In one of the most extraordinary operatic reveries from late nineteenth-century Milan, the music critic Filippo Filippi projected himself into a world 30 years ahead of his own. Writing in 1881, in the wake of the first local performance of Boito’s revised Mefistofele, he mused on a vision of 1911. ‘Let’s posit’, he began, ‘that music will have progressed by the same degree as it has over the last three decades; that audiences will be calmer and musically better educated; and that performers, all of them, will be more cultured, more musical than they are today’. ‘In my imagination’, he went on, ‘I see the aged Boito, with a white beard à la Faust … his celebrity so great that the entire world is enthused at the mere hope of hearing a new opera by him, as today with Verdi’.Footnote ¹ Filippi’s anticipation of a world to come, a future he could just about hope to experience, is crammed with ironic allusions that spare no protagonist of contemporary Milanese musical life. But his core point was nonetheless a serious one: it concerned an imaginary revival of Mefistofele in its first, hitherto misunderstood version. Under improved performance conditions and before a more discriminating audience – Filippi prophesied – Boito’s original, 1868 opera would finally receive the public recognition it had long deserved. Filippi’s dream, alas, was to remain just that. Nor did the all-too-human critic outlive his fantasy by more than a few years (he died in 1887). But his utopia of an archaeological recuperation enabled by technological and cultural progress captures well the tensions between historicism and modernism, tradition and innovation, in which fine secolo Italian culture was mired.

Alessandra Campana’s Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy revisits this stubbornly recalcitrant topic by exploring some of the ways in which opera, or more precisely a nexus of operatic works, reconfigured their ‘communicative and aesthetic powers’ in conjunction with ‘a broader movement of industrialization of culture’ (p. 2). What came to be redefined, in the wake of new cultural policies and a new economy of high culture and entertainment, was opera’s relationship and means of engaging with its public. Thus the emphasis, in Campana’s analysis, is on a wide gamut of (broadly speaking) authorial manoeuvres, ones that she spells out in a number of case studies, with no claims to over-arching grand narratives.

The gist of her methodology and materials are usefully outlined in Chapter 1. This introduces the concerns that lie at the heart of her investigation: opera as participatory of broader cultural trends; the operatic genre as an aesthetic medium, rather than an art form to be unpacked simply through instances of reception. The triangulation of audience, public and spectatorship that she proposes in these opening pages remains, on some fronts, slightly obscure. I could not entirely grasp, on pp. 12 and 14, the difference between ‘public’ and ‘spectatorship’. Both seem to refer to the combination of contingent and potential opera-goers, as articulated, always differently, by specific works; but spectatorship is doubly protean, insofar as it stands for ‘the variable relation between opera and public’. Yet Campana’s reluctance to pin down spectatorship tout court is crucial to – and largely to be welcomed for – the resilience it lends to the concept when this is applied in each of her case studies. A significant preponderance of evidence here falls on opera staging manuals (in Italian, disposizioni sceniche). As Campana explains early on, she intends to explore these documents both for their status as symptomatic of a burgeoning commodity culture – of opera’s assimilation into an autonomous (and thus fully reproducible) authorially sanctioned script – and for their potential to shed light on each work’s idiosyncratic mode of addressing its public.

Campana’s first case study (Chapter 2) addresses Mefistofele, the opera which Filippi was at such pains to rescue. She starts off by retracing a similar idealistic tension: one inscribed, on the one hand, in the work’s compositional and reception history (Boito’s 1868 visionary project, its subsequent adjustments to public taste, and its eventual critical enshrinement as a ‘lost original’); and, on the other, in the composer’s oeuvre and artistic beliefs more generally (his involvement with the Milanese ‘scapigliatura’ and his unfinished operatic project Nerone). The relationship of ‘antagonism and resistance’ between artist and public that underpinned most of the composer’s early career has served, up to now, as the dominant critical paradigm in accounts of the fiasco of the first Mefistofele (p. 15). And yet, Campana explains, this relationship goes beyond signifying the nth rehearsal of the myth of the misunderstood Romantic genius. Rather, in a subtle twist of the standard interpretation, she makes that struggle into the aesthetic and ideological core of what she calls the opera’s ‘cultural project’ (p. 16). It is at the very level of dramatic content and theatrical effects – at the level, that is, not only of reception but also of Boito’s ‘text’ – that the artist/public battle is thematized. Thus, peering at the opera’s stagecraft and spectacular apparatus through the looking glass of Giorgio Agamben’s aesthetics of modernity becomes an opportunity to tease out broader cultural tensions. From such a reading, Mefistofele emerges as the epitome of a theatre that purposely ‘interpellate[s]’ rather than invokes empathetic consumption from its public (p. 47).

Chapter 3 explores another opera with a convoluted compositional history: Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. Premiered in Venice in 1857, Boccanegra was then thoroughly revised by the composer and performed in its new (now standard) version in Milan in 1881. For Campana, the multiple historical strata out of which the opera arose constitute only one level of the work’s ‘spectral historicity’ (p. 49). Once again, she pursues her topic by examining the hermeneutic territory that lies at the intersection of the opera’s text and the context of its 1881 performance. The numerous racconti that underpin Verdi’s opera, each a different version of Amelia’s/Maria’s story, insistently ‘conjure up the present as a coexistence of multiple temporalities and various histories’ (p. 89). This persistence of spectres from the past and their capacity to reveal hidden aspects of reality is further conveyed, Campana argues, through the opera’s use of lighting as a ‘productive’, so-to-speak transfigurative device (p. 74). It also reaches a climax in the famous Council Chamber Scene. Here the Doge at once takes on himself empathetically the moral burden of his people’s bellicose past, and writes it off through his call for peace – ‘mak[ing] room for potentiality within history’ (p. 105). However, it is within the larger context of 1881 Milan – its National Industrial Exhibition, shows of technological progress, and yet ‘historicist’ opera season – that Simon Boccanegra most clearly comes to embody the peculiar, meandering and two-sided trajectory of Italian culture’s road to modernity.Footnote ²

