Introduction: Remembering Italian Operetta

TY - JOUR

T1 - Introduction

T2 - Remembering Italian Operetta

AU - Ladd, Marco

AU - Rindom, Ditlev

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), 2025.

PY - 2024/7/31

Y1 - 2024/7/31

N2 - Received wisdom has it that the Marxist intellectual and political theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote little about music. Nevertheless, scattered across his Quarderni del carcere (1929-35) are a small number of trenchant comments on Italian opera, which Gramsci probed for its role in creating the civil society of a unified Italian state - a state whose failures led to the rise of the Fascist regime that kept him imprisoned for the last decade of his life.1 In Mary Ann Smart's words, 'Gramsci saw the popularity of opera in Italy as both a substitute for and an impediment to the development of his preferred vehicle for Romantic sentiment, a popular literature that demanded a solitary and reflective mode of consumption diametrically opposed to the experience of the opera house.'2 Opera's melodramatic excess partly accounted for what Gramsci saw as the Risorgimento's failure to be a truly popular movement in Italy; from an infirmity on the aesthetic plane sprang many of the irresolvable cultural and political schisms that beset unified Italy.

AB - Received wisdom has it that the Marxist intellectual and political theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote little about music. Nevertheless, scattered across his Quarderni del carcere (1929-35) are a small number of trenchant comments on Italian opera, which Gramsci probed for its role in creating the civil society of a unified Italian state - a state whose failures led to the rise of the Fascist regime that kept him imprisoned for the last decade of his life.1 In Mary Ann Smart's words, 'Gramsci saw the popularity of opera in Italy as both a substitute for and an impediment to the development of his preferred vehicle for Romantic sentiment, a popular literature that demanded a solitary and reflective mode of consumption diametrically opposed to the experience of the opera house.'2 Opera's melodramatic excess partly accounted for what Gramsci saw as the Risorgimento's failure to be a truly popular movement in Italy; from an infirmity on the aesthetic plane sprang many of the irresolvable cultural and political schisms that beset unified Italy.

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105003848476

U2 - 10.1017/S0954586724000077

DO - 10.1017/S0954586724000077

M3 - Article

SN - 0954-5867

VL - 36

SP - 99

EP - 111

JO - Cambridge Opera Journal

JF - Cambridge Opera Journal

IS - 2

ER -