200 Years of Italian Opera in the United States: 1825–2025
Chair(s): Davide Ceriani (Rowan University)
This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Italian opera in the United States. On 29 November 1825, the Park Theater in New York opened its first season of Italian opera with Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. In the leading roles were the famed tenor Manuel García and his seventeen-year-old daughter Maria, who would rise to fame as Maria Malibran. Despite the ups and downs of its American debut, Italian opera permanently transformed the musical and theatrical landscape of the city, and eventually of the whole country.
Several aspects of the context and ramifications of the groundbreaking García season remain poorly understood. Integrating Italian opera into the production system and musical conventions of 1820s New York—a city undergoing rapid economic and demographic expansion—brought to the fore the varied and sometimes conflicting aspirations of patrons, impresarios, recent immigrants, singers and musicians, as well as audiences and investors. It also sparked some of the most consequential changes in the perception of Italian opera and the social and aesthetic values associated with it. This session offers new insights into three remarkable episodes in the history and legacy of the 1825-26 season at the Park Theatre. The first paper examines García’s role as a composer, particularly his somewhat surprising decision to stage his own opera L’amante astuto following the success of Rossini’s Barbiere. By focusing on Garcia’s authorial voice—largely absent in the musicological literature—the paper reveals motivations as well as points of tension in the celebrated tenor’s strategies of self-representation in the New World. The second paper reconstructs a previously unknown chapter in Lorenzo da Ponte’s life in New York: his decision to pen a sequel to his Don Giovanni in the wake of the García company’s production of the opera in May 1826. The third paper examines the heated 1833 exchange between a supporter and an opponent of Italian opera—the first public controversy over its unplanned and uncontrollable impact on the nation’s musical future and its broader role in American society.
Presentations of the Symposium
Composing Italian opera in 1820s New York: European fantasies in Manuel García’s L’amante astuto
Francesco Milella González Luna
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
The arrival of the Spanish tenor and composer Manuel García (1775-1832) in New York at the end of 1825 holds a unique place in the musical historiography of North America: his performances of operas by Rossini and Mozart, among others, continue to be discussed and celebrated for their pivotal role in establishing a permanent operatic tradition in The United States (Dizikes, 1995; Radomski 2000). The activity of García as a composer in New York, however, continues to remain largely unexplored. In less than eight months, before he eventually decided to move southward to Mexico City at the end of 1826, García wrote and staged two Italian operas for his own company at Park Theatre: L’amante astuto and La figlia dell’aria. Often viewed as incidental and unsuccessful experiments, they allow us to rethink for the first time the spread of the Italian operatic tradition through the stage beyond the perspective of reception.
My analysis focuses on García’s first opera, L’amante astuto premiered on 17 December 1825 two weeks after the opening of the season with Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia which it aimed to imitate. The chronological proximity and absolute resemblance of the plot of the two operas calls for a transatlantic perspective that goes beyond New York and its theatre. My study contextualises the score and the libretto of L’amante astuto in García’s own context, taking into account not only his own background and relationship with Rossini but also his personal expectations about the American project. Indeed, composed after a long and successful career as a singer in Europe, L’amante astuto marked a key step in García’s own strategy to finally kick off a long-desired career as composer in the “New World” by confronting himself with the main operatic authority of the time, Rossini. Situated in a wider network of European fantasies, Italian traditions, imperialist discourses and personal aspirations L’amante astuto emerges a privileged standpoint to investigate the Atlantic spread of Italian opera from the perspective of the stage, as it was imagined, discussed and implemented by the composers and performers involved in the process.
Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Longing to Return as a Librettist
Francesco Zimei
University of Trento
When Lorenzo Da Ponte arrived in the United States in June 1805, having hastily left England due to debts, he had abandoned any prospects of continuing his career as a librettist. In fact, Italian opera had not yet taken root in the New World, particularly in its original language, which was still unfamiliar to the inhabitants of the Union. Nevertheless, it is significant that he took it upon himself—first in his own home and later at Columbia College in New York—to introduce young generations of Americans to the Italian language and a passion for opera. To this end, he regularly promoted group readings of Metastasio’s librettos as well as of his own works in his lessons, paving the way for the eventual introduction of Italian opera in New York.
The arrival of Manuel García’s opera company in New York in November 1825 offered Da Ponte the opportunity to return to his former profession and its related activities. This chance started to materialize with the successful première of Don Giovanni at the Park Theatre. On that occasion, the poet secured a portion of the production’s profits by publishing the printed program. The personal recognition he received from that success, as noted by a contemporary source, led him to plan a new libretto intended as a sequel to his dramma giocoso, which he had written nearly four decades earlier for Mozart. This ambition, previously unknown to musicology, was still alive in April 1830 when Da Ponte composed the pastiche L’ape musicale, his last stage work. In the dedication addressed “To the inhabitants of the City of New-York,” he expresses his “wish for greater efforts of my pen,” a goal unfortunately never realized. This paper will present and discuss the details of this unrealized Don Giovanni project, along with the literary and cultural context within which it could have been situated. It will also highlight composers active in New York who might have been responsible for setting the new libretto to music in light of their relationship with Da Ponte.
“In the Fairyland of Roast Beef and Plum Pudding”: The 1833 Controversy on Italian Opera
Giuseppe Gerbino
Columbia University
The curtain fell on the first season of Italian opera in New York after only ten months, but the contested success of the García opera company continued to haunt supporters and detractors alike for years. In January 1833, the first public controversy over the merits and dangers of Italian opera erupted right on schedule. It began with an article on the “State of Music in America” signed by B. from the pages of the North American Magazine. Opposing B. and defending Italian opera was J.T., who later revealed his identity in unrelated articles for the same magazine as Joseph Togno, a Philadelphia physician from Corsica. Togno had served as a naval officer in the Napoleonic wars before moving to the United States.
This paper aims to reconstruct the context and significance of this little-known polemic. For six months, B. and J.T. clashed over the very notion of American music. B. subscribed to the idea that its future depended on an inalienable British-American identity. In contrast, J.T. saw American music as a blank canvas, open to the influence of the best musical traditions, beginning with Italian opera. They address a wide range of issues, from the migration of musicians to the history of Italian and British music, as well as the financial sustainability of Italian opera in the United States. Here I will focus on two key points of contention: the perceived threat of “foreign-language” opera and the social function of theater. The issue of language accompanied the reception of Italian opera throughout its first New York season. B.'s near-moral critique of foreign opera—rooted in the unity of sense and sound—echoed a longstanding concern about the impact of theater on large swaths of the population, and therefore on the Republic. If a healthy society needed a vehicle for moral and political education, the arrival of Italian opera introduced an unprecedented danger: the allure of captivating yet unintelligible singing, which served only to elevate the cultural ambitions of an elite audience. The 1825-26 García experiment thus emerged from this debate as a litmus test for American musical identity.
