1871: Cairo

Around the time of Aida’s premiere, music critics of Italian journals – those whom Giuseppe Verdi called ‘lemmings’ (literally ‘pecoroni’, or ‘big sheep’) – increasingly sang the praises of Richard Wagner’s ‘modern school’ while attacking the home-grown Italian operatic tradition. This was especially the case in 1871, the year of the first Italian performance of a complete Wagner opera.Footnote ³ The opera was Lohengrin, and, as is well known, Verdi travelled to Bologna expressly to attend the performance, held at the Teatro Comunale on 19 November. We also know his impressions, thanks to the notes he wrote on the score he brought with him. And although he did not appreciate everything, he lauded the felicities of Wagner’s orchestration – for example, the pairing of the English horn with the bass clarinet.

For our purposes, this point bears highlighting: the orchestra was fertile terrain in the controversy between traditional and modern schools of composition, in that the critics who compared Wagner with Verdi venerated the German composer’s innovations in orchestration; an aspect that Verdi himself appreciated about Wagner’s music. It is thus unsurprising that Verdi, always a fastidious composer, would in the case of Aida labour hard to calibrate the right orchestral balance, colours and effects. Indeed, Aida employs instrumental forces that were decidedly unusual in earlier Italian operas, his own included. Given that even for a provincial Italian production of the opera Verdi refused to consider hiring musicians who were young and inexperienced, the orchestral players employed for Cairo were undoubtedly chosen to guarantee the highest artistic standards. These preliminary considerations allow us to conjecture that three of the musicians in the orchestral pit at the premiere of Aida, who would later take part in performances of the same opera in South America, were among the most accomplished members of their profession: Pietro Melani, Tomaso Marenco and Giovanni Grazioso Panizza.Footnote ⁴

Melani was leader of the orchestra and assistant conductor at the Cairo premiere. Born in Salerno in 1854 and already considered a promising talent in his student years, he is mentioned in a document from 1871 that the director of the Royal Conservatory in Naples sent to the Public Education Ministry, still headquartered at that time in Florence. The director was responding to the ministry’s stated interest to ‘become perfectly familiar with the fruits of this College’s educational training’ (‘conoscere perfettamente i buoni frutti portati dall’insegnamento di codesto Collegio’). The director, trying to show his institution in the best possible light, promptly produced a list of its most important alumni, including Filippo Marchetti (the composer of Ruy Blas), Paolo Serrao (who would become the teacher of Umberto Giordano), Francesco Cilea, Ruggero Leoncavallo and Leopoldo Mugnone. Among these stellar graduates the director also listed ‘Melano [sic] Pietro. Violinist, concertmaster and conductor, who is currently in Cairo’ (see Fig. 1).Footnote ⁵ Melani’s career was distinguished by appointments of the first rank: he was appointed as a professor at the Naples Conservatory, and in 1880, when a local chapter of the Società del Quartetto had been established in that city, he became the first violinist, thereby collaborating with Giuseppe Martucci, his colleague at the conservatory who was also the Società’s official pianist. Indeed, Melani’s professional life abounded in prestigious contacts, and he went on to study with both Fernando Pinto and Joseph Joachim, esteemed associates of Verdi and Brahms.

Fig. 1

(colour online) Informe del Direttore del Real Conservatorio de Nápoles al Ministro dell’Istruzione Pubblica (1871), Archivio Storico del Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella, Naples.

Tomaso Marenco also played a key role in the Cairo premiere, for which he was given an old-fashioned title, that of ‘primo violoncello al cembalo’. Tomaso and his brother Romualdo were the youngest sons of a family from Novi Ligure. The two brothers’ early years were adventurously itinerant. Shortly before receiving their Aida appointment, they worked at Istanbul’s opera house, where Romualdo was leader of the orchestra.Footnote ⁶ Given the brothers’ common origins, training and apprenticeship, it is interesting to compare their destinies after their paths diverged. When Romualdo returned to Italy, he was employed in the chief operatic centre of the country as La Scala’s leader and ‘direttore d’orchestra per il ballo’. Beginning in 1878, he dedicated himself entirely to composition and eventually became the most famous ballet composer in Italy; the theatre in his hometown today carries his name. As an artistic figure, he projected the image of an optimistic, monumental, positivist Italy. His Excelsior, probably the most famous Italian ballet, was composed in 1881, for example, to inaugurate the Fréjus Road Tunnel in the Alps, which connects Italy and France, and was the Kingdom of Italy’s most daring engineering feat to date.Footnote ⁷ His ballet productions exploited innovations in electricity and monumentalism: the choreography of Amor at La Scala in 1886 called for numerous animals and 500 supernumeraries. For the inauguration of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, he composed the ballet Sport as a hymn to international collaboration. As Romualdo turned to composition, meanwhile, Tomaso would choose in 1878 to cross the Atlantic, having been employed as lead cello at the Teatro Colón.

Among the other cellists in Cairo was Giovanni Grazioso Panizza, who sometimes used the double surname Panizza Pugnalini. Much of what we know of him comes from the autobiography by his son Héctor, who himself became one of the most important conductors of the early 1900s.Footnote ⁸ Giovanni Grazioso, a native of Gazzuolo in the province of Mantua, was the son of a tailor of humble origins. Nevertheless, he was able to move in the best operatic circles and to acquire solid professional credentials thanks to his siblings, several of whom were also musicians. According to Héctor, Giovanni Grazioso’s sister Annunziata was a successful singer ‘who had one of the most beautiful dramatic soprano voices’.Footnote ⁹ The personal tragedy of losing a son – he died on a transatlantic voyage – led her to devote herself to teaching in Rio de Janeiro, where she died young.Footnote ¹⁰ Panizza studied with excellent teachers at the Milan Conservatory, including cello with Guglielmo Quarenghi, and composition with Italy’s pre-eminent conductor, Franco Faccio. He was, moreover, an erudite figure whose gifts allowed him to write not only the music but also the libretto for the opera Clara, performed at Milan’s Teatro Manzoni with his sister in the title role.Footnote ¹¹ It is reasonable to assume that Panizza and his colleague Tomaso Marenco crossed paths at some point before they ended up in the same string section in Cairo. Panizza’s association with Faccio, who was particularly well connected, indicates that he and the Marenco brothers knew many of the same people in Milanese society, which at the time included illustrious personages such as Countess Clara Maffei. Panizza, like Romualdo Marenco, composed music that lay somewhere between opera and the vaudeville-style entertainments appreciated by the elite. Panizza signed these less serious works with the pseudonym Achille Panizza.Footnote ¹² Earlier and less ambitious works than Clara belong to this genre, such as those he composed in 1872: Le nozze per astuzie (premiered in Calcutta),Footnote ¹³I briganti and Il Caporale Bastogio al campo d’istruzione.

