This special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review is dedicated to the practice of self-borrowing in nineteenth-century Italian opera. The articles it contains arose from a symposium held at Maynooth University in 2018, the intent of which was to consider self-borrowing not only as a compositional phenomenon, but also a vantage point from which to observe nineteenth-century Italian opera.Footnote 1 In order to set the stage for the discussion that follows, it is first necessary to bring our field of enquiry into focus by providing a definition of self-borrowing, and then narrow our perspective to the repertory under scrutiny and the scholarly debate surrounding it.
A useful point of departure to clarify the ontological limits of the practice of self-borrowing might be the entry ‘Borrowing’ by Peter Burkholder in Grove Music Online, which implicitly recognizes that the leading English-language dictionary of music does not provide one specifically devoted to our topic. According to Burkholder, ‘the study of borrowing in music focuses … on the use in a new composition of one or more elements from a specific piece’. It is significant, in particular for the genre explored within this issue, that Burkholder distinguishes between actual borrowing and the presence, in a new piece, of ‘qualities identified with another tradition’ or – more importantly – ‘common melodic formulae and formal conventions’ of a certain repertory, whereas the latter broader level of interrelations falls outside the field of study.Footnote 2 I will return to this point later; at present, I would like to remark that the emphasis is on the re-use of a specific piece. Yet, one may ask what is to be understood by ‘one or more elements’ from an existing, specific piece in order to speak of borrowing. Burkholder suggests a few possible answers to this question with a list of indicators (potentially applicable to any repertory and composer) grouped into six areas, which he provides to establish specific typologies of borrowing: (1) the relationship between the new and the existing piece; (2) what elements are incorporated into or referred to by the new piece; (3) the relationship between the borrowed material and the shape of the new piece; (4) the ways in which the borrowed material is altered in the new piece; (5) the function of the borrowed material within the new piece, in musical terms; (6) the function or meaning of the borrowed material within the new piece in associative or extra-musical terms, if any.Footnote 3
In the first area, one of the possible options presented as part of the sub-category ‘origin’ is that the existing piece is ‘by the composer of the new piece’. Hence, self-borrowing – a term that never occurs explicitly within Burkholder's text – is a specific type of borrowing, which can be defined as ‘the use in a new composition of one or more elements from a specific piece by the same composer’, whereas the ‘one or more elements’ to be considered might be (but are not limited to), according to the indicators listed in the second area: the full texture; a combination of parts; a melodic line, gesture or colour; a rhythmic figure; an aspect of harmony (chord progression, striking sonority or pitch collection); the form or a formal device; texture or instrumental colour. Burkholder's entry then shifts towards a chronological discussion of musical borrowing, encompassing diverse periods and repertories. Nevertheless, in the section devoted to the nineteenth century, there is no extensive account of Italian opera. It comes as no surprise that the only notable reference goes to Rossini, who ‘recast numbers from earlier operas to create new ones, adapting arias to suit the new words, plot situations and singers’. Finding its roots in the Baroque era, the practice of self-borrowing was actually widely employed among nineteenth-century Italian opera composers – including the immediate predecessors and successors of Rossini – and it must be evaluated against the backdrop of the coeval theatrical system.
