Opera beyond the Opera House

Opera pervaded Parisian salons during the nineteenth century. At residential concerts pianists improvised fantasies on favorite opera themes and singers performed popular arias that sustained public focus on successful works. Operas in progress were also routinely previewed in the salon to measure the audience's response. In this regard, the salon is traditionally viewed as venue for curating operatic ideas, but not for staging operas themselves. This premise, however, is complicated by salon opéra, one-act musical comedies specifically created for residential performance that proliferated between 1850 to 1870. Patrons such as Gioachino Rossini, Madame Gaveaux-Sabatier, and Princess Mathilde Bonaparte played an important role in propelling the popularity of the genre, cultivating works by composers Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, Gustave Nadaud, and librettist Gallope d'Onquaire, among others. While salon opéra was a seemingly transient fashion, its history has broader ramifications in salon and opera studies. In this paper, I contend that the genre sparked innovation as librettists and composers reimagined the operatic stage in residential space. Using the material decorations and interior architecture of the hosting residence as the theatrical set, salon opéra creators sought to surround the audience in the dramatic action. Moreover, the opera scenes routinely required characters to communicate from adjacent rooms, to sing across closed doors, and even to speak through open windows, as exemplified in D'Onquaire's compendium of libretti entitled Le spectacle au coin de feu (1865). These immersive elements were not only novel, but the multidimensional staging was incorporated into the plot development. A close analysis of Nadaud's Docteur Vieuxtemps (1854) shows how interspatial scenes are used as a dramatic device, providing the circumstances for misunderstanding and the opportunity for veiled trickery. As salon opéra resonated widely in Paris, metropolitan theaters, such as Offenbach's Bouffes-Parisiens, seemed to take a cue from the residential genre, presenting works with similarly deconstructive approaches to staging and musical comedy. This study not only sheds light on a branch of opera that has warrants further historical attention, but it illustrates how the material space of the salon ultimately played an important role in propelling generic innovation. 

Born in Palermo, Sicily and trained under Nicola Zingarelli in Naples, Errico Petrella was the most-performed living composer in Italy after Verdi throughout the 1850s and 1860s. His operas featured in the seasons of both major and minor theatres, and selected numbers were performed by wind bands and travelling opera companies all over the world. Based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Jone was his most popular opera. Virtually unknown today, it premiered at Milan's La Scala in 1858 and was produced on countless Italian stages (and elsewhere) well into the early twentieth century. 


By the time of the composer's death in 1877, Jone's Act 4 marcia funebre had achieved something of an iconic cultural status. Originally composed for a banda sul palco, the piece, which announces the doom of the young Athenian Glauco as he is led to the circus to be devoured by the beasts, had an extensive circulation in manifold wind band contexts. Its main role in late nineteenth-century Italy was in funeral rituals, as contemporary descriptions of their variegated affective landscape attest. Not only that, however, for it also grew into a central feature of the Holy Week processions-specifically the Good Friday re-enactment of Christ's Passion-that have for centuries taken place in areas of Southern and Central Italy, accompanied by municipal bands. At a time when Italian wind bands were on the rise and their original military roles were being rewritten and expanded in new civic contexts, I suggest that the dissemination of Jone's march sheds light on key aspects of shifting Italian musical and death cultures. At once a common denominator of grief and mourning across the peninsula and an object of emerging ethnographic investigations, in the final decades of the century Petrella's marcia funebre served as an "emotional arena" (to borrow Mark Seymour's terminology) in which tensions between public and private, the everyday and the exotic, and bodily discipline and emotional excess were again and again negotiated through music.

Ecphrasis is the depiction of a visual work of art in a piece of literature, as in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; its rhetorical power comes from attempts at persuasion and emotional evocation (D'Angelo, 1998). Further, ecphrasis allows the writer to assume some authorship of the depicted object, reinterpreting it through emotional, biased description. Siglind Bruhn (2000) approaches musical ecphrasis as a post-program-music form, developed only in the twentieth century. I apply the term more widely, conceiving of musical ecphrasis not as a genre but as a tool, just as traditional ecphrasis is a literary device and not a poetic genre.


In music, narrative theories argue for the validity of emotional description as a means of analysis, for the importance of the distinction between story and discourse, and for relevance of social and cultural implications of narrative (Maus, 1991; Almén, 2008). Despite the root of opera fantasias in text-based music, issues of narrative in textless instrumental music bleed into opera fantasias, and issues of the analysis and manipulation inherent in narration also offer helpful lenses for examining fantasias. 


In this paper I argue that opera fantasias illustrate an "ecphractic" impulse both to depict a work of art in a different genre and to reassign authorship of a work through interpretation. In an opera fantasia, a composer reuses and alters not only Verdi's or Donizetti's music but also his characters and structure. I use fantasia composer Antonio Pasculli as a case study, contending that his manipulation of opera plots often reclaims a happy ending for the leading female character. His combination of the oboe (a "female" instrument), a female character, and "male" virtuosity perhaps lends these operatic women some agency. 


Because of the distinctions that can be made within narrative theory between the composer and the narrator, narrative theory offers a helpful means of avoiding issues of composer intentions when writing about how music can both reflect its context and critique it, offering a lens with which to look at the ways in which fantasias fit into or struggle against the society and culture in which they were composed. Fantasias, for example, can reflect contemporary gender norms, both reinforcing traditional associations between instruments and gender characteristics and offering means of escape from or subversion of constrictive gendered opera plots, without the composer making an overt or even purposeful statement. Simultaneously, narrative theory offers a way to discuss the form of fantasias, which resist analysis along traditional structural lines. For fantasias traditional formal and harmonic analyses are not particularly fruitful as interpretive tools, yet generic paradigms play an important role in understanding fantasias and their reception. 


It is selectivity that gives ecphrasis its power, offering the possibility of deepening or subverting characteristics of the original work, and that raises ecphrastic descriptions and opera fantasias alike from reporting to reinterpreting. I argue that ecphrasis offers a useful lens for approaching opera fantasias, explicating frequently critiqued partiality and inaccuracy and revealing narrative trajectories within these works.