Title page of the first Sonzogno edition of “Cavalleria rusticana”, 1890. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
On 2 January 1842 the first issue of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano appears in Milan, and the publisher is not a journalist: he is Giovanni Ricordi, the most powerful music printer in Italy, the man who had started out copying the parts at La Scala. The paper will last sixty years, until 1902, and for all that time it will be the most authoritative voice of Italian music criticism. With a detail that would send any journalists’ guild through the roof today: it belonged to the publishing house that sold the operas it wrote about.
Leafing through it, and the Melos library keeps the volumes in reproduction on the periodicals shelf, is a crash course in the history of taste and in conflict of interest. You find the most serious analyses of the century, signed by real critics and even by Boito; dispatches on premieres from half of Europe; solemn obituaries and polemics on the future of melodrama. And you find, regularly, promotion of the house catalogue: Verdi defended like a government bond, Ricordi novelties escorted to their debut with maternal care, and the competition’s composers, those of the publisher Sonzogno, Mascagni foremost, treated with the coolness reserved for other people’s products. Sonzogno, not by chance, responded by founding its own newspapers: the two houses made war through reviews as well, and the Italian public learned to read criticism the way we read player ratings in the sports pages today, knowing which team the paper supported.
It would be easy to dismiss it all as marketing in disguise. The truth is more interesting: the Gazzetta was at once the best music journalism of the century and a commercial instrument, and the two natures would not come apart. It is the original sin of music criticism, and anyone who thinks this is a matter for antiquarians should look at the present: specialist magazines live on record advertising and theatre invitations, streaming charts are compiled by those who sell streaming, and the algorithms that recommend music belong to those who distribute it. The conflict has changed its clothes, not its trade.
The lesson to take home, for a reader today as for one in 1842, is basic hygiene: always ask who is paying the pen. Not out of cynicism, but to read better: knowing where it spoke from, the Gazzetta remains a marvellous mine, and without Sonzogno’s rival papers we would not understand verismo. An openly partisan paper made very well informs more than one that declares itself neutral and is not: this magazine, which is partisan by statute and says so on every page, owes the Gazzetta more than it likes to admit.