These three instrumentalists, all of them central to the Aida premiere, would soon find themselves in Buenos Aires, where the next phase of their respective musical careers unfolded. In 1872, soon after the premiere, Panizza relocated from Italy to Argentina, although he would continue to travel between the two countries quite often. Marenco moved in 1878, followed by Melani in 1881. All three were therefore in South America in 1886, the year of the second Aida of this account.

1886: Rio de Janeiro

Anecdotally, my next production of Aida adheres to the topos whereby a talented youth takes the stage at the last minute when the scheduled star is unexpectedly unable to appear. The hero then becomes an overnight success; a star is born. The well-rehearsed story in this case is as follows: Arturo Toscanini, still a teenager, was employed as a cellist for an opera company in Rio de Janeiro. The impresario had recruited instrumentalists who were willing to leave Italy for an extended period. To find good musicians who would accept moderate fees and were not bound by prior contracts or future prospects, he had searched among recent conservatory graduates, where he came across Toscanini, who had just completed his studies at the Conservatory in Parma. Once in South America, the company planned to perform Aida; but neither the conductor nor his assistant were competent enough to discharge their duties. Toscanini stepped up to the podium, closed the score and conducted from memory; his subsequent success is familiar to all.Footnote ¹⁴

I have often tried to imagine the situation, and especially the courage – bordering on recklessness – that the teenager must have possessed, given the backbiting common to so many orchestras. Questions of musical aptitude aside, placing oneself in front of one’s peers and imposing an interpretation on them is a fearsome task for a nineteen-year-old. Toscanini was, however, surrounded by a group of trusted friends who supported him in the endeavour, including a pair who would continue on to Buenos Aires, and who can now join those already mentioned above: Italo Casella and Ferruccio Cattelani. Cattelani, in particular, was so close to Toscanini that they might have been fraternal twins. They were in fact born just three days apart, and studied at the same conservatory with the same teacher, the great Giusto Dacci. Their musical affinities – a common devotion to Beethoven, for example – bound them in a kind of brotherhood. Although a full historical account of Toscanini’s rise to the podium is not the aim here, we need to contextualise that fabled evening with details from the historical record in order to better understand Toscanini’s artistic kinship with Cattelani and the ways in which the Brazilian tour would shape their respective destinies. This is especially important because while Toscanini remains a household name, his lesser-known colleague has faded into oblivion.

It has often been said that it was Toscanini’s inner courage that inspired him to assume command of the orchestra after a more cowardly conductor vacated the podium on that historic evening of 30 June 1886; but in fact – and although conflicting egos certainly played their part – the events were driven not so much by a clash of individual wills as a clash of nationalisms.Footnote ¹⁵ To analyse the dynamics at play, we need to pause briefly on the key figures involved. Aside from Toscanini, the main cast in the lead-up to the incident were as follows: the impresario of the company, Claudio Rossi; the company conductor, Leopoldo Miguéz; and his assistant, Carlo Superti. As might be expected, the affair also includes supporting players who, like Tom and Sam in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, have a crucial role to play; especially important in this respect were, of course, the music critics.

Miguéz was by no means a second-rate, incompetent or unknown artist. In Brazil, he was an acclaimed composer and pedagogue. He pursued his musical career without abandoning the profession he had learnt from his father, a Spanish-born merchant who had settled in Portugal. He also made an artistic virtue of the commercial abilities that ran in his family, currying favour with prestigious, well-connected public figures in order to ensure his success in the musical world. Before leaving for Europe, for example, Miguéz obtained a letter of presentation from none other than the Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro II, which opened doors to figures such as Ambroise Thomas and other renowned musicians. He established personal relationships with them, and the international cachet of his associations became the basis of his prestige and success when he returned to Brazil, two years before the evening that concerns us.

As a musician, Miguéz preferred the spectacular to the intimate. He composed a symphony with fanfare and chorus that indirectly glorified Pedro II: the piece was officially written in honour of the eighteenth-century Marquis of Pombal, the famed minister of King José I of Portugal, and was performed in Rio thanks to the protection of the Brazilian emperor, who was of course a descendant of the Portuguese monarch. Miguéz managed to combine this devotion to the ancien régime with the highly wrought modernism favoured by the elite of his country by assuming the mantle of Brazil’s Wagnerian prophet. The convergence of these two vectors proved uncommonly successful: Miguéz’s sensibilities coincided with the motto on the Brazilian flag, which promised ‘Ordem e progresso’ (‘Order and progress’). Miguéz’s veneration for Wagner was not only perfectly in line with that of the Brazilian intelligentsia, which persists to this day,Footnote ¹⁶ but it also allowed him to push on an open door in the imperial Carioca palace, as Pedro II had been present at the inauguration of Bayreuth, while in his famous communications with Wagner the emperor had even invited the composer to relocate to Brazil.Footnote ¹⁷ All told, Miguéz’s local prestige was enormous, so it was natural that he should find himself at the head of the orchestra that would inadvertently launch Toscanini’s legendary career.