The nineteenth-century Italian theatrical system was organized around seasons. For each season, the main opera houses were expected to present new works, which could then circulate across the peninsula depending on their initial reception. Forced to write under extreme time pressure and with exhausting production schedules, composers often resorted to the re-use of existing musical materials. For reasons that will be discussed below and in the articles collected in this issue, however, it would be misleading to dismiss the practice of self-borrowing as merely a last resort to deal with looming deadlines. The conditions for such re-use lay primarily in the production system itself and in the ways in which operas were consumed: especially in the first two decades of the century, operas disappeared from the stage after the season for which they had been conceived, with very few exceptions. Composers could therefore take up earlier works which they expected would no longer circulate, at least in the area where the new opera was to be represented, according to what has been defined as a ‘geographical criterion’ of selection.Footnote 4 The choice of materials also followed a ‘qualitative criterion’, falling on those works – or specific pieces – that were evidently considered worth saving from oblivion.Footnote 5 Writing on Rossini's recourse to self-borrowing, Marco Beghelli sees it primarily as a manifestation of ‘self-preservation instinct’, for which the composer intended to grant proper value to high-quality materials that otherwise would be prevented from circulating.Footnote 6 Recourse to self-borrowing was also facilitated by the highly conventional nature of the repertory, relying on recurring musical structures that enabled composers to recast entire numbers or broad sections within new works.Footnote 7
A related aspect to be considered is that, in Italy, complete piano-vocal scores began to be printed no earlier than in the 1820s, and printed full scores started to circulate regularly towards the end of the century, with Verdi's Otello and Falstaff.Footnote 8 Until then, the audiences’ – and critics’ – knowledge of existing works could only rely on empirical experience and on aural memory. Commenting on the celebrated letter that Rossini sent to Tito Ricordi in 1864, after receiving a selection of volumes from the Nuova compiuta edizione di tutte le opere teatrali edite ed inedite, ridotte per canto e piano, del celebre Maestro Gioachino Rossini – in which he expressed his fear that the series would ‘give rise to a lot of (well-founded) criticisms, since the same pieces of music will be found in different operas’Footnote 9 – Emanuele Senici remarked that ‘the issue was clearly the “public” textualization of the music brought about by the spreading of complete piano-vocal scores of operas that had been composed in a context in which the only “public” text of an opera was the libretto’.Footnote 10 At the same time, he draws the attention to the fact that the first scholarly studies specifically devoted to self-borrowing in Rossini's production (and, more broadly speaking, in nineteenth-century Italian opera) coincide with another crucial phase of textualization of this composer's music: the launch of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, the first volume of which (La gazza ladra) has been published in 1979.Footnote 11
During the 1990s, research by Marco Spada, Marco Mauceri, Arrigo Quattrocchi and Marco Beghelli showed the potential of investigating nineteenth-century Italian opera from the perspective of self-borrowing.Footnote 12 Their studies present close readings of individual works by Rossini sharing analogous methodologies, aimed at identifying all possible cases of self-borrowing within the opera under scrutiny and offering a thorough comparative analysis with their source pieces, at the same time defining categories in which to subsume the examples discussed.Footnote 13 The investigation follows an eminently textual approach, showing a clear need to map and systematize the phenomenon, an aspect that recurs even in the most recent studies on the subject. The broader implications of the practice of self-borrowing in early-nineteenth-century Italian opera have been discussed in the ensuing decades, and still dwell in particular on Rossini's production. While Philip Gossett addressed self-borrowing within the context of Rossini's compositional methods, highlighting that – rather than being a mechanical procedure – it implied a re-composition of existing music,Footnote 14 Emanuele Senici, in his aforementioned study, has widened the perspective to include the contemporary reception of this composer's self-borrowings and the discourse surrounding this practice, at the same time discussing some of Rossini's immediate predecessors and contemporaries (in particular, Stefano Pavesi). Before considering the role of memory in the aesthetic evaluation of self-borrowing, Senici investigates its relation to Rossini's style, based on repetition, noting how coeval audiences could misperceive – and condemn – the recurrence of elements inherent to his personal style as occurrences of self-borrowing. In so doing, he advances the hypothesis that both the musical critique and the printed piano-vocal scores could supply instruments through which to obviate the fallibility of memory, and to prove or refute the actual presence of instances of self-borrowing. Senici's text raises two themes that are strictly interconnected: the relation between self-borrowing and personal style, and the coeval condemnation of the practice of self-borrowing.
The first theme has been part and parcel of the phenomenon since the early 1810s, when Rossini was already active and – to use Senici's words – ‘discussion about self-borrowing as a practice distinct from plagiarism emerged’.Footnote 15 Senici reads it in relation to the gradual affirmation of the repertory, linked to the spread of Rossini's operas across the peninsula, which prompted critics to evaluate his production in terms of authoriality and style, in a moment in which, for the first time, the composer was considered as ‘the sole or in any case the foremost individual aesthetically responsible for a text, for an autonomously determined opus’.Footnote 16 Especially for the decades to follow, the disapproval of self-borrowing – both at a creative and at a moral level – must be observed against the incipient Romantic aesthetics, which promoted ideas such as the uniqueness of a work of art and originality.
