Letter from Italy.(Brief Article)

Given the strength of its musical past and the continuing, if sometimes controversial, celebrity of a number of its conductors and singers, Italy remains strongly associated with opera in the minds of non-Italians. It is, however, no longer really true that opera is popular in Italy, or that it has much to do with the Italians' sense of national or local identity. One is no more likely to hear someone whistling an opera tune in the street in Milan than in New York, and Italian schoolchildren are generally as unfamiliar as those in other countries with the plots or even the titles of operas such as Norma and Aida. This probably has been true for many years now, but the turn of the century makes one suddenly aware that a once broadly-based operatic culture is no longer in dedine; it simply does not exist any more.

The basic reason for this is the gradual passing away of the last generation who grew up when opera was still a living and creative organism in Italy, and their inability or unwillingness to pass that culture on to younger generations. It is easy to exaggerate the popularity of opera even in nineteenth-century Italy, yet it is true that for at least a hundred years (from Rossini to Puccini), what was originally an aristocratic art form captured the imagination of broad segments of Italian society, and that the appeal of the works lay largely in their emotional directness as a distinctly non-highbrow form of entertainment.

Today, opera still has an audience in Italy, but it is not greatly different from audiences in other Western countries. Indeed, in some respects it is more weakly motivated. Middle-class Italians are not particularly well-educated musically, and statistics suggest that they are less likely to read reviews of performances and buy recordings than opera audiences in many other countries. And while some spectators over fifty still go to the opera out of family tradition, one hardly ever sees them taking their children with them. Few things, after all, can seem as stale and old-fashioned as the once-popular manifestations of one's native culture, and Italians -- who are as novelty-hungry as any nationality -- naturally perceive the archaisms of librettos more acutely than audiences who rely on the bland translations of projected titles. For Italians, opera lacks the appeal of the exotic. A sense of novelty has been maintained in recent decades by the extension of the repertoire to include long-forgotten works (as in the Rossini and Donizetti "renaissances") and through an ever-heavier reliance on production values. Yet in spite of the great directors who have emerged from Italy since the second world war, this trend has led almost inevitably to a superabundance of concept-ridden readings that often prove alienating in their misunderstanding of musical dramaturgy.

Strange as it may seem, the opera tradition has at the same time suffered from insidious opposition from within the country's conservatories. A reaction against the dominance of opera started in the musical-academic community in the late nineteenth century, leaving in its wake deep prejudices that made it ...