The struggle between patriotic duty and love in three Italian operas of early
Risorgimento
Raffaella Bianchi
Abstract
Opera is fundamental for an understanding of love in Western culture. This contribution focuses in a
particular period for the study of the emotions in Italy, when Italian identity was constructed (the
Risorgimento). If opera has always narrated love stories, at this period this emotion acquires a different
objective: opera is not concerned any longer with Romantic love between men and women; its focus
becomes rather the love for the Fatherland. This can be found in some performances of the time which
started to introduce patriotic duty as a competing emotion for Romantic love. This paper analyses this
struggle between love and duty from the perspective of gender and nationalism in Rossini’s La Gazza
Ladra (The Thieving Magpie), and Bellini’s Il Pirata and I Capuleti e i Montecchi. In these three
examples, patriotic love wins over Romantic love, even in the most famous of Romantic loves, the one
between Romeo and Juliet. On the Duties of Man was a famous political pamphlet written by the
patriotic organiser Giuseppe Mazzini, in which the author extolled patriotic duty as the new compelling
value of the time. The paper shows how love is an acceptable emotion in early Risorgimento while
accompanied by patriotic duty. The construction of the nation passes through the emotion of love, into
love for the Fatherland.
Key Words: Opera, gender, nationalism, Rossini, Bellini, history of emotions, love, duty, La Scala.
*****
1. Operatic conventions of love and the idea of duty
Opera is often generally described as a performance of the troubled love story
between a soprano (female highest voice), a tenor (male highest voice) which
encounter the opposition of another character, often a bass (lower voice) who could be
a competing lover, or a family member. However, this has not always been the case.
As is well known, opera was born with the intent to reproduce Greek tragedies;
therefore, plots focused on mythological subjects. It is on the 19th century, the period
of melodrama, that operatic stories took the conventional form of a contrasted love in
which the heroine usually end up dying.
Catherine Clément has analysed these love stories in which women are sacrificed
from a feminist perspective in her Opera, or, the Undoing of Women.i My intent is to
contextualise a feminist view in the cultural context of the time at study when,
although Romanticism was the main cultural current, patriotic political ideas were
widespread. Therefore, I will analyse the operatic discourse of the time from the
perspective of gender and nationalism.ii This is also because opera in Italy is
connected to the political movement fighting for Italian unification, the so-called
Risorgimento.iii As Kimbell puts it, Romanticism in Italy was the cultural arm of the
Risorgimento.iv Following the suggestions of the political agitator Giuseppe Mazziniin
his pamphlet The Philosophy of Music, v opera became a cultural arm of the
Risorgimento in the sense that helped to spread political values which were
instrumental to the cause of fighting for the nation. Opera was preferred by Mazzini
because of its ability to stir emotions, along with its popularity.vi In order to inspire
young Italians to take military action against the Hapsburg empire, narratives of
heroic deaths were staged in opera. In this context, the sacrifice of life on the stage is
reminiscent of the sacrifice of life on the battlefield.
Indeed, there is a shift on the ethical evaluation of the value of life. The ultimate
sacrifice of life becomes a duty. Lipovetsky sees modernity as ‘the heroic time of
1
duty’, as he mantains that modern philosophical thought in Rousseau, Kant and
Comte develops a ‘modern hymn’ to the idea of duty.vii In turn, this affected the
political sphere, where one of the central duties became the duty to die for one’s
nation.viii Duty to a higher authority becomes a central theme in the modern age, and
indeed, in the Risorgimento. One of the best known political pamphlets written in
1852 by Giuseppe Mazzini was entitled On the Duties of Man.ix Mazzini was aware of
the shift of values he was advocating. According to him, all political doctrines before
1830 were founded on the ‘old idea of rights’, not on the notion of duties.x And it is
around this time that the stage of opera houses became populated with heroes and
heroines sacrificing themselves for a supreme ideal or for the common good.
According to the historian Alberto Banti, elements of love and patriotic duty are
intertwined in discourses of Italian identity, and this can be shown in some operatic
plots, for instance in Solera’s libretto for the Lombard at the First Crusade, composed
by Verdi and first staged at La Scala on 11 February 1843.xi Thus, this opera relies on
opposing demands of personal love and patriotic duty.