Claudio Rossi, the impresario, and another central player in this drama, was an Italian set designer who was highly respected in Brazil, although his work compelled him to lead an itinerant life, shuttling between Europe and South America. Rossi regularly collaborated with the two competing impresarios, Angelo Ferrari and Cesare Ciacchi, who managed the South American tours of the most important European theatrical and operatic companies. While in Brazil in 1883 on a tour organised by Ferrari, for example, Rossi worked alongside the chief conductor of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Nicola Bassi, and two important singers, Adalgisa Gabbi and Napoleone Limonta, to present the Brazilian premiere of Lohengrin, with sets by Rossi.Footnote ¹⁸ Two years later, on joining Ciacchi’s company, Rossi designed sets for the Brazilian tour of the great actress Eleonora Duse. He also designed the scenery for large local parades and seemed to exercise a veritable monopoly over scene design in Rio. In journals of the day, there are abundant examples of rival performances that have Rossi’s set designs in common. For instance, alongside an advertisement for Marenco’s ballet Excelsior at the Teatro D. Pedro II in June 1886, La Gazeta de Noticias announced a competing performance at the Teatro Lucinda, both with sets by Rossi.Footnote ¹⁹ Even on that decisive evening of 30 July 1886, while Rossi’s sets for the epochal Aida were being mounted on the stage of the Teatro D. Pedro II, a dramatic version of George Sand’s Le Marquis de Villemer at the Teatro D. Maria II also boasted his designs. As a scenographer, Rossi was invariably admired: one Brazilian critic in 1885 went so far as to declare that he was more than just an artist, he was a true poet.Footnote ²⁰ Aside from his sets, which were summarily built and dismantled, Rossi left less ephemeral traces of his art in Brazil. Like other Italian scenographers – Giuseppe Carmignani, for example – he was commissioned to make the interior designs of various Latin American theatres. He painted the stage curtain for the Teatro Imperial D. Pedro II, inaugurated in July 1885, as well as the curtain of the Teatro São Carlos in Campinas.Footnote ²¹ He was also responsible for the renovated interiors of both the São Carlos and São Paulo’s Teatro São José, where, according to commentators, he managed to convert an ugly tenement building into a theatre worthy of the city by beautifully refurbishing the ceilings.Footnote ²² The artist could have basked in his uncontested fame in this field, but ambition enticed him to try his hand at further ventures. As a result, on that famous evening in Rio, he had not only designed the sets, but also held an unusual position: he was the impresario who headed – and was thus at the very centre of – this operatic venture.

Carlo Superti, finally, was an Italian musician active in Parma who had previously collaborated with most of the orchestra players who made up Rossi’s company in Brazil. From the theatrical chronicles of the day it does not appear that he had a prominent role in Brazilian musical life, and in Miguéz’s orchestra he took the unrewarding role of assistant conductor. We know from contemporary accounts that in São Paulo he had conducted a few operas of the standard repertory, such as Rigoletto, filling in for Miguéz earlier in 1886 as the latter busied himself with preparations for an eagerly awaited local premiere: Amilcare Ponchielli’s Marion Delorme. Paulistano critics, perhaps motivated by nationalism, declared that Miguéz’s absence was felt.Footnote ²³ In Brazil, Superti did what assistant conductors throughout the world have to do: he waited. He waited for catastrophe, and catastrophe duly struck on that evening in late June.

Miguéz, Rossi and Superti were launched on a trajectory that hurled them inexorably towards a tense denouement. As in many suspense novels, everything began light-heartedly, with general feelings of optimism and good will. A news item appeared in the Gazeta de Noticias a year before the climactic incident, announcing that the much-beloved Rossi was to embark on a new career as an impresario whose stupendous new operatic company would make its debut in São Paulo.Footnote ²⁴ This was quite a novelty, given that grand opera tours usually originated in Buenos Aires and stopped over in Rio, only then making their way to São Paulo. The news provoked expressions of local pride not only from the São Paulo music enthusiasts but also from practically all Brazilians: arrogant Buenos Aires would be snubbed by the ‘companhia lírica paulista’, as the venture came to be called. São Paulo’s capitalists eagerly supported the idea, and its originality was quite possibly the reason for entrusting a neophyte impresario with such an ambitious undertaking: Ferrari or Ciacchi might well have avoided such a risky project. In any case, the press exuded enthusiasm, and the young scenographer-cum-impresario travelled to Milan to hire the best singers in the world. From that moment on, Brazilian newspapers published a series of breaking-news updates and retractions about Rossi’s negotiations. Finally, with public anticipation at its height, enthusiastic crowds flocked to the port of Santos on 12 April to welcome the visiting artists. At the docks, the crowd tried to catch a glimpse of sopranos Elena Meyer, Giustina Reggiani, Nadina Bulicioff, Paolina Rossini Streiter, Carolina Buglione di Monale and Medea Mei, the mezzo-soprano Eugenia Mantelli, the Russian tenor Nicolaj Figner, the Italian Carlo Callioni, and the basses Gaetano Roveri and Nicola Limonta.

Local journalists indulged in wild gossip, printing that Meyer was the most beautiful singer in the company, and that, because she and Reggiani were unmarried, they travelled with their respective mothers ‘por salvaguardia’; that Mei had a statuesque figure and was secretly married to Figner, who in turn was the brother of a dangerous terrorist; that Buglione di Monale was noble and in fact a descendant of Godefroy de Bouillon, the mythical defender of the Holy Sepulchre; that Mantelli travelled with her father, who was Antônio Carlos Gomes’s friend and therefore had only been hired because of her connections.

