudios sobre el tema, y proponer nuevas perspectivas de investigación.

Il contributo intende esaminare il rapporto tra musica e gioco a partire dall'analisi del Terzetto delle carte in "Carmen" (1875) di Georges Bizet. Si vuole, infatti, dimostrare come la presenza delle carte da gioco sia qui molto più di un semplice spunto tematico, rivestendo al contrario una funzione sostanziale e paradigmatica, direttamente connessa alla drammaturgia dell'opera, oltre che alla nozione di tempo.

The massacre of women, always present in the opera from its origin, is especially spread in the nineteenth century and has its popular specimen in La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi; it doesn’t disappear in the musical theatre of the twentieth century which indeed started with the death on stage of a female figure, mysterious and unconventional, the Mélisande by Maetherlimk and Debussy, killed by the common destiny for all women. Purpose of this paper is to show how the music in the theatre plays a different role which depends on different compositional modes in similar dramatic events and so it is able to give different sense to similar episodes of violence against women. Transgressive linguistic choices, detachment from conventional forms and structures, new relations between notes, new vocal and instrumental timbres release the music from its moving and involving qualities and give to it a vivid role in denouncing the aberrations produced by social conventions and in revealing to the spectator his collusion.

In this article, the philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 1499) and the composer Francesco Cavalli (1602 - 1676) are presented as belonging to one and the same universe of discourse, in which music, love, and the imagination play a fundamental role. Ficino’s Neoplatonic theory of love plays a central role in his philosophy. He defines love as the desire for beauty. Beautiful things such as harmonious music inspire the soul with love. When music is loved properly, the lover distances himself from the sensible world, focuses his attention on his soul, and thus ultimately finds his end in God. However, if the soul loves improperly and becomes fixated on the sensual beauty of music, this results in lovesickness. Thus, for Ficino, the proper application of love and music lie at the heart of human happiness. A secularized echo of this theory can be heard in the Cavalli’s opera Artemisia.

Il saggio delinea i percorsi giovanili di Richard Strauss, come compositore e direttore d'orchestra, anche alla luce dei suoi rapporti con Cosima Wagner, con la "cerchia" di Bayreuth e con Gustav Mahler.

This article examines the relationship between fiction and reality in the opera according to the approach of Rousseau and Diderot. The ambiguous and contradictory definition of this relationship brought Rousseau to remove the singing from the opera and to invent a new genre, the "mélodrame". It was a very paradoxical solution that Diderot could have shared as this article tries to prove. Sujet de cet article c’est la relation entre la fiction et la réalité dans l’opéra selon Rousseau et Diderot. La définition ambiguë et contradictoire de cette relation conduit Rousseau à l’élimination du chant dans le théâtre lyrique par l’idéation du “mélodrame”, une solution paradoxale que – on veut montrer – Diderot aurait pu agréer.

This paper focuses on the personal recollections left by a dozen Italian musicians concerning their personal experiences in South America in the years 1880-1920 (the period when the phenomenon of Italian emigration to South America reached its highest peak), integrated with the evidence provided by some of their relatives and colleagues. Secondary biographical literature is also taken into account. The issues most often mentioned in these personal notes and recollections are the (often bad) travel conditions, the wages, the theatres, the reception of the audience, and the leisure activities. The paper investigates the experiences of such workers in the music sector as opera singers, symphonic directors, composers, and music teachers in search for fortune. In the paper, the experiences of the following personalities are discussed: Francesco Tamagno, Gemma Bellincioni, Arturo Toscanini, Giacomo Puccini, Michele Puccini, Ada Giachetti, Enrico Caruso, Nazzareno De Angelis, Luigi Mancinelli, Pietro Mascagni, Gino Marinuzzi, Beniamino Gigli.

Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s Giasone, set to music by Francesco Cavalli (Venice, S. Cassiano, 1649), is probably the most popular opera of the entire 17th Century. Its author is considered one of the most prolific and successful dramatists and librettists of his age. The existence of two versions of Giasone however - the libretto set to music by Francesco Cavalli and a prose text intended to be staged (or read) as a play - has not yet been fully explored. The same is also true of another work by Cicognini, Gli amori di Alessandro e di Rossane. Both plays, like almost all Cicognini’s works, were published only after his death. Giasone was extraordinary popular, so we can easily suppose that the dramatic version was published for commercial reasons. In contrast, the libretto of Gl’amori was published only posthumously, in 1651, and the preface warns us that Cicognini had written only the first act and two scenes of the second act; and the prose version («opera tragicomica») was not issued until 1661 by Giacinto Pezzana in Venice and Eredi di Grisei e Piccini in Macerata. The prose Giasone, called «opera» on the title page, had five editions between 1664 and 1689, in Bologna, Venice and Parma. A year before the first of these editions (in 1663), the Roman printer and bookseller Bartolomeo Lupardi announced his intention to publish «Giasone, which has astonished Fame itself» in the form of a play. Lupardi was eventually responsible for a complete Cicognini edition in ten volumes, but no copy of his prose Giasone has survived. The existence of prose versions of these two works raises important questions: Who wrote them? What was the intended audience? Were they conceived to be read or to be acted? Moreover, a comparison between the prose and musical texts may help us to enter the world of a Seventeenth century dramatist, and to understand the different strategies involved in writing texts intended for musical setting and those conceived as spoken dramas.

Marsilio Ficino, Francesco Cavalli and Music as Remedy for Lovesickness In this article, the philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and the composer Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) are presented as belonging to one and the same universe of discourse, in which music, love, and the imagination play a fundamental role. Ficino’s Neoplatonic theory of love plays a central role in his philosophy. He defines love as the desire for beauty. Beautiful things such as harmonious music inspire the soul with love. When music is loved properly, the lover distances himself from the sensible world, focuses his attention on his soul, and thus ultimately finds his end in God. However, if the soul loves improperly and becomes fixated on the sensual beauty of music, this results in lovesickness. Thus, for Ficino, the proper application of love and music lie at the heart of human happiness. A secularized echo of this theory can be heard in the Cavalli’s opera Artemisia .

A Life for the Tsar by Michail Glinka was staged on 20 May 1874 at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. The paper discusses the impact this opera had on the Italian public, including some of the echoes in the foreign press. The style and dramaturgical content of Glinka’s masterpiece sparked off an authentic querelle which was similar to — indeed perhaps even more violent than — the one caused by Wagner’s operas, which were also receiving their first hearings in Italy. The increasingly frequent staging of operas from the Slavic repertoire brought to the fore a fundamental problem in this transition period. The insinuation of an extraneous element — which in the case of Italy immediately found a casus belli in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar — necessarily meant acknowledging the inescapable crisis of everything which had heretofore been confined within national borders or had relied on a substantially Euro-centric viewpoint.

All’interno della vasta produzione teatrale di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini (1606- 1649), i drammi per musica occupano un luogo privilegiato, nonostante siano solamente quattro (Celio, Giasone, Orontea, Gli Amori di Alessandro e Rossane) e tutti ascrivibili agli ultimi anni di vita del drammaturgo (1646-1649). Malgrado il numero sia esiguo rispetto ad altri librettisti del secondo Seicento, i libretti di Cicognini fissano un modello nel quale tragico e comico, stile alto e stile basso, lamento patetico e lazzo osceno si mescolano perfettamente. Queste caratteristiche derivano, come è stato notato, dall’influsso determinante del teatro spagnolo ma trovano una specifica ragion d’essere nel teatro per musica. L’esame di questi testi, in particolare dei tre libretti veneziani, ha permesso non solo di individuare alcuni dei loro testi-fonte, ma anche di formulare delle ipotesi su come i libretti siano stati creati ed in generale sul metodo compositivo di Cicognini.

L'articolo prende in esame le dichiarazioni di poetica contenute nei paratesti di un ricco corpus di libretti del Seicento, mettendole in relazione con le concrete esigenze della scena operistica e con il teatro coevo. Vengono esaminati concetti quali "capriccio", "comando", "gusto locale", "pubblico", mettendone in evidenza la relazione con le idee espresse da Lope de Vega nel suo trattato "El Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo"

The essay aims to shed light on the relationship between opera and play, focusing on the card scenes in four operatic masterpieces of the 19th and 20th centuries: "Carmen" (1875), "The Queen of Spades" (1890), "The Girl of the Golden West" (1910) and "The Rake’s Progress" (1951). In these operas, the idea of play is much more than a simple cue or thematic subject: it has a substantial and paradigmatic function, directly connected with the dramaturgic and musical architecture of the work. On the other hand, these operas share some features that can be linked to the idea of time and to the metalinguistic value of play: although play and music take place in time, they tend to annul it, thus entering a supra-temporal dimension.