Indeed, love appears to be in conflict with duty and loyalties in the operatic discourse
of patriotism. However, as Banti himself suggests, a patriotic sentimentality was build
in the early years of 19th century,xii and, I would suggest that on the stage of La Scala
in Milan, an important centre for the Risorgimento’s movement, the idea of duty
began to appear a decade earlier than that. This paper explores this theme in three
different operas performed before 1840s at La Scala and La Fenice, in the Habsburg
Empire. The first is an opera semiseria by Gioacchino Rossini, La Gazza Ladra (The
Thieving Magpie) of the 1817, while the other two operas, Il Pirata (The Pirate) and I
Capuleti e i Montecchi were written by librettist Felice Romani, composed by Bellini
and performed around the 1830s.
2. Love for the father
In 1816 Milanese cultural life was enflamed by the debate between Classicism and
Romanticism.xiii With a bourgeois ambiance and dense orchestration, La Gazza Ladra,
which was performed in Milan in 1817, was an ‘effective weapon of the rising
Romanticism’, according to the musicologist Piero Mioli.xiv The contrasted love is
between Ninetta, a servant and Fabrizio who has just finished his army service. The
obstacle for this love is the loyalty of Ninetta towards her father. According to
Stendhal, Belloc, the singer interpreting Ninetta, ennobled the character of the
servant, who was not a vulgar girl but the daughter of a good soldier.xv Because of the
war she had to work to support herself. The plot is constructed around a silver fork
stolen by the magpie, while the servant Ninetta is accused. This is not a tragic subject,
however, this opera is more than light entertainment. In this opera, duty and
allegiance are constructed in an unusual manner. The most striking element is the
value given to military service. La Gazza Ladra staged two soldiers. One is Fabrizio,
the son of the family where Ninetta works, who returns home after finishing his duty;
the other is the father of Ninetta who has run away from the army. Interestingly, the
deserter is, indeed, not depicted as a bad character not accomplishing his duties. In the
recent past of Milan, serving in the army meant to go to die in Napoleonic campaigns.
According to the historian of the Risorgimento Franco Della Peruta, there was a
growing resentment in Milan against a severe military conscription.xvi This resentment
can also be detected in a comment to another opera Il Disertore in the gazette La
Gazzetta Privilegiata di Milano: ‘It is natural that the compelling desire of seeing his
father again, caused a soldier to desert because he had not been granted his discharge
2
from army’.xvii These operas spread the feeling that serving in the army was not a
respected duty.
Ninetta respects her father, the deserter, against the law and protect him at the cost of
her life. She is accused of stealing the silver fork from the table of Fabrizio’s family
because she sold another silver fork belonging to her father who meet her in secret.
Her father is on the run and in need. Ninetta protects her father with her silence and,
while imprisoned, she is ready to sacrifice her life. She appears to have a superior
moral status than the hegemonic characters of the plot. Ninetta never accepts the
courtship of Gottardo, the podestà of the village, rejecting, firstly, the promise of a
higher social status, and then the chance of escaping execution when she is put into
prison and faced with death on the scaffold. Ninetta is a model of fidelity for Italian
women, a model of resistance to the enchantments of the powerful in favour of love
for her father. Because of the conventions of comic opera, the ending is not tragic and
Ninetta is saved by the fortuitous discovery of the actual thief of the fork from the
table of Fabrizio’s parents: the magpie. However, Ninetta’s behavior shows that
loyalty to her father is more important than Romantic love itself. As the obstacle for
her love to Fabrizio is her fidelity to her father, duty towards the community of
descent wins over love.
This centrality of the community of descent has been studied by Ida Bloom who
analysed the national symbols rooted in the traditions of loyalty to a family, and she
found that in the case studies considered, namely Japan, India, Sweden and Norway,
the family is central to national symbolism.xviii It is the duty towards the family of
origin, usually towards the father for whom the Italian operatic heroines sacrifice their
Romantic love. This is also evident in another great success on the Milanese operatic
scene, Bellini’s Il Pirata first performed at La Scala in 1827. If in La Gazza Ladra
there are elements of duty towards the family of origin, in Il Pirata these elements
become more explicitly patriotic, as there are two opposing political factions who
come into conflicts with each other. The plot involves Imogene, who loves Gualtiero,
Count of Montaldo and supporter of King Manfredi, the son of Frederick II, King of
Sicily. When King Manfredi is defeated by the supporters of Charles D’Anjou,
Imogene marries one of them, Ernesto, in order to save the life of her father.
