| The political uses of Italian opera during the turbulent decade that culminated in the revolutions of 1848--49 is a familiar topic, but one that in recent years has come under more rigorous and critical scrutiny. This dissertation enters the scholarly conversation by examining the theatrical (and especially operatic) oath-swearing scene as an expression of Risorgimento ideals and aspirations. With occasional glances elsewhere, it focuses on performances of six operas and one spoken tragedy staged (or attempted) in Rome, from the election of Pope Pius IX in 1846 through the fall of the Roman Republic in 1849: Verdi's Ernani (1847), I masnadieri (1848), and La battaglia di Legnano (1849); Mercadante's Orazi e Curiazi (1847); Buzzi's La Lega lombarda nel secolo XII (performed as Gusmano di Medina, 1847); Mifsud's Il giuramento di Germanos (1849); and Alfieri's Bruto primo (1848). Against a broad cultural context---including not only contemporary music and literature, but also iconography, historiography, and political discourse---individual chapters explore how oath scenes in these productions illuminate a variety of issues arising from the intersection of art and politics in an age of revolution: Pius IX's evolving role as the embodiment of liberal aims; the use of Roman myth to expound and promote the politics of martyrdom and resistance; the ideologies of neo-chivalric honor that undergird Italian revolutionary art; the themes of unity, identity, and nationhood in modern foundation myths; and the insurrectionary role, in both history and imagination, of political and countercultural societies, secret and otherwise. The dissertation concludes by considering the reasons for the decline of the oath-swearing scene in the new political climate of 1850s Italy, the product of both reaction and Realpolitik. |
