FARE MUSICA TRA I GIGANTI: PERCORSI NELL’OPERA ITALIANA DELL’OTTOCENTO

Abstract

From the 1830s, the Italian music and operatic system is moved by the pressure to artistically respond to the critical, stylistic and philosophical renewal of music in Europe. A small unit of artists and gatekeepers gathers around this impulse, with a strong ideological, intellectual, artistic and economic cohesion; they are able to impose themselves on the national scene and to face the challenge of a new centrality of the Italian opera at a world level. Giuseppe Verdi and his publisher Giulio Ricordi are the leaders of this group, followed by few others. But what does it mean for a musician to try the artistic career in a system that is progressively and steadily dominated by few players? Our hypothesis is that the annoyance and susceptibility of the “minor†composers are not simple signals of an uncontrolled subjectivity, but the result of a change in the condition of the art and the artists that marks the modernization of the Italian operatic system. The reconstruction we propose is based on two complementary sources: the book registering the agreements for the theatrical operas bought by the publisher Ricordi from 1838 to 1892 and around 1,000 letters written to the publishing house in the same years.