In the midst of the noisy crowd, nobody paid any attention to the young figure who would shape music history, in the Americas for the first time. The company boarded the train with some thousand trunks in tow and departed immediately for São Paulo. They first performed at the Teatro São José, newly refurbished by Rossi. The news from the correspondents of the Rio papers augured well. It was reported that the singers were excellent and had received expensive gifts from admirers. However, at a certain point things took a turn for the worse. The first signs of strain came at a performance of Il trovatore. The opera had been thrown together so perfunctorily that one critic described it as no more than a rehearsal, noting that the singers had their eyes glued to the conductor, and that it was a pity to pay so much to watch musicians studying.Footnote ²⁵ Things were so chaotic that during the offstage chorus, singers could be heard laughing from the wings. For the performance of Gomes’s Salvator Rosa (premiered in Genoa in 1874) matters were not much better: the tenor Callioni’s contribution was described as ‘vile’.Footnote ²⁶ At the end of the season at the São José, O Paiz dismissed the company as second-rate.Footnote ²⁷ The reviewer wrote that he saw no tears in Paulistanos’ eyes at the departure of this troupe; everyone spoke ill of the company, even some of the garantidores – the capitalists – who had financed it. In one of the last performances there were even skirmishes between those who applauded despite the critics, and those who stamped their feet in disapproval. La Buglione, the descendant of the famous crusader, was the scapegoat and was viciously heckled, to the point that a group of operagoers hired a band to serenade her beneath her hotel room window as compensation for the bad treatment she had received.

After these shaky preliminaries, the company arrived in Rio. The Gazeta’s first review, of a performance of Aida on 25 June, was mixed. The critic treated his compatriot leniently – Miguéz was judged talented, judicious and modest – but the chorus was third-rate and the corps de ballet worse. A point that would become central now began to be touched on: a sense of authority was missing, but this was blamed on an orchestra that could not respond to the delicate and perhaps too ‘compliant’ gestures of ‘our dear Miguéz’.Footnote ²⁸ For Faust, performed on 28 June, the critics once again tried to keep an open mind. Rossi’s virtues were admired in the field where the Italian was appreciated without reservation: scene design. The notices said that if it had not been for the sub-par chorus and the orchestra, this might have been the best, most memorable Faust Rio had ever seen.Footnote ²⁹

And so the second performance of Aida finally arrived. The public was impatient to hear the Tuscan tenor Tobia Bertini, who had joined the company in Rio expressly to sing Radames, a small instance of the then-capital upstaging São Paulo.Footnote ³⁰ At the company’s first Carioca performance, Bertini had been substituted at the last minute. There could now be no more excuses, and expectations were extremely high. As if this were not enough, a few hours before the performance an article appeared in the Gazeta da Tarde, announcing that Miguéz had abandoned direction of the orchestra and making a direct appeal to Brazilian nationalistic feelings against the Italians in order to stir up controversy.Footnote ³¹ After a panegyric lauding of Miguéz’s international credentials and declaring him a Brazilian national treasure, it was implied that his Italian colleagues, spurred on by a ‘certain Superti’, had shown him blatant disrespect. Superti had even dared to change his superior’s markings in the conductor’s score in order to sabotage the conductor’s performances, undermine his prestige and authority, and ultimately assume his post. Despite Miguéz’s ‘natural Brazilian docility’, an impasse had been reached and Superti had obtained what he wanted: he had become Miguéz’s replacement. Next, the reporter incited the audience to revolt: ‘Let us see what the public will do, let us see whether the conspiracies of the envious will succeed in offending our national art in the person of one of its worthiest and most illustrious representatives.’ The article ended by explicitly suggesting how these defenders of the national art should behave: ‘For our part, let the stamping of our heels be heard.’

The inevitable occurred. To recount the events I have selected a passage from O Paiz, in which the influential critic Oscar Guanabarino tried to be even-handed by pointing out the responsibility of all involved.Footnote ³² He began prudently: ‘Everyone knows how great a friend I am of Leopoldo Miguéz’, but went on to imply that despite the Brazilian conductor’s wisdom, prestige and humility, he lacked the firmness necessary to conduct an orchestra. However, Miguéz had to deal with an intransigent foreign orchestra with a preference for their compatriot and long-time acquaintance, Carlo Superti. Guanabarino’s report then took a classical turn, remarking that it was easy for the conspirators to ‘transform the theatre into a Procrustean bed’ and to wrap Miguéz in the fatal tunic of Nessus. The critic defended the behaviour of the audience, which had not been placated by a letter from Miguéz that Rossi read before the curtain went up. Instead, the moment Superti appeared at the podium, they exacted the punishment due to the victim of a ‘petty, odious quarrel over nationality’ and instigated by this usurper. This punishment consisted of ‘the most clamorous stamping of feet that had ever taken place under that roof’. What Guanabarino did not say was that this disapproval issued less from the upper balconies than from the boxes occupied by the elite and the critics themselves, as was reported in a letter sent to the Gazeta de Noticias and signed by ‘the galleries’.Footnote ³³ The same letter charged that the disturbance had been organised by a claque of those who did not have to pay for their tickets, that is, by the very critics who were hypocritically glad Miguéz had been toppled. Whatever the case, the deafening noise – which lasted a full quarter of an hour according to some, and a good half hour according to others – did not calm down until Superti had abandoned his position. And this was the point when the principal cellist mounted the podium, closed the score and conducted from memory. This teenager, who just a few months earlier had worn the blue uniform of a conservatory student, resisted entreaties to change into a proper conductor’s tuxedo and conducted the entire performance wearing the attire of a humble member of the orchestra.

