The reception of Verdi's operas in London

Despite the vast research on Verdi’s compositional as well as dramatic achievements, little attention seems to have been paid to the reception of his works in London and to the way English columnists contributed to the general discussion on Italian opera in the 19th century.

Aims

This project aims at investigating the critical terms in which Verdi's art was first conceptualized in the London press from Ernani (1845), down to the premiere of Falstaff at Covent Garden in 1894.

For this purpose, articles will be examined, which were published in the columns of The Times, The Athenaeum and The Musical World during the time span taken into consideration, overtly addressing issues concerning the quality of Verdi's music, as well as the progresses of his compositional technique.

This research will take into account the notion of empirical musicology as it has been discussed by Erik Clarke and Nicholas Cook in their introduction to the volume Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects (2004). In fact, there is at least one study field, within the realm of historical musicology, that appears to be extremely rich with regard to the available data: that is music criticism. A study of the way a composer’s production has been received, based on an extensive examination of reviews and criticisms that were published in contemporaneous periodicals seems to fully respond to the characteristics that qualify a data-rich field of study. Reviews and criticisms represent an extremely rich source of information and contribute to form a large body of data that can be explored both diachronically and synchronically. In nineteenth century Victorian England, periodicals of different kinds flourished, which reviewed - on a daily, weekly, quarterly and monthly basis - the main artistic events that took place in London as well as in the other main English cities. Quite often, these texts were divided into two main sections: the first consisted of a descriptive account of the event in question, including the circumstances leading up to it; the second provided the reader with more critical reflections and incorporated more or less explicit value judgements.

Results

A first scrutiny of such periodicals as The Times, The Athenaeum and The Musical World allowed us to shed some light on the issue and highlight three fundamental aspects:

• The reason why Verdi first met with very strong oppositions lay in the way his operas impinged upon the palmy model represented by Rossini
• Verdi's music was perceived as completely devoid of the most typically distinctive feature of Italian music ever: melody
• Not only the traditional notion of melody was at stake, but also the vocal technique necessary to sustain it.

Publications

Zicari,M. "Critica musicale e opera italiana a Londra: Gorge Bernard Shaw", in Musica e Storia, Edizioni il Mulino (Bologna), by the Fondazione Levi, Venice (2011). In print.

Zicari,M. "Nothing but the Commonest Tunes: The Early Reception of Verdi’s Operas in London, 1845-1848", in Dissonanz, June 2011, n. 114.

Zicari,M. "The Land of Song, La terra del Belcanto sulla stampa londinese nel decennio 1890 - 1900", Bern, Peter Lang Verlag, 2008.