Imogene’s father and her lover Gualtiero are on the same political side. Imogene
chose to save the life of her father, not only by sacrificing her love for Gualtiero, but
also by giving herself to the enemy, Ernesto. However, this allegiance towards the
family of origin does not represent a model for the women of the time. This is because
here it represents the choice of individual, not of communitarian salvation. And this is
shown by the sort of Imogene in Il Pirata. The contrasting feelings of love and ethical
choices Imogene has been invested with are like a storm at the beginning of the opera,
and they are too much for her: in the finale Imogene becomes insane. Imogene does
not even have the possibility of being admired and sacralised by her sacrifice. She is
punished with madness because she still has not made the shift from feeling a love
towards her family to a higher love. Love and loyalty here are transposed to another
level. Not only love for the immediate family, but also love for a wider community of
political alliances becomes central here. In Il Pirata, it is clear that saving an
individual life is not a heroic act. This shows the staging of the new value of sacrifice.
If, from the beginning of the century, up to Rossini, saving a life in operatic plots was
a heroic act, during the Restoration, it was no longer considered heroic. Instead, it is
the sacrifice of life which becomes heroic. This is also shown by the behaviour of
Gualtiero, who refuses to flee with his pirates who come to rescue him, and he throws
himself into the sea. Gualtiero does not sacrifice himself to an individual love, he
3
fights for the community of descent. Loyalty to the family of origin took over a wider
meaning. The love for the father is transposed to the love for the entire community of
descent the characters belongs to. It becomes love for the fatherland.
3. A blood barrier to love
I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues), another opera of the time, staged at
La Fenice four years later, composed by Bellini and based on the libretto of Romani (1830), has the
same recurrent element: there are two antagonistic political fronts, and the opera ends with the
tragic death of both lovers, Romeo and Giulietta. This was a popular plot using different sources
than Shakespeare’s play.xix The title of the operatic work refers to the family names of the two
lovers, underlining the two opposing fronts, rather than the individuality of the characters. It is also
of significance that in this love story there are many references to fighting and the cry ‘all’armi’ (to
arms) reverberates through the opera house. The libretto clearly put more emphasis on the
importance of blood than on the importance of personal love. And the blood that will run is the
blood of the foreigner political opponents, of the ‘barbarians’, as the chorus threatens: ‘Sangue, o
barbari, bramate, ed il sangue scorrerà.’xx This blood will be shed in vain xxi but it is not the fault of
the patriots: ‘Ma su voi ricada il sangue/ Che alla patria costerà’.xxii The references to patriotic
blood shed for the fatherland is connected to the troubled love of Romeo and Giulietta. Romeo is of
another political faction, he is not a foreigner, but the impossibility of their love is expressed
through the metaphor of blood: ‘Sorge fra noi di sangue/ Fatal barriera’.xxiii
It is blood separating Giulietta from Romeo. The political is embodied in the flesh, in the veins
of the contestants. The struggle between love and duty is here more characterised, and Giulietta
expresses it with the refusal to escape with Romeo. Giulietta is not only in conflict between her
love for Romeo and her love for her family; there is a further element introduced here, which is not
present in other versions of the story. The story starts briefly introducing the plot and the problems
dividing the two lovers; then Romeo and Giulietta are together on the same level, Giulietta not
talking from the balcony down to her lover. They are again unified and could save their lives by
escaping; there is time and opportunity for it. But Giulietta rejects this as a solution:
Ah! Romeo!
Per me la terra
E’ ristretta in queste porte:
Sì: per me la terra etc.
Qui m’annoda, qui mi serra
Un poter d’amore più forte
Solo, ah! Solo all’alma mia
Venir teco il ciel darà,
Solo, ah! Solo all’alma mia, ecc.xxiv
Giulietta talks about ‘porte’ (doors) in the plural. She does not refer to the door of the house
where women have been confined; rather, the doors are the gates of Verona, of the city, the
homeland. As a citizen, she cannot abandon her homeland because she feels physically linked so
strongly to it. Her body is tied to the body of the nation. Only the soul can escape and meet Romeo,
possibly in the afterlife. The rope which ties Giulietta’s body is a power more powerful than love.