Along this road, Verdi’s Otello (1887) has long been held a cornerstone. While scholarly accounts have traditionally emphasized formal aspects of the opera, in her fourth chapter Campana scans Otello’s historical punctuality by examining the resonances between the opera’s approach to acting and a number of other contemporary discourses. The juxtaposition of Otello and Iago, of the former’s artificiality of emotions and the latter’s immediacy and transparency, in Campana’s view registers a contemporary re-emergence of European querelles about acting (with roots back in Diderot’s 1770s essay Paradoxe sur le comédien, first published in Paris in 1830). In Otello’s rehearsal of this controversy, the polarization between the two characters would reflect the partisan divide between ‘emotionalists’ and ‘anti-emotionalists’ (p. 111): the upholders of an acting that is moved by the characters’ emotions versus those promoting an acting that merely attempts to reproduce their effects. But Campana’s chapter takes its perusal of acting a long way further. It subsequently considers issues of mimesis, and therefore the dialectics of Self and Other – particularly of a Self becoming Other – in literary texts and historical events surrounding the Otello premiere. It concludes by zooming in on the opera’s final moments: on Otello’s own ‘crisis of individuation’ (p. 133); his recognition, at the return of the bacio motive, of the loss and otherness of his ‘self-in-the-past’ (p. 142).

Mimesis is again the main theoretical impulse to Chapter 5, which concerns Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. As often in her book, Campana addresses and redresses standard scholarly narratives. Manon’s oft-talked-about discontinuity and the hollowness (visual and dramatic) of its last act can be seen, she suggests, as the very elements that enable its modernity. Campana unfolds a reading of particular aspects of the opera’s sets and dramaturgy which draws on film theory (the concept of suture) as well as on Sartre and Lacan. The role of vision – the characters’ gaze at Manon, and her appropriation of that gaze as reflected in her absorption into a constantly changing background – is fundamental, Campana argues, in explaining the continual re-constitution of the heroine’s identity. Manon is a feminine figure who might even constitute the opera’s very system of representation, propelling as she does its dramaturgy according to her shifting perceptions of herself. In this way, the act of looking and the transmutations and disruptions that accompany it summon a new type of spectator: one that is stitched into the gaze.

Finally, Campana’s last chapter, more concise and bringing us more explicitly into the age of film, involves a related and yet somehow opposite project: the way in which Mascagni’s music for Oxilia and Fassini’s silent film Rapsodia satanica (1915–17) performs its autonomy, its ‘unsutured-ness’ from the visual. The music and the imagetrack are treated by Mascagni as two separate dimensions, mostly resisting mutual assimilation. The few instances when the music becomes diegetic are immediately overturned by its receding back into its own self-constitutive domain. What Mascagni’s procedure ultimately points to, Campana suggests, is an attempt to reconfigure music as a medium – as an art capable of lending cinema ‘its own aesthetic and discursive baggage’ (p. 180).

Opera and Modern Spectatorship – it will by now be obvious – interweaves a vast range of theoretical and historiographical approaches: from cultural history to text hermeneutics, from film theory to performance studies and psychoanalysis, with only a curious absentee, perhaps, represented by studies of vision and perception (Jonathan Crary et al.). What is more, the book places intriguing interpretative pressure on musical texts throughout. At a time when finding ways of bringing the so-called Music Itself into dialogue with Contexts is likely to become one of the most taxing challenges in musicology, these are remarkable accomplishments. Perhaps one possible way forward – a route Campana hints at (if only in passing) on various occasions – is to pursue how, historically, ‘ideology is mediated by aesthetics’ (p. 14): in her closing, Rancière-coloured gloss, ‘the question of the politics of aesthetics’ (p. 193). The tensions and negotiations she unwraps in her chosen operas certainly had an element of historical agency. But to reveal how those texts bore on and/or articulated political, social and cultural concerns, they need also to be examined, I would suggest, alongside further evidence of the operas’ contemporary productions and reception. (The cultural policies that stood behind them, though profusely invoked by Campana, are ultimately granted little space for discussion.) The risk is, otherwise, that we fall back into the domain of the self-contained musical work; or, alternatively, that we excavate the internal dialectics of both operas and society and then map them onto one another, by calling on somewhat elusive reverberations.

In this sense, the moments in the book which I found most fascinating often came towards the end of each chapter (the Mefistofele and Boccanegra ones are good examples). It is here that Campana opens up the greatest room for the encounter of the aesthetic with the political. Partly such moves are the result of her tightening up her argument, of her weaving together the various threads of her discourse. But they also show a conscious effort to foreground connections that, if as yet still laconic, are both intellectually and ethically worth pursuing. For, as Campana explains early on, what is at stake when we approach opera as a medium that exists in response to and anticipation of shifting public identities is ultimately the possibility that we confront enduring myths and cultural stereotypes, revoking at least some of their assumed impermeability to the fluctuations of time and history. Aesthetics, then, would disclose its politics twice over. And we, at once actors and spectators, would become even more integrally part of the performance.