Conference Agenda

Preserved today in the Central State Archives in Rome, the voluminous correspondence that crossed Benito Mussolini’s desk (the Segreteria Particolare del Duce) is an exceptionally valuable resource for scholars of music in Fascist Italy. Yet it has rarely been examined with anything other than composers of art music and their representative institutions in mind. No surprise, perhaps, given that the regime was primarily interested in manipulating the ecosystem of elite musicking; the historical actors involved in popular musical traditions simply left fewer archival traces. Operetta, however, constitutes a partial exception, insofar as it sat ambiguously at the fringes of serious opera: national heritage of huge symbolic import, with which the regime necessarily had to engage.

This paper explores operetta’s marginal position within an increasingly Fascistized musical culture through the lens of a single folder in the Segreteria Particolare, PSE 19, which contains c. 40 items of correspondence pertaining to Virgilio Ranzato—the foremost composer of Italian operetta in the 1920s. Spanning the period 1923–1931, the assorted letters and telegrams reveal that Ranzato was an enthusiastic Fascist who craved Mussolini’s direct approval. More importantly, they show that the Maestro had friends in high places, who campaigned extensively behind the scenes to have him granted a formal State honour in recognition of his role in securing l’avvenire dell’operetta italiana, the “future” or perhaps “destiny” of Italian operetta.

That this campaign was ultimately unsuccessful tells us much about opera and its lighter relative at a time when both were being displaced by popular entertainments of various kinds. Composers representing Italian opera, in spite (or precisely because) of the tradition’s increasingly repertory-bound character, negotiated with the regime from a position of relative strength. Italy’s operetta merchants, with no such reserves of cultural capital to draw on, were forced to trade on Italian operetta’s supposedly glorious future. But this was a weak claim, more marketing spin than aesthetic credo. Unable to convincingly assert either its artistic bona fides or genuine mass appeal, operetta met its true destiny: to diminish, from c. 1930, into a nostalgic heritage act wholly unthreatening to the Fascist project.