ABSTRACT
Cultural transfer has rapidly emerged as a central preoccupation in fields of study as widely separated as management, tourism, translation and literary criticism of all types. It furthermore constitutes an important frame for the study of the transnational in music, especially of the relationships between French and Italian stage music of the nineteenth century and the embryonic globalization of opera. Underpinning Franco-Italian operatic relationships is the reuse of French dramatic models for the libretti of Italian opera. And among the vast numbers of French theatrical works - drames, ballets, vaudevilles, mélodrames - that served as the basis for Italian opera libretti of the primo ottocento, both serious and comic, is an important subset: the French opera libretto itself. Examples are rarer than the use of other genres, but at least as well known: Scribe's libretto for Auber's Gustave III (1833), for example, served as the basis for no less than three works, by Rossi and Gabussi (Clemenza di Valois; 1841), Cammerano and Mercadante (Il reggente; 1843), and Somma and Verdi (Un ballo in maschera; 1859).
The use of a French opera libretto presented different challenges and opportunities to the composers of melodramma, melodramma giocoso or dramma buffo than those posed by the use of other dramatic genres: subject matter had already been extracted, and the work was already of appropriate dimensions for the lyric stage; decisions concerning stasis and kinesis, furthermore, had already been taken. The process of acculturation consisted more of adjustment, addition and subtraction than of retranscription; such a specific process throws into relief the responses of librettists and composers to the contrasting conventions governing grand opéra or opéra comique and Italian lyric forms.
Romani and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore (1832) was based on a libretto with an already very strong Italianate influence, a characteristic that was important as the libretto found itself reworked for the Teatro Canobbiana only ten months after its Parisian premiere. Scribe and Auber's Le philtre (1831) had been an early attempt to write comic opera in two acts for the Opéra specifically to accompany a ballet (for which the new breed of historical grand opéra was too long). Le philtre was modelled on the first work to satisfy these conditions: Scribe, Delestre-Poirson and Rossini's Le comte Ory (1828), which in turn was partly based on Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims of 1825. Although it has long been thought that Scribe's libretto for Le philtre was based on a short story by Stendhal, this has recently been shown to be false. However, the importance of Le comte Ory and its own Italian origins in the genesis of Le philtre and L'elisir d'amore reinstates an Italian dimension to the cultural transfer involved in the relation between the two works. Many of the features of L'elisir d'amore's libretto and music may be traced back to the innovative Franco-Italian traditions found in Le philtre and Le comte Ory.
