Romantic opera

During the Risorgimento opera played a more central part in national life than at any time before or since. When Felice Romani described Donizetti as ‘a patriot of the intellect an the imagination’ and when Carducci exclaimed of Verdi's early operas, ‘Oh songs unforgettable and sacred to anyone born before the '48 [the 1848 risings]!’, they were paying the tribute of several generations to a whole repertory of Italian opera from Rossini to Verdi. From the theatre which was its proper home this music overflowed into the streets (ground out on barrel-organs), into the divine service (as organ voluntaries), into soirées, receptions and other social gatherings, grand or modest. It became a kind of folk music, through which people – as long as they were not completely isolated from civic life – could express themselves, and to which they turned for consolation or inspiration in times of crisis.

More than at any time since the late seventeenth century, opera owed this esteem almost entirely to the music, scarcely at all to the poetry. For fifty years the craft of writing words for opera had been in decline. There is a barbed observation in Mme de Staël's essay on translation to the effect that listening to the words of Italian opera ‘for five hours every day must necessarily make the nation's intellect obtuse for want of exercise’. But Manzoni was to define Italian Romanticism as a cultural movement that aspired to take ‘the useful as its aim, the true as its subject, the interesting as its means’; and Mazzini in his Filosofia della musica was to urge composers to involve themselves in the progress of civilisation and become ‘its spirit, its soul, its sacred perfume’.