To return to the question: what possessed this youth to assume such enormous responsibility? Generally two explanations are offered. The first is hierarchical: Toscanini, in addition to being the company’s principal cello, was the assistant chorus master. After Superti, the third in command would have been the chief chorus master, who might have thought twice about braving the podium given the harsh criticism that the press had meted out to the choral forces. The other complementary interpretation posits that Toscanini was encouraged by his conservatory friends – such as Italo Casella – as well as other colleagues, especially the choristers. Toscanini himself would later recall that ‘Everyone knew that I had the opera by heart; when I rehearsed the parts with them I accompanied them on the piano without looking at the score. I didn’t want to go on, but a member of the chorus – a certain Ms. Leoni from Parma, as ugly as the devil – urged me to.’Footnote ³⁴

After that ‘stormy night’, the skies began to clear. There was a happy ending for the hero who had saved the day, the villain straight out of central casting ended up humiliated and disgraced, and the well-intentioned supporting cast had saved their reputations. Guanabarino in O Paiz addressed this last point by reaffirming not only his esteem for his compatriot Miguéz but also his respect for Rossi who, according to the critic, defended the Brazilian conductor as best as he could from his enemies.Footnote ³⁵ On the opposite side of the issue from the jingoistic Giornale de la Tarde stood L’Italia, the ‘organ of Italo-Brazilian interests’, which accused its rival periodical of rushing to judgement, immoderation and ‘virulent rhetoric against Superti’. L’Italia published two letters to the editor. The first was by Rossi, in which the impresario restated his esteem for Miguéz and expressed his disappointment and surprise at the Brazilian conductor’s decision to resign for health reasons. The second was from Superti, who vented his frustrations at being made the scapegoat of the situation and the victim of the Giornale de la Tarde’s smear campaign. According to him, Miguéz himself had asked him back in São Paulo to mark the places in the score where the instrumental sections were to be cued for their entrances.Footnote ³⁶

This incident had consequences beyond Toscanini’s fabled rise to fame as an orchestral conductor. His local, overnight prestige spread beyond the walls of the opera house and furnished an occasion to make sardonic comparisons in political circles. One commentator wrote that the Brazilian parliament seemed like ‘a cacophonous orchestra conducted by Maestro Superti’.Footnote ³⁷ Toscanini was already assuming a reputation for qualities that would become lasting features of his public persona. According to Guanabarino, he was a man of courage, with a cool head, enthusiasm and vigour; comparable even to Enrico Casella, another Italian who had performed in Rio’s famous Club Beethoven a couple of years earlier, although not as an artist but as a skilled fencing master:Footnote ³⁸ both roles, in other words, required the same chivalric test of honour, nerve and mettle. Despite Toscanini’s youth, meanwhile, he was also portrayed as severe and inflexible character.Footnote ³⁹ The conductor was seen as brooking no compromise, driven by an incorruptible dedication to his art.Footnote ⁴⁰

Such a powerful personality could clearly not be confined to the opera house. And more generally, in fact, it was typically by way of operatic touring companies that professional instrumentalists good enough to perform the chamber music of the great composers could be found in Rio.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, as opera companies often performed extended runs in port cities, musicians had ample opportunity to establish significant contacts with the local music scene. Toscanini’s partner in his own extra-operatic activities was his friend Ferruccio Cattelani. The two played what was considered in the 1880s to be Latin America’s most exclusive performance venue, the Club Beethoven. The club, managed for years by the Italian Vincenzo Cernichiaro, catered to the social elite of Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, ‘the club’s reputation as the foremost musical society in the imperial capital echoed beyond the country’s borders, reaching other cities in Latin America and Europe’.Footnote ⁴²

All Rio de Janeiro’s periodicals promoted Toscanini and Cattelani’s performance at the Club Beethoven, scheduled for the evening of 17 August, just after their duties in the opera house orchestra pit came to an end. At that concert, Cattelani played the violin, with Toscanini on the piano, and the programme included the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (with piano accompaniment). The audience also heard one of Schumann’s Op. 41 string quartets for the first time, along with an ‘Air de Wieniawski’. In Rubinstein’s Piano Trio Op. 15 No. 2, Toscanini then switched from piano to cello.Footnote ⁴³ On another occasion, a few days later, the two Parma Conservatory alumni shared the stage with other colleagues at a concert with the imperial family in attendance. A colourful detail has come down to us in press reviews of that performance, providing added confirmation of Toscanini’s enormous musical prowess. The programme was supposed to include the famous duet from I puritani, but at the last minute it had to be substituted by another piece, the Romanza ‘Julia!’ by Luigi Denza, to be sung by Napoleone Limonta. Once again, it was Toscanini to the rescue: sight-reading the piece and even transposing it by a semitone to suit the singer. The extended programme was divided into three sections, and Cattelani took centre stage. The ineffable Guanabarino, always ready with advice, had some for the violinist: ‘In the first part of the concert, what impressed us most was Vieuxtemps’s Fantasia-Capriccio, performed with incredible polish and great feeling by Cattelani, the leader of the orchestra to whom we offer the following advice: abandon your orchestral work and apply yourself exclusively to a concert career.’Footnote ⁴⁴

Two days after this final concert, the opera company boarded the ship Savoie to return to Italy, and thus concluded this shared exploit for Ferruccio and Arturo. In their case, as in that of the brothers Marenco, their paths would divide after this experience abroad. Toscanini would leave behind one of the richest artistic legacies in sound recording history, one that, even today, survives the test of time and provides occasion for pleasure, analysis and comparison; the same cannot be said of his great friend and esteemed colleague, Cattelani. Yet to understand something of the artistic mastery of the latter, even more convincing than contemporary reviews is the fact that an artist of Toscanini’s standards, who was as demanding of his colleagues as of himself, deemed Cattelani to be a worthy partner in that most exposed of musical collaborations, chamber music. There is no evidence that Toscanini’s personal feelings ever compromised his legendarily severe standards, even during his youth.

After all these (mis)adventures, Miguéz resumed his successful career as Brazil’s favourite conductor. Little or nothing more is known of Superti. The two tenors who cut such a poor figure in Aida were in reality victims of circumstance: in Rio they had to fill the shoes of the legendary tenor Francesco Tamagno, who had sung Radames in the city shortly before them. Bertini continued his career in Europe and is remembered with great affection in his hometown of Prato; Callioni settled down in Buenos Aires, where he began a profitable career as a voice teacher. The Parmense friends, meanwhile, Italo Casella and Ferruccio Cattelani, finally landed in Buenos Aires. There they found a fellow alumnus of the Parma Conservatory, Riccardo Furlotti, who had paved the way for them. Casella ultimately settled in Montevideo, where he founded the tradition of classical music instruction in Uruguay, and where his son, who would become an important composer, was born. Cattelani, on the other hand, decided to stay in Argentina. Toscanini also revisited Buenos Aires a few years later to conduct at the Teatro de la Ópera. However, as one of the first international ‘jet-set’ conductors, his presence in Argentina would be far more sporadic.