Franz Schreker (1878-1934) fu uno dei più noti e controversi autori di teatro musicale della Germania fra le due guerre. Nel 1933 la sua musica venne proibita ed egli morì poco dopo l'avvento al potere di Hitler. Il saggio traccia un breve profilo biografico dell'autore e si sofferma sulla genesi, il soggetto e i caratteri musicali dell'opera in tre atti "Die Gezeichenten" (I predestinati, 1913-15).

The traditionally so–called ‘transitional’ period of italian melodramma, roughly corresponding to the decades of 1870s and 1880s, saw also wide transformations in its relationship with the librettos, their creation and their form. Changes happened also in the status of the libretto and of the librettist among the new publishing industry, in their stength ratio with the music and the musician and in their related production modalities, as in the specific examples of librettists Angelo Zanardini and Carlo D’Ormeville. Great importance was to be found in new poetry configurations in the domain of meter, of ‘liricity’ and of solo, duo and collective singing forms and in ‘metasinging’ prescription.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), bambino prodigio nel crepuscolo dell'Impero asburgico e genio in fuga dall'Europa nazista, ottiene il suo più grande successo teatrale con l'opera in tre quadri "Die tote Stadt" (La città morta, 1920). Il saggio traccia un breve profilo biografico dell'autore - anche in rapporto con le opere del periodo americano e con le musiche destinate al cinema di Hollywood - analizzando la genesi, la drammaturgia e i caratteri musicali della "Città morta".

Il testo si propone di tracciare un quadro d'insieme della vita musicale in Sicilia - in particolar modo a Palermo - nel XVIII secolo e di sottolinearne alcuni aspetti, quali i generi musicali più diffusi, le occasioni e i luoghi in cui si faceva musica, le testimonianze rimaste (iconografiche, documentarie). Verranno inoltre esaminati i rapporti tra la Sicilia ed altri centri siciliani ed italiani, cercando di valutare la posizione della capitale siciliana nel contesto musicale italiano ed europeo.

Si prende in esame l'influsso del compositore Giacomo Meyerbeer sull'opera italiana e, in conseguenza, sulle orchestre dei teatri d'opera italiani. La prima parte guarda in generale alla recezione della sua musica in Italia e descrive il suo impatto sul sistema produttivo; la seconda parte discute attraverso specifici esempi l'influenza della sua musica sulla trasformazione delle orchestre dei teatri d'opera durante l'Ottocento. This study analyses Giacomo Meyerbeer's influence on Italian Opera and, consequently, on Italian orchestras. The first part looks at Meyerbeer's reception in Italy and describes his impact on the system of opera production there; the second part discusses the subsequent effects on opera-houses orchestras, referring to specific examples.

Si prende in esame la recezione del Crociato in Egitto

Sulla base dei libretti conservati, si discute la presenza delle opere di Francesco Cavalli sulle scene teatrali di Palermo nella seconda metà del Seicento, e più in generale le modalità di diffusione dell'opera veneziana in Sicilia. Vengono prese in esami alterazioni ed aggiunte apportate ai libretti rispetto ai testi veneziani e napoletani ed il concetto di "gusto locale". L'articolo è corredato da una cronologia ragionata delle opere rappresentate a Palermo dal 1655 al 1693.

Il volume analizza la vita e l'opera di Francesco Paolo Neglia, musicista siciliano vissuto fra Italia e Germania a cavallo del XIX e XX secolo. Strumentista, didatta, direttore d'orchestra, Neglia si dedicò in modo completo alla musica, componendo soprattutto lavori strumentali (sinfonie, quartetti, pezzi per pianoforte), musica sacra ed un'unica opera, intitolata "Zelia". Ad Amburgo fondò un Conservatorio che prese il suo nome, ma che dovette abbandonare per amor di patria, a causa dello scoppio della prima guerra mondiale. Dopo una diffusa panoramica sulla vita e sulla musica strumentale, il testo si incentra sulla genesi e sulla drammaturgia di "Zelia", chiudendosi con un capitolo sulla fortuna critica e con un'appendice contenente il libretto dell'opera.