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Interview: Pierpaolo Polzonetti
Accustomed as we are to analyze the dynamics of the Italian emigration in the U.S., and how our fellow Italians were seen and described by the Americans, we found very interesting in some way to reverse the perspective and try to understand if and how the élite of the Italian opera of the eighteenth century used to refer to the ideas and the events of the American Revolution.
We can do this thanks to the valuable work of Prof. Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Associate Professor of music and liberal studies at the prestigious University of Notre Dame in Indiana, who has published a very interesting book about this topic. As requested by Prof. Polzonetti, we specify that the interview has been conducted in Italian and translated in English by Arianna Capuani.
Professor Polzonetti, you are the author of Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution, a very interesting book about how the Italian and European operas of the XVIII century described what was happening in those revolutionary years in America. Please tell us something about this.
My book is about a corpus of operas, mostly comic, written between 1768 and the early 90's of the XVIII century. In those years there was a fad forAmerican themes that coincided with the release of the first news aboutthe American uprisings on Italian newspapers. None of these works present direct and explicit references to the American Revolution. Yet these operaswere based on very unusual topics, in many cases breaking with theconventions of the genre.
The first opera based on a North American subject was I napoletani in America, with music by Niccolò Piccinni, and premiered in 1768. It is about a Neapolitan girl who after beingrobbed of herdowry, seduced and abandoned, out of desperation fliesto America, where she becomes governor of a province of "American savages". In L’Americana in Olanda, the term "American" meant Native American (the wrong term "Indian" was not used, while white Americans were called "English").