The second theme identified above brings us back to Burkholder's distinction between actual (self-)borrowing and ‘common melodic formulae and formal conventions’ characteristic of a certain repertory, as indicated at the beginning of this introduction. For nineteenth-century Italian opera, this distinction must be extended to personal style as well. The line separating self-borrowing and shared conventions is also at the centre of Mary Ann Smart's enquiry into Bellini's practice of self-borrowing. Smart argues that, for the composer, self-borrowing entailed a simplification of melodic materials and a reduction of harmonic and melodic variety, aimed at distancing himself from bel canto conventions. Thus, she claims that studying self-borrowing can provide a lens through which to reassess the musical language of nineteenth-century Italian opera, otherwise frequently dismissed as conventional and unworthy of analysis.Footnote 17 More recently, Marco Beghelli has further explored Rossini's self-borrowing – demonstrating that it was a habit shared also by coeval librettists and critics – to individuate recurring formulae, derived from common rhythmic and melodic models. The latter formulae are at the core of what Beghelli defines as the Rossinian ‘tinta’, which listeners would recognize even when no literal repetition of the same music occurs. Here it is important to emphasize that, as mentioned previously, the need to distinguish between actual self-borrowing and style or shared conventions puts into question its nature as an eminently economic practice, allowing composers to speed up their creative tasks. The extent of ‘one or more elements’, falling between the re-use of an entire number and, at the opposite end, the sphere of style and shared conventions, calls for a reconsideration of self-borrowing as a practice that can convey wider meanings and implications.
Although, in recent years, musicological research has granted much attention to the practice of self-borrowing in nineteenth-century Italian opera, many aspects remain largely unexplored.Footnote 18 This special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review is intended to fuel the scholarly debate on the subject by offering a collection of essays investigating and re-evaluating the phenomenon of self-borrowing from diverse, original angles – including listening and cognitive theories, the possibility of using it as an instrument to conquer Italian operatic stages, its connections with diegetic music and its dramaturgical implications, its relation with (and distinction from) the category of rifacimento, and the ways in which the presence of self-borrowing is treated in contemporary critical editions – at the same time widening the discourse to include the use of this practice as taken up by Donizetti and Verdi.
The Articles
Roberta Montemorra Marvin's article, ‘Musical Self-Borrowing in Ottocento Opera and the Composer's Toolbox’, offers a reasoned survey of critical approaches to self-borrowing in the musicological literature on nineteenth-century Italian opera, reflecting upon possible directions for a reassessment of this practice. In the first part of the article, Marvin suggests a more accurate use of terminology, offering a valuable list of descriptors intended to reflect the nature and the extent of transformation of the borrowed material. Drawing on texts by Bonifazio Asioli and Carlo Ritorni, she subsequently discusses self-borrowings within the pedagogical context of nineteenth-century Italian opera – which involved formulaic musical elements associated with extramusical ideas, constituting a shared idiom characteristic of this repertory – arguing that some instances of perceived self-borrowings may be ‘symptomatic of a genre that at its core thrives on prescribed and desirable similarities across works’. Although she sees intentionality as a discerning feature for identifying self-borrowings, she questions the notion that specific rationales can always be identified behind the re-use of a certain passage, thus joining Melina Esse and Roger Parker in stating that the absence of meaning may be inherent to this genre. In support of this, she presents an example from what she defines as a direct self-quotation within Leonora's cavatina ‘Tacea la notte placida’, from Verdi's Il trovatore (1853), dating back to the composer's 1838 romanza ‘In solitaria stanza’, showing how it eludes hermeneutical explanation. In the final part of her article, Marvin develops Emanuele Senici's studies on the role of memory and repetition in the reception of self-borrowings, by reconsidering this practice through the lens of modern theories of listening, and evaluating its possible effects on coeval audiences, against the backdrop of cognitive theory. Drawing on work by Elizabeth Margulis, David Huron and Leonard B. Meyer, the article proposes that self-borrowing embodied a resource for composers to stimulate psychological mechanisms such as expectations, predictability, anticipation or deviation, on which pleasures of musical experience depend.
