by the Melos Chorus, technical and scientific committee
Mary Cassatt, In the Loge, 1878. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Milan, mid-January 1872. La Scala is closed to the public, and Franco Faccio is reading through, with the orchestra, a page nobody has ever heard: the overture Verdi has written for the Italian premiere of Aida, in place of the brief prelude that had opened the opera in Cairo a few weeks earlier. Verdi listens, and withdraws it. He will say that, however well played, it was a pretentious piece of nonsense. On 8 February Aida goes on at La Scala with Teresa Stolz in the title role and the old prelude up front. The overture ends up in a drawer.
The man who at that moment filled Italy’s theatres more than anyone else doubted a page for orchestra alone. He knew his audience. In nineteenth-century Italian theatre, applause had its assigned places, and those places were written into the score. The surest of them all was called the cabaletta.
Rossini had codified the mechanism, and the critic Abramo Basevi set it down in black and white in 1859, calling it the solita forma, the usual form. First a scena, then a slow cantabile, where the character stops to feel. Then the tempo di mezzo, where news arrives, a messenger, a chorus, something that sets the action moving again. And finally the cabaletta: fast, driven by a rhythm that beats like a gallop, with the verse sung twice, the second time with the singer’s embellishments, and a virtuoso coda that leads straight to the last note. Nothing about that closing is accidental. The repetition gives the house a second chance to take the singer’s measure, the coda gives him the ground to win, and everything converges on one precise instant in which the last note dies away and judgment can explode. The verdict was the clapping. The audience knew it so well that tenors, in Di quella pira, still sing today a high C that Verdi did not write: tradition put it there, because the house expected it.
The symphony asks for the opposite. It asks you to suspend judgment for twenty, thirty, sixty minutes, to follow an architecture instead of a person, to applaud the form and not the risk. It is an education, and in Italy it came late. The Società del Quartetto of Milan was born only in the spring of 1864, on the initiative of Tito Ricordi and Arrigo Boito, with the declared aim of spreading chamber and symphonic music. Beethoven’s Ninth was performed for the first time in Italy on 18 April 1878, in the hall of the Milan Conservatory, conducted by Faccio himself: fifty-four years after Vienna. Verdi, who admired it all the same, voiced reservations about the last movement.
Hence the difference that can still be felt in Italian concert halls. An audience raised in opera houses has learned to applaud a voice at the instant it clears the obstacle, the way one applauds a jump. It has not had a century of concerts to learn to hold back its hands until the last chord of a finale. Whoever reproaches it for applause in the wrong place forgets that those hands were educated, and educated superbly, by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, who knew exactly when to set them off. The Melos Chorus sees two grammars here, more than a flaw to be corrected, and a country that has always spoken only one of them, with the ease of a mother tongue.
The Aida overture stayed at Sant’Agata for almost seventy years. The first time an audience could hear it, and decide whether to applaud, was 30 March 1940, in a radio broadcast from New York, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. It was conducted by a man from Parma who at nineteen had played the cello at the premiere of Otello, under Verdi’s eyes: Arturo Toscanini.