¹ I organized the Symposium as part of an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, of which I was Principal Investigator at Maynooth University (2016–2018), with a research project focusing on Donizetti's self-borrowings entitled Gaetano Donizetti's ‘école-mosaïque’ (www.maynoothuniversity.i.e./music/events/self-borrowing-nineteenth-century-italian-opera-reconsideration, accessed 20 December 2021). Although it was not presented as a paper at the Symposium, the article I am contributing here is the result of the research I undertook for that project. I wish to thank Antonio Cascelli, who was my mentor in Maynooth, and the then Head of Department, Christopher Morris, for constantly supporting me throughout my Fellowship and during the organization of the Symposium.

² J. Peter Burkholder, ‘Borrowing’, in Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 20 December 2021).

³ The list is adapted from Burkholder, J. Peter, ‘The Use of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field’, Notes 50 (1994): 851–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ See, in particular, Senici, Emanuele, ‘“Ferrea e tenace memoria”: La pratica rossiniana dell'autoimprestito nel discorso dei contemporanei’, Philomusica on-line 9/1 (2010): 69–99Google Scholar, here 75–6, and Andrea Malnati, ‘La pratica dell'autoimprestito nell'opera italiana del primo Ottocento’, in Ladri di musica: filosofia, musica e plagio, ed. Alessandro Bertinetto, Ezio Gamba and Davide Sisto, Estetica: Studi e ricerche 4/1 (2014): 71–81, here 75. A large part of Senici's article has been re-elaborated in the author's recent book Music in the Present Tense: Rossini's Italian Operas in Their Time (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), in particular, 55–81.

⁵ Malnati further distinguishes between two subcategories: (1) the recovery of pages considered to show fine workmanship which, conceived as part of an unsuccessful opera, would have not have the opportunity to be revived, and (2) the recovery of pages deriving from occasional works, which were thus destined to receive only a single performance. See Malnati, ‘La pratica dell'autoimprestito nell'opera italiana’, 76–7.

⁶ See Marco Beghelli, ‘Dall’“autoimprestito” alla “tinta”: elogio di un péché de jeunesse’, in Gioachino Rossini, 1868–2018: La musica e il mondo, ed. Ilaria Narici, Emilio Sala, Emanuele Senici and Benjamin Walton (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 2018): 49–91, here 70.

⁷ For a wider discussion of conventional structures in nineteenth-century Italian opera, see (in chronological order) Gossett, Philip, ‘Gioachino Rossini and the Conventions of Composition’, Acta musicologica 42/1–2 (1970): 48–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Id., ‘The “Candeur Virginale” of Tancredi’, Musical Times 112 (1971): 326–29; Id., ‘Verdi, Ghislanzoni, and Aida: The Use of Convention’, Critical Inquiry 1 (1974–75): 291–334; Scott L. Balthazar, ‘Evolving Conventions in Italian Serious Opera: Scene Structure in the Works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, 1810–1850’ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985); Powers, Harold S., ‘“La Solita Forma” and “The Uses of Convention”’, Acta musicologica 59/1 (1987): 65–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Balthazar, Scott L., ‘The Primo Ottocento Duet and the Transformations of the Rossinian Code’, Journal of Musicology 7/4 (1989): 471–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roger Parker, ‘“Insolite Forme”, or Basevi's Garden Path’, in Verdi's Middle Period, 1849–1859: Source Studies, Analysis, and Performance Practice, ed. Martin Chusid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 129–46; Lamacchia, Saverio, ‘“Solita forma” del duetto o del numero? L'aria in quattro tempi nel melodramma del primo Ottocento’, Il Saggiatore musicale 6/1–2 (1999): 119–44Google Scholar.

⁸ See Philip Gossett, ‘Compositional Methods’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 68–84, here 69.

