Italianizing the Metropolitan Opera House: Giulio Gatti-Casazza's Era and the Politics of Opera in New York City, 1908-1935

The appointment of the Italian Giulio Gatti-Casazza as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1908 marked a considerable change in New York's music scene. From the mid-1880s, when the Met's leaders decided to favor German opera over Italian, Wagner had become the most respected and admired composer in the city, while Italian works were dismissed as mere entertainment American music critics feared that the newly-appointed general manager might favor his compatriots over the Germans. Despite Gatti-Casazza's public reassurances that this would not happen, his actions proved otherwise.;I begin by focusing on the negative reactions of the American critics and on Gatti-Casazza's early attempts to promote new works by his compatriots Alberto Franchetti (Germania) and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari ( Il segreto di Susanna, Le donne curiose, and L'amore medico ). I argue that Gatti-Casazza staged these operas because he wished to introduce into the Met repertory Italian composers who possessed a strong German background in terms of musical training (both had completed a good deal of their studies in Germany) and, hence, avoid antagonizing the American critics.;Gatti-Casazza's decision to favor Italian operas, especially by living composers, was motivated by several factors. With the outbreak of World War One, the cultural prestige of Germany was considerably weakened; at the same time, the general manager's patriotic sentiments developed from an ever-increasing nationalism to support of Fascism when Mussolini rose to power in 1922. I claim that Gatti-Casazza's intense feelings of national pride were at the core of how he chose to run the Met. The general manager's political preferences help explain why Italian performers working for the Met and Italian living composers whose operas were performed at the Met during the 1920s and the early 1930s happened to be Mussolini sympathizers, and why Toscanini --- a noted antifascist --- eventually refused to conduct again at this theater.;Gatti-Casazza used opera as a means of establishing the superiority of Italian operatic culture over that of the Germans at the Met, and his bias towards Italian works thus mirrored, on a smaller scale, Mussolini's attempt to convey a positive image of Italy abroad.