Conference Agenda

In her 2016 study on the cultural histories of Nazi Germany, Pamela Potter noted the “diachronic isolation” of the Third Reich, or the tendency of arts scholars to bracket off those years as a “historical aberration… that was bookended by the exuberance of 1920s Weimar culture and the postwar renaissance after 1945.” In music scholarship, this isolation has traditionally been maintained by depicting the Third Reich as an artistic wasteland in which the modernist currents of the Weimar era were brutally suppressed, resulting in conservative, neo-Romantic works of musical mediocrity. This narrative is apparent in the standard portrayal of German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963). While scholars praise his compositions of the Weimar Republic as vigorous, imaginative, and innovative, those written during the Third Reich are dismissed as dull, regressive, and “morbidly languid.” This characterization stems, in part, from Hindemith’s move away from his dissonant, contrapuntal style of the 1920s toward a simpler, more accessible style featuring homophonic textures, flowing melodic lines, and clear tonal centers.

Many have attributed this “regressive” aesthetic shift to the rise of National Socialism, born out of Hindemith’s melancholy over the political crisis in Germany and/or the implementation of an antimodernist Nazi arts policy. Based on his correspondence with his publishers and contemporary music criticism, I argue that Hindemith’s aesthetic about-face instead reflected an international conservative swing in the arts that would continue throughout the 1930s. I then suggest that this retreat from the “chaos” of postwar musical experimentation echoed a larger desire for stability amidst the chaos of the worldwide economic crisis. Examining this sea change in music contributes to recent research by scholars such as Nicholas Attfield and Brendan Fay that complicates the linkage between musical and political conservatism in the Weimar era. More importantly, it sheds light on the impact of the worldwide economic depression on artistic creation and reception, while demonstrating the continuities in musical style between the Weimar Republic and Third Reich.

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.