⁹ Letter by Rossini to Tito Ricordi, 14 December 1864: ‘L'edizione da voi intrapresa darà luogo (con fondamento) a molte critiche poiché si troveranno in diverse opere gli stessi pezzi di musica’, in Lettere di G. Rossini raccolte e annotate, ed. Giuseppe Mazzatinti et al (Florence: Barbera, 1902): 284.

¹⁰ See Senici, ‘Ferrea e tenace memoria’, 70. The translation is derived from Senici, Music in the Present Tense, 68.

¹¹ Gioachino Rossini, La gazza ladra, edited by Alberto Zedda, Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, i/21 (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1979).

¹² See (in chronological order) Spada, Marco ‘Elisabetta Regina d'Inghilterra di Gioachino Rossini: fonti letterarie e autoimprestito musicale’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana 24/2 (1990): 147–82Google Scholar; Marco Mauceri, ‘La gazzetta di Gioachino Rossini: fonti del libretto e autoimprestito musicale’, in Ottocento e oltre: Scritti in onore di Raoul Meloncelli, ed. Francesco Izzo and Johannes Streicher (Rome: Pantheon, 1993): 115–49; Arrigo Quattrocchi, ‘La logica degli autoimprestiti: Eduardo e Cristina’, in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994): 365–82 (a new, larger version of the article has been published as Id., Esercizi di memoria. Scritti su Rossini: Un itinerario critico fra testo, musica e performance, ed. Daniele Macchione and Alessandra Quattrocchi (Milan: il Saggiatore): 91–149); Marco Beghelli, ‘Die (scheinbare) Unlogik des Eigenplagiats’, in Rossinis “Eduardo e Cristina”: Beiträge zur Jahrhundert-Erstaufführung, ed. Reto Müller and Bernd-Rüdiger Kern (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997): 101–22. Mauceri is also the author of ‘“Voce, che tenera”: una cabaletta per tutte le stagioni’, in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 115–49, focusing on the re-use of a single piece.

¹³ The discussion of the recourse to self-borrowing in Bellini and Donizetti's production was then limited only to the identification of specific occurrences – without extensive explanation – within wider studies on the composers, in Maria Rosa Adamo and Friedrich Lippmann, Vincenzo Bellini (Turin: ERI, 1981); William Ashbrook, Donizetti and His Operas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Annalisa Bini and Jeremy Commons, Le prime rappresentazioni delle opere di Donizetti nella stampa coeva (Milan: Skira, 1997).

¹⁴ See Gossett, ‘Compositional Methods’, 80–83. This aspect is further discussed in Beghelli, ‘Dall’“autoimprestito” alla “tinta”’, 66–8.

¹⁵ See Senici, ‘Ferrea e tenace memoria’, 82. The translation is adapted from Senici, Music in the Present Tense, 65.

¹⁶ See Senici, ‘Ferrea e tenace memoria’, 86. The reference here is to Luca Zoppelli, ‘Intorno a Rossini: sondaggi sulla percezione della centralità del compositore’, in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 13–24: here 24. The translation is derived from Senici, Music in the Present Tense, 171.

¹⁷ Smart, Mary Ann, ‘In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's Self-Borrowings’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 53/1 (2000): 25–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ For a discussion of the recourse to self-borrowing in individual operas by, respectively, Bellini and Donizetti, see also Marco Uvietta, ‘Da Zaira a I Capuleti e i Montecchi: preliminari di un'indagine filologica sui processi di ricomposizione’, in Vincenzo Bellini: verso l'edizione critica, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta and Simonetta Ricciardi (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2004): 101–39; Esse, Melina, ‘Donizetti's Gothic Resurrections’, 19th-Century Music 33/2 (2009): 81–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Carlo Gatti, Verdi (Milan: Edizioni Alpes, 1931; rev. ed. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1950).

²⁰ Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols (Milan: Ricordi, 1959).

²¹ Giuseppe Pugliese, ‘Dai Lombardi alla Gerusalemme’, in Gerusalemme, Quaderni dell'Istituto di Studi Verdiani 2 (Parma: Istituto di Studi Verdiani, 1963): 7–88.