In ‘Rossini's Self-Borrowings as a Stylistic Weapon’, Daniele Carnini reassesses the practice of self-borrowing as a strategic tool used by Rossini to hegemonize the Italian operatic stage. The first part of the article is dedicated to clarifying the different weights that borrowing and self-borrowing took on within Rossini's production: by extending the meaning of ‘borrowing’ to embrace a reliance on collaborators (to whom Rossini and his contemporaries often resorted, especially when short on time), as opposed to self-borrowing, Carnini posits that the latter practice became a way through which Rossini could hold the operas under his strict control, thus paradoxically embodying a marker of authenticity. The second – and most extensive – part of the article focuses on La gazzetta, a peripheral work written for the Teatro dei Fiorentini (Naples) in 1816, with which Rossini had to deal not only with the peculiar genre of comic opera with spoken dialogue, whose leading character typically expressed himself in Neapolitan, but also with its most celebrated interpreter, Carlo Casaccia. The latter was normally granted great autonomy, and extant scores and libretti written for him share recurrent elements tailored to his physique and performative requirements. Carnini maintains that, by relying on a massive use of earlier music originally composed for other genres and opera houses (mostly for La pietra del paragone and Il turco in Italia), Rossini led to a gradual marginalization of Casaccia's persona, whose voice – as representative of an entire repertory – was overwhelmed by the composer's own voice. In support of this, Carnini presents a comparative analysis of two parallel pieces, both employing existing materials, but with different outcomes: the quintets from, respectively, Act I and Act II, the first of which was rediscovered only recently. In conclusion, he provocatively compares Rossini's language to a GMO, which deliberately prevented other varieties from growing, thus saturating the Italian operatic market.
My article, ‘Donizetti's Self-Borrowings as an Artistic Practice’, fills a gap in the musicological literature by presenting the first systematic study of Donizetti's recourse to self-borrowing, questioning the idea that it must be read as a primarily economic practice, allowing the composer to save time. The article first discusses Donizetti's examples of (self-)borrowings across genres, dwelling on the ways in which he re-functionalized earlier serious passages within comic frames, almost inevitably to achieve a parodic effect, whereas the level of parodization depends on the degree to which the earlier piece can be recognized. After discussing the links between parody and diegetic music – one of his favourite contexts for employing older materials – I turn to Donizetti's serious production, advancing the hypothesis that his recourse to self-borrowing could take on semantic connotations. In so doing, in the second part of the article I focus on selected case studies grouped into three thematic areas, which – similarly to, and occasionally in connection with diegetic music – all involve the suspension of a character's habitual idioms. These areas are deception, rituals and madness. The article includes, in particular, extended examples from the composer's Linda di Chamounix (Vienna, Kärntnertortheater, 1842), Sancia di Castiglia (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1832), Il paria (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1829), Marino Faliero (Paris, Théâtre-Italien, 1835), Enrico di Borgogna (Venice, Teatro San Luca, 1818), and Anna Bolena (Milan, Teatro Carcano, 1830). My ultimate concern is to demonstrate that Donizetti's use of self-borrowing within these boundaries could perform a dramatic function, deliberately connoting the altered modes of expression of the characters to whom the earlier piece is associated. To conclude, I argue that Donizetti turned an economic practice into an artistic means of articulating his dramaturgy.
