ABSTRACT
The view of the early nineteenth-century operatic stage as a site of particular decadence ('sad and squalid’ is one scholar’s appraisal) in opera’s history o f tensions between music and theatre is by no means a wholly modem perspective.1 In 1824 the Rivista teatrale complained that a recent performance at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples had made Don Giovanni almost unrecognisable because of the number of interpolated arias from other works;2 another review a fortnight later ranted against a new opera (Morlacchi’s and Rossi’s Tebaldo e Isolina), claiming it had been written to accord slavishly with the convenience teatrali rather than from any real dramatic intent.3 The singers bore then, as now, the brunt of criticism for this parlous state. Berlioz attributed to these 'charming monsters’ every conceivable blame: 'the number of bastard works, the gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of expression, the neglect of dramatic proprieties, the contempt for the true, the grand and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepitude of art in certain This essay arose from a colloquium I delivered at Cambridge University; fragments of the paper later appeared in my monograph The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930 (Cambridge, 2006). Its current extended version owes much to the invaluable advice of Roger Parker and Laura Tunbridge. I am grateful also to Marco Capra, who first brought the periodical debate about Pasta and Malibran to my attention; and to Paolo Russo, for steering me in the direction of some important sources on Pasta. 1 B. Cassinelli, A. Maltempi and M. Pozzoni, Rubini: luomo e lartista, 2 vols. (Romano di
Lombardia, 1993), I, 153. See also David Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism (Cambridge, 1981), 33-4.