Aida in Argentina

On their respective arrivals in Argentina, what sort of place and what sort of audiences did first-rate Italian musicians such as Melani, Panizza, Marenco, Casella, Furlotti, Cattelani and Toscanini find, 15,000 kilometres from their homes? Just who were the inhabitants of this austere landscape? What might have struck a foreigner about Buenos Aires most strongly were the city’s sharp divisions between an upper class of diverse origins, which spoke both the local language and French, and a majority-Italian lower class that spoke Italo-Spanish slang. There was practically no communication between the two milieus; in the high-class neighbourhoods, parents warned their children: ‘Don’t bring home any Italians!’

While Melani, Panizza and Marenco were busy assuring Aida’s first international triumph on Christmas Eve 1871, their compatriots in Argentina, migrants in a far-flung land, struggled to adapt to the harsh conditions of the unforgiving setting. On the same day that the shores of the Nile echoed with the mellifluous sufferings of Verdi’s star-crossed lovers, another river, the capacious Rio de la Plata, was the site of a real tragedy, the shipwreck of the steamship America. That December in Buenos Aires signalled the end of a year that had been marked by a yellow-fever plague so fierce that it necessitated opening another public cemetery. These events hit the poor migrants in the Rio de la Plata Basin especially hard. However, a steady tide of immigrants in search of better prospects kept arriving, and in time the demographic flow became so massive that a radical social transformation of the Latin American country took place, along with a corresponding backlash.Footnote ⁴⁵

Most of the late nineteenth-century arrivals in Buenos Aires were Italians who, despite being mostly illiterate labourers of humble origins, were thoroughly familiar with the standard operatic repertory. As such, they participated in the same sorts of ‘opera crazes’ that they had been used to in Italy. Of course, what opera signified in the two contexts was very different. In the case of Verdi, Italians had come to see him as an institution and, like all institutions, one could be alternately revered or rebelled against, sneered at and taken for granted (as variously demonstrated by scapigliatura and verismo intellectual currents). For the Italians across the Atlantic, Verdi was more like a father-figure who made them feel proud of themselves: numerous Italian institutions in Argentina were named after him. The migrant found comfort in opera: indigent Italians who had suffered one degradation after another saw that music they considered their own was appreciated by the local elites. Operatic events in Buenos Aires were therefore sources of pride and integrity of group identity.

If the triumphal march that represented ancient Thebes had a strong positive meaning for those whose daily lives were still rooted in Italian soil, that same musical opulence would be the agent of an immense and powerful nostalgic-emotional bond among those who, far from their homeland, conceived of the Italian character as a merely spiritual space. Italians in Buenos Aires kept themselves informed about the triumphs of the great Italian celebrities, and at the time of Aida’s premiere Verdi’s international prestige was at its height. He was not merely one of the world’s most important living composers, but also in all probability its most popular. His sentimental story of a poor Ethiopian slave was such a hit that Italians around the world broke the ancestral habit of baptising their daughters with names of their forebears and instead had them christened with the name of Verdi’s heroine, even though it was obviously nowhere to be found in the Roman sanctorale.Footnote ⁴⁶

When Aida itself migrated to Argentina in 1873, Buenos Aires had two important opera houses that competed with each other for pre-eminence: the Teatro de la Ópera, which had been inaugurated a year earlier, and the Teatro Colón, where Verdi’s new opera made its Argentinian debut.Footnote ⁴⁷ In those years, Angelo Ferrari, the powerful impresario, had already managed to organise seasons that attracted artists of international prestige to the city: for the Argentinian premiere of Aida the conductor was Nicola de Giosa, a great Italian composer who had studied with Gaetano Donizetti; the title role boasted no less than the soprano who had sung Aida in Cairo for the world premiere, Antonietta Pozzoni Anastasi. Two other singers that evening, the baritone Luigi Colonnese and the bass François-Marcel Junca – respectively Amonasro and Ramfis – had had the honour of creating the roles of Don Carlo and Padre Guardiano in the revised version of La forza del destino when it was premiered at La Scala in 1869. Other well-known artists sang the remaining principal roles: Salvatore Anastasi as Radames and Ernestina Stoika as Amneris.Footnote ⁴⁸

It is important not to idealise the range of music that Italian migrants enjoyed in Argentina. According to scholarly convention, the year 1880 marks the beginning of the great European migration to the country. That year is also more or less equidistant between the world premieres of two of Verdi’s last operas: namely, Aida (1871) and Otello (1887). The stylistic evolution between these two operas is significant enough to explain the different popular reception of the two works. Although one account has it that newspaper boys hawking their wares in the streets of Buenos Aires would whistle tunes from Otello, there is no way that that opera rivalled the popularity of Aida, a work Italians all over the world claimed as their heritage.