In ‘Giuseppe Verdi's Jérusalem between Adaptation and Self-Borrowing’, Francesco Izzo investigates Verdi's Jérusalem from the perspective of self-borrowing to shed light onto the opera's controversial reception as a remake perceived as a new work. At the centre of the enquiry is the peculiar ontological and textual status of Jérusalem – which received its premiere at the Paris Opéra on 26 November 1847 – oscillating among translation, adaptation and reworking of its source opera, I Lombardi alla prima crociata (Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 1843). In the first part of the article, Izzo retraces Jérusalem's negative reception, starting with Arthur Pougin's Vita aneddotica di Verdi (1881), showing how this opera was alternatively seen as a corruption of Italianness,Footnote 19 or as showing the composer's lost integrity.Footnote 20 Izzo sees a study published by Giuseppe Pugliese in 1963 as a turning point in reassessing the significance of Jérusalem, now considered noteworthy achievement, which provided Verdi with an opportunity to re-elaborate the plot, as well as to improve musical aspects of the pre-existing score.Footnote 21 This article maintains that, in the passage to the new opera, I Lombardi was partially lost in translation, with several divergences in the plots. If, as a whole, Jérusalem can be considered a reworking of the pre-existing opera, Izzo argues that some pieces should be included within the category of self-borrowing, when they are re-used within a different dramatic context from the original. Through a comparative examination of various passages shared by the two operas, this article demonstrates how most of the divergences are found among the pieces described as self-borrowings. The last example, focusing on the opera's sunrise music, extends the discussion to include issues of compositional models and consequent resemblances, highlighting how self-borrowing can also lie in the listeners’ perception. Izzo concludes that Jérusalem not only offers a vantage point from which to explore Verdi's self-borrowings, but it also demonstrates that, in relying on this practice, Verdi continued to use working methods established in the primo Ottocento.
Andrea Malnati's article, ‘The Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini and Self-Borrowing’, reverses the focus by exploring the treatment of self-borrowings within the critical edition of Rossini's works, published by the Fondazione Rossini (Pesaro). Officially established in 1979, this series was preceded by the presentation, five years earlier, of a set of editorial criteria, which were revised in 2015. Malnati takes an indication provided in the revised criteria as a lens through which to examine examples from various volumes, grouped into two sections: those published between 1979 and 2014 (in turn split into two sub-sections: editions based on the autograph for another opera, and editions prepared by using more than one source), and those published since 2015. He thus brings to light a new critical approach, questioning principles such as the centrality of the autograph or the distinction between primary and secondary sources, as well as concepts such as authenticity and originality. The examples discussed share an analogous rationale, avoiding contaminations among textual traditions of different works whenever possible. The only cases – from the editions of La gazza ladra (1979, ed. Alberto Zedda), and the Cantata in onore del sommo pontefice Pio Nono (1996, ed. Mauro Bucarelli) – in which interactions among different textual traditions can be detected, are united by their lack of a complete autograph for the derived pieces, which pressured the editors to rely on the autographs of the original pieces as primary sources, judging them closer to the composer's authentic intentions, even if conceived for a different situation. Conversely, Malnati discusses the edition of Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra (2016, ed. Vincenzo Borghetti) as a turning point, signalling a wider change in methodology. When editing the opera's 1822 Vienna version, in fact, Borghetti chose a manuscript copy of the opera as the principal source for the newly composed Duet Norfolc and Leicester over the autograph of Ricciardo e Zoraide, in which this piece was subsequently included. On the one hand, Malnati argues that the edition of Elisabetta embodies a specific editorial strategy granting more prominence to the sources specifically related to the opera in question, even if not autograph, considering them to be the closest to the idea that the composer had of a self-borrowed piece at the moment in which it was re-employed; on the other hand, he presents it as a methodological model for future editions, including the one of Eduardo e Cristina, which he is currently completing for this series.
The essays collected in this special issue constitute a significant advancement in the study of self-borrowing in nineteenth-century Italian opera. At the same time, they also represent a point of departure for further research on the subject, which may explore, for instance, the psychological effects of self-borrowings on listeners, the resort to this practice as an instrument to reinforce authorial voice or to express peculiar dramatic situations, and – more broadly – the implications of the recourse to self-borrowing in other repertories and different composers.