Romeo leaves with consternation that there is a power greater than love: ‘Che mai sento? E qual
potere/E’ maggior per te d’amore?’.xxv Giulietta replies explaining that it is the power of duty, of
law, of honour. These are the patriotic values which tie the citizens to the homeland. This tie is so
strong that it is physically felt.
In the Romantic period, when Romantic love was the main value, the Italian operatic stage
developed another message for the audience. In these plots, love is acceptable only if it is
accompanied by patriotic duty. Duty comes from the duty to the family-group, to the duty towards
an enlarged community of descent, whose purity must be defended with the sacrifice of life.
4
5
i Catherine Clément, Opera, or, the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988).
ii See Glenda Sluga, ‘Identity, Gender, and the History of European Nations and Nationalisms’,
Nations and Nationalisms, 4,1 (1998):87-111; Ida Bloom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall,
Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the long Nineteenth century (London: BERG,
2000);
Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000). Jennifer N. Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in
Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 (Ithaca and London: University of Cornell Press, 2005).
iii See Raffaello Monterosso, La Musica nel Risorgimento, (Milan: Vallardi, 1948); Philip Gossett,
(1990) ‘Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in "Risorgimento" Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 2, 1
(1990): 41-64; Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle
origini dell'Italia unita. (Torino: Einaudi, 2006); Claudio Toscani ‘Melodramma e Risorgimento:
Per una fenomenologia del patriottismo in musica’. In Per una Fenomenologia del Melodramma,
ed. Piero D'Oriano (Macerata: Centro Universitario di Ricerca ‘Fenomenologia e Arte’ (CIRFA) e
MIUR Universita' di Roma Tre, 2006), 189-209; Simonetta Chiappini, O Patria Mia: Passione e
Identità Nazionale nel Melodramma Italiano dell’Ottocento (Florence: Le Lettere, 2011).
iv David Kimbell, ‘Romantic Opera 1830 - 1850: Italy’, in The New Oxford History of Music, ed.
Gerald Abraha (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 140-184.
v Giuseppe Mazzini, I fratelli Bandiera. Dante. Filosofia della musica (Milan: Sonzogno, [1836]
1927).
vi On the proliferation of new opera houses and on the popularity of opera in 19th century Italy see
Luciano Bianconi, Il Teatro d'Opera in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993). Carlotta Sorba, Teatri:
l’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001). John A. Davis
‘Opera and Absolutism in Restoration Italy, 1815-1860’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
xxxxvi, 4 Spring, (2006):569-594.
vii Gilles Lipovetsky, Le Crépuscole du Dévoir: L'étique indolore des nouveaux temps
démocratiques (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
viii Lipovetsky, Ibidem, 27-9.
ix Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (London: J M Dent and sons ltd. [1852]
1907).
x Mazzini, Ibidem, 33.
xi Banti, Risorgimento: Parentela, Santita’, Onore, 72.
xii Banti, Ibidem.
xiii See Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
xiv Piero Mioli, Rossini: Tutti i libretti d'opera (Rome: Newton, 1997:9).
xv In Mioli, Ibidem, 9.
xvi Franco Della Peruta, Milano nel Risorgimento: Dall'Età Napoleonica alle Cinque Giornate
(Milan: Editrice La Storia, 1992), 7-9.
xvii Anonymous, ‘Appendice critico-letteraria teatrale e di varietà’, Gazzetta Privilegiata di
Milano, 30 May 1843, 1-2.
xviii Ida Bloom, Karen, Hagemann and Catherine Hall, Gendered Nations: Nationalism and
Gender Order in the long Nineteenth century (London: BERG, 2000).
xix Michael Collins, ‘The Literary Background of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi’, Journal of
American Musicological Society, 35,3, Autumn, 1982:532-8.
xx ‘Blood, oh barbarians you crave/And blood will run’; Act, 2.
xxi ‘…tanto sangue invan versato’; Act, 1.
xxii ‘But on you will fall back the blood/ Which will be spent for the fatherland’; Act, 1.
xxiii ‘Rise between us /a fatal barrier of blood’; Act, 1.
xxiv ‘Ah! Romeo!/For me the earth is restricted between these gates/Yes, for me earth is, etc./ Here it ties me in a
knot, here it locks me/ A power which is stronger than love/Only, ah! Only my soul/ Will be allowed by God to
come to you /Only ah! Only my soul… ; Act, 1.
xxvWhat I hear? And which power/do you think is greater than love? Act, 1.
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