The ‘Aida Five’ in Buenos Aires

It is not easy, from our standpoint, to understand the extreme mobility of musicians in search of employment during those years. Some young Italian professionals looked eastward, even as far as India. This is demonstrated by the previously mentioned list that the director of the Naples Conservatory sent to the Ministry of Public Education, in which he boasted that recent graduates from his institute had been hired in Istanbul, Athens and Calcutta. Not even the distance to the Americas was daunting enough to keep musicians from criss-crossing the ocean, even for brief periods, just like those labourers who ‘flew south for the winter’, following alternate harvest seasons from one hemisphere to another. Once arrived in South America, these pioneers travelled within the continent itself, shuttling from one distant operatic centre to another. As an example, we might consider the case of Italo Casella, who seems to have been motivated by the constant search for a place that suited him within the vast South American territories. He arrived in Buenos Aires, having been hired by the impresario Cesare Ciacchi, in 1883; the following year he was in Montevideo; then he participated in the Carioca Aida of 1886. Six years later he seemed to have taken up residence in Rio, where he founded a string quartet, but in 1896 he abandoned Brazil to return to Buenos Aires. The following year his friend and colleague Ferruccio Cattelani, another drifter, met up with him. Such Italians formed a collaborative peer network in Buenos Aires, meeting other first-rate colleagues such as the Bolognese violist Giuseppe Bonfiglioli, who six years before his arrival in Argentina, in 1883, had been of member of the pioneering string quartet of Marquis Camillo Pizzardi.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this way, Buenos Aires saw a strong contingent of excellent instrumentalists resident in the city during the last two decades of the century. They were close enough in age – the eldest of the circle, Marenco, was born in 1843, while the youngest, Cattelani, was born in 1867 – to allow them to collaborate in the musical life of the city for an entire generation.

These instrumentalists were principal members of the operatic orchestras of the Colón and the Teatro de la Ópera as managed by impresarios such as Ferrari and Ciacchi, and were occasionally conducted by Toscanini, a semi-regular feature of Buenos Aires’s musical life, at least during the first decade of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁰ In other venues, they also played chamber music and symphonic works: Melani and Cattelani, for example, formed and led instrumental groups of gifted musicians modelled on the European vogue of the quartet societies. These formations laid the foundations of chamber music in Argentina by giving the first performances in Buenos Aires of quartets by Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.Footnote ⁵¹ The result was a peculiar phenomenon: although Italians were associated with their native opera, they were also the principal vehicle of music considered the patrimony of German culture, music that journalistic critics explicitly posited as in opposition to the operatic sensibilities of the Italians. An idea of the near-monopoly held by Italians can be illustrated by the fact that Italians conducted the local debuts of almost all the operas of Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Cattelani and his colleagues enjoyed the support of the numerous Italian immigrant institutions, which were varied in terms of their social composition. Consequently, and in contrast to the social function of the Club Beethoven in Rio, Italian musicians in Buenos Aires interacted with a far wider range of society: most of their concerts took place in the beautiful headquarters of the Italian Workers’ Association, where labour negotiations between entrepreneurs and workers took place.Footnote ⁵² This venue hosted the local premieres of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie, Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung and Don Juan, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture and Brahms’s Second Symphony. The music periodical La Gaceta Musical recommended a performance of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer to a public already familiar with large sections of the opera, but ‘never performed in the Americas until now’.Footnote ⁵³ In a different setting, Riccardo Furlotti devoted himself to a musical enterprise of great importance: he led performances of demanding music at concerts held among the serene, familiar avenues of the famous Jardín Florida.

It was a considerable boon for local audiences that Buenos Aires hosted musicians such as Cattelani who, beyond his musical abilities, was also an extremely capable organiser. Like his student companion, Toscanini, Cattelani’s work was his mission, and his efforts to present great symphonic music to a public still unaware of the pinnacles of the form were monumental. His conscientiousness was apparent in his service towards the country that had taken him in. Simply put, he helped the city achieve symphonic literacy. Alejandro Lucadamo noted that, prior to the years of Cattelani’s educational mission, musical study in Argentina was the exclusive prerogative of elite families.Footnote ⁵⁴ He and his compatriots taught the first generation of local classical musicians who, for the first time in the country’s history, did not all hail from the upper classes. Cattelani’s pedagogical zeal also found expression in publications such as the Six Violin Studies Op. 2, which he dedicated to his own teacher, Lodovico Mantovani.Footnote ⁵⁵

In addition, Cattelani seems to have been the composer of the first symphony written in Argentina.Footnote ⁵⁶ He was chiefly responsible for the drafting of the constitution of the Asociación Orquestal Bonaerense, an organisation which under his direction introduced local audiences to important instrumental works by Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Borodin, Brahms, Strauss and Debussy. Cattelani promoted a repertoire that ran the gamut from ‘ancient’ music – scarcely programmed even in Europe – to the contemporary music of his time. Argentines got their first taste of early opera thanks to him, as the first to mount local performances of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s La rappresentazione di anima e di corpo and Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 1920 and 1924 respectively. (A planned performance of Peri’s Euridice never came to fruition.) Of eighteenth-century music, he presented not only Bach but also key works of Pergolesi, Tartini, Geminiani, Handel, Corelli, Vivaldi, Leo and Porpora. The composers of his own time included D’Indy, Debussy, Mahler, Martucci, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss (see Appendix 1 for a list of all the works introduced to the city by Cattelani; Appendix 2 lists the handful of works introduced by Melani). When international operatic stars such as Solomiya Krushelnytska, Beniamino Gigli or Gilda Della Rizza visited, Cattelani played joint concerts with them. When Saint-Saëns travelled to South America in 1904, the Frenchman performed several of his chamber works at the piano, with Cattelani on violin.

The evangelical fervour with which Cattelani carried out his musical activities was quite possibly based on the model he had seen in Rio, playing alongside Toscanini in the Club Beethoven. He felt he needed to combat public apathy towards symphonic and chamber music.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, while he was a lifelong devotee of the operas in which his countrymen excelled, he was equally at home leading performances of Wagner. This was another point in common with Toscanini, who conducted six Wagner operas in Buenos Aires alone, including, in August 1901, the Argentinian premiere of Tristan und Isolde. While most of Toscanini’s conducting in Argentina was in the opera house, he not only championed composers he knew personally (Verdi, Boito, Catalani, Franchetti, Puccini, Mascagni, Giordano, Panizza fils and Cilea) but also was an ardent advocate of repertoire by German and French composers (Wagner, Weber, Goldmark, Humperdinck; Berlioz, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Massenet and Dukas). In three of his five operatic seasons at Buenos Aires, he conducted his beloved Aida, but gave Tristan the same number of times. He even cast that most Italian of tenors, Enrico Caruso, in the role of Lohengrin in Buenos Aires. By promoting diverse musical idioms, Toscanini’s example fostered the internationalisation of local operatic sensibilities in a way analogous to Cattelani’s efforts in the symphonic and chamber music realm. Also as in Cattelani’s case, this is reflected in the heterogeneous works that received their Argentinian premieres under Toscanini’s baton, which in addition to Tristan included Berlioz’s La Damnation du Faust, Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, Panizza’s Medio Evo Latino, Franchetti’s Asrael and La figlia di Iorio, Massenet’s Griselda, Giordano’s Siberia, Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Catalani’s La Wally and Humperdinck’s Königskinder.Footnote ⁵⁸

Compared to Toscanini, however (who by this time had no qualms about wearing the tuxedo proper to a superstar divo of the podium), the musical activity of Cattelani and the ‘Aida Five’ connected more deeply to Argentinian society as a whole: it was geared directly to the working classes, which in itself was entirely innovative and profoundly different from, for example, the Club Beethoven, ‘a closed society, ready to admit only the cream of Rio de Janeiro’s social, political, and intellectual society as members’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Italian Workers’ headquarters attracted a different audience and, in contrast to classical music venues in Rio, was managed not by the elite but by immigrant labourers. Many associations of the Italian community fully shared the anticlerical leanings which Verdi manifested in Aida above all. And one of the most active associations in Buenos Aires, the Sociedad Filarmónica ‘José Verdi’, even issued diplomas proudly displaying its association with the Asociación Anticlerical Boca del Riachuelo (see Fig. 2).Footnote ⁶⁰ As the progressive ideals of most of the community had a strong internationalist profile, they saw no conflict of interest in manifesting affection for Italy as strongly as they did for their adopted land. From a musical point of view, this co-allegiance seems to be on display in Cattelani’s own compositions, which included not only the Inno dell’Associazione Unione e Benevolenza but also an opera on a local theme (Atahualpa), works inspired by Argentinian folklore and a Himno del Centenario on the epic tale of Argentinian independence.

Fig. 2

Certificate of the Sociedad Filarmónica José Verdi as a member of the Asociación anticlerical Boca del Riachuelo. Oreste Vaggi Archive, Buenos Aires.

What Cattelani and his peers contributed to Argentinian culture is little known in Argentina today. Neither streets nor cultural institutions in Buenos Aires bear their names. The visual symbol of this oblivion is the neglect of the magnificent salon of the Italian Workers’ Association, which until recently was in a state of catastrophic ruin. Possible explanations for this neglect are many, but certainly a central element is Bonaerense society’s ambiguous relationship to the fact of immigration as part of the fabric of its cultural life and history. After the centenary celebrations of local independence in 1910, an aggressive nationalist sentiment against those who had brought the country such unwelcome innovations as unions and workers’ rights began to take root, especially in the rural strongholds that controlled the country. The biggest victims of this historical revisionism were Italian immigrants, their descendants and their cultural symbols. The upper classes began to belittle opera from south of the Alps and came to prefer Massenet to verismo’s stentorian vocalism, the latter dismissed as too reminiscent of the cries of common street vendors. In the wake of the centenary of independence celebrated in 1910, the elite’s rejection of Italian opera fitted with a more general desire to champion the archetypal figure of the Argentinean gaucho and at the same time to idealize France and French culture.Footnote ⁶¹ Italians had to be kept at arm’s length, in other words: they were harbingers of trouble simply by making up the majority of the proletariat.

Less easy to explain is the lack of recognition in intellectual spheres – for whom internationalism had once been a byword – towards those who brought Beethoven, Brahms and Debussy to the city and made them accessible to the general populace. To this day, browsing through Argentinian musicological publications as well as the curricula of local universities, one is struck by how little scholarly attention is given to the musical contributions of immigrants (there is, for instance, no publication of the Instituto Nacional de Musicología devoted to these musicians). Instead one finds an emphasis on studies of the Iberian past, which is curious, especially as Argentina offers far fewer research opportunities than nearby Bolivia and Perù regarding local composers who could be considered ‘Argentinean’ in terms of their Iberian heritage, or through their production of a ‘mythico-nationalistic’ oeuvre. Applying the principle of ius soli to national culture seems to match a reluctance to recognise that ‘everyone came from elsewhere’, a holdover of the primordial horror vacui in the face of the endless pampas.Footnote ⁶²

New arrivals went unrecognised as properly national, in other words, as did the fact that objects and artefacts change on migrating, and that place exacts its own tributes. Aida mounted in Buenos Aires is different from Aida at La Scala even though the notes are the same, just as pixa – as it is pronounced in Buenos Aires – is a very different thing from Italian pizza. The logos adhering to nationalistic, elitist schemes, together with the myth of a bucolic purity, declares that all those who made landfall in the Americas without being born there are aliens. The blanket condemnation applies not only to Christopher Columbus – the centuries-old statue of whom was recently torn down after former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez denounced him – but also to the destitute migrants of the early 1900s. As a result, there is a risk that conventional academic wisdom draws a distinction between poverty worthy of musical study – such as the many studies of cumbia villera and other cultural products of shanty towns peopled by labourers from rural provinces and from other Latin American countries – as opposed to the immigrant-filled conventillos of the late nineteenth century which, deriving from ‘First World’ countries, are overlooked.

It seems remarkable that the musical culture of millions of humble peasants and proletarians who arrived in Argentina is so widely ignored by their descendants, who prefer to embrace indigenous culture or the art generated by the mystical invention of an imaginary nation. All the more important, then, in the face of such neglect, to recognise that a group such as the ‘Aida Five’ – Melani, Panizza, Marenco, Casella and Cattelani, internationally united by their common experience abroad accompanying the uprooted Ethiopian slave torn between national allegiances – radically transformed the musical reality of their host country, as well as contributing to the global spread of Italian opera.