by Will Durant
With castrati like Farinelli and Senesino, with divas like Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, opera became the voice of Italy, and, as such, was heard with delight everywhere in Europe except in France, where it stirred a war. Originally opera was the plural of opus, and meant works; in Italian the plural became singular, still meaning work; what we now call opera was termed opera per musica— a musical work; only in the eighteenth century did the word take on its present meaning. Influenced by traditions of the Greek drama, it had been designed originally as a play accompanied by music; soon, in Italy, the music dominated the play, and arias dominated the music. Operas were planned to give display solos to each prima donna and each primo uomo in the cast. Between these exciting peaks the auditors conversed; between the acts they played cards or chess, gambled, ate sweets, fruit, or hot suppers, and visited and flirted from box to box. In such feasts the libretto was regularly drowned in an intermittent cascade of arias, duets, choruses, and ballets. The historian Lodovico Muratori denounced this submergence of poetry (1701);16 the librettist Apostolo Zeno agreed with him; the composer Benedetto Marcello satirized this tendency in Teatro alla moda (1721). Metastasio for a time stemmed the torrent, but rather in Austria than in Italy; Jommelli and Traëtta struggled against it, but were repudiated by their countrymen. The Italians frankly preferred music to poetry, and took the drama as mere scaffolding for song.
Probably no other art form in history ever enjoyed such popularity as opera in Italy. No enthusiasm could compare with an Italian audience welcoming an aria or a cadenza by a singer of renown. To cough during such a ceremony was a social felony. Applause began before the familiar song was finished, and was reinforced by canes beating upon floors or the backs of chairs; some devotees tossed their shoes into the air.17 Every Italian town of any pride (and which of them was without pride?) had its opera house; there were forty in the Papal States alone. Whereas in Germany opera was usually a court function closed to the public, and in England it limited its audience by high prices of admission, in Italy it was open to all decently dressed persons at a modest charge, sometimes at no charge at all. And as the Italians were devoted to the enjoyment of life, they insisted that their operas, however tragic, should have a happy ending. Moreover, they liked humor as well as sentiment. The custom grew to interpolate comic intermezzi between the acts of an opera; these interludes developed into a genus of their own, until they rivaled opera seria in popularity, and sometimes in length. It was an opera buffa—Pergolesi’s La serva padrona —that charmed Paris in 1752, and was acclaimed by Rousseau as attesting the superiority of Italian music over French.
Buffa or seria, Italian opera was a force in history. As Rome had once conquered Western Europe with her armies, as the Roman Church had conquered it again with her creed, so Italy conquered it once more, with opera. Her operas displaced native productions in Germany, Denmark, England, Portugal, Spain, even in Russia; her singers were the idols of almost every European capital. Native singers, to win acceptance at home, took Italian names. That enchanting conquest will go on as long as vowels can outsing consonants.
III. RELIGION
After the prima donnas and the great castrati, the dominant class in Italy was the clergy. In their distinctive cassocks and under their broad-rimmed hats they walked or rode in proud freedom across the Italian scene, knowing that they dispensed the most precious boon known to humanity—hope. Whereas in France there was in this century approximately one ecclesiastic for each two hundred souls, in Rome there was one for fifteen, in Bologna one for seventeen, in Naples and Turin one for twenty-eight.18 A contemporary Neapolitan, professedly orthodox, complained:
So greatly have the clergy increased in number that the princes must either take measures to restrict them, or allow them to engulf the whole of the state. Why is it necessary that the smallest Italian village should be controlled by fifty or sixty priests? … The great number of campaniles and convents shuts out the sun. There are cities with as many as twenty-five convents of friars or sisters of St. Dominic, seven colleges of Jesuits, as many of Theatines, about twenty or thirty monasteries of Franciscan friars, and a good fifty others of different religious orders of both the sexes, not to speak of four or five hundred churches and chapels.19
Perhaps these figures were exaggerated for argument. We hear of four hundred churches in Naples, 260 in Milan, 110 in Turin; these, however, included small chapels. The monks were relatively poor, but the secular clergy, as a whole, possessed more wealth than the nobility. In the kingdom of Naples the clergy received a third of the revenues. In the duchy of Parma one half, in Tuscany almost three quarters, of the soil belonged to the clergy. In Venice, in the eleven years from 1755 to 1765, new legacies added 3,300,-000 ducats’ worth of property to the Church.20 Some cardinals and bishops were among the richest men in Italy, but cardinals and bishops were primarily administrators and statesmen, only occasionally saints. Several of them, in the second half of the century, renounced their wealth and luxury, and led lives of voluntary poverty.
The Italian people, barring a few publicists or satirists, made no significant protest against the wealth of the clergy. They took pride in the splendor of their churches, monasteries, and prelates. Their contributions seemed a small price to pay for the order that religion brought to the family and the state. Every home had a crucifix, and an image of the Virgin; before these the family—parents, children, and servants—knelt in prayer each evening; what could replace the moral influence of those unifying prayers? The abstinence from meat on Fridays, and on Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent, was a wholesome discipline of desire—and was a boon to health and fishermen. The priests, who themselves knew the charms of women, were not too hard on sins of the flesh, and winked an eye at the laxities of Carnival. Even the prostitutes, on Saturdays, lit a candle before the Virgin, and deposited money for a Mass. De Brosses, attending a play in Verona, was astonished to see the performance stop when church bells rang the Angelus; all the actors knelt and prayed; an actress who had fallen in a dramatic faint rose to join in the prayer, and then fainted again.21 Seldom has a religion been so loved as Catholicism in Italy.
There was another side to the picture—censorship and Inquisition. The Church demanded that every Italian, at least once a year, perform his or her “Easter duty”—go to confession on Holy Saturday, and receive Communion on Easter morn. Failure to do this brought—in all but the largest cities-priestly reproof; failure of private reproof and exhortation brought public listing of the recusant’s name on the doors of the parish church; continued refusal brought excommunication and, in some towns, imprisonment.22 The Inquisition, however, had lost much of its power and bite. In the larger centers ecclesiastical surveillance could be evaded, censorship was reduced, and there was a silent spread of doubt and heresy in the intelligentsia, even in the clergy themselves—for some of these, despite papal bulls, were secret Jansenists.
While many priests and monks led easy lives, and were no strangers to sin, there were also many who were faithful to their vows, and kept the faith alive by devotion to their tasks. New religious foundations testified to the survival of the monastic impulse. St. Alfonso de’ Liguori, a lawyer of noble lineage, founded in 1732 the “Redemptorists”—i.e., the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer; and St. Paul of the Cross (Paolo Danei), who practiced the most severe asceticism, founded in 1737 the “Passionist Order”—i.e., the Clerks of the Holy Cross and Passion of Our Lord.
The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) had in 1750 some 23,000 members, 3,622 of them in Italy, half of them priests.23 Their power was quite out of proportion to their number. As confessors to kings, queens, and prominent families they often influenced domestic and international politics, and they were sometimes the most urgent force—next to the populace itself—in the persecution of heresy. Yet they were the most liberal of the Catholic theologians; we have seen elsewhere how patiently they sought a compromise with the French Enlightenment. A similar flexibility marked their foreign m
issions. In China they converted “several hundred thousands” to Catholicism,24 but their intelligent concessions to ancestor worship, to Confucianism, and to Taoism shocked the missionaries of other orders; and these persuaded Pope Benedict XIV to check and reprove the Jesuits in the bull Ex quo singulari (1743). They remained nevertheless the most able and learned defenders of the Catholic faith against Protestantism and unbelief, and the most loyal supporters of the popes against the kings. In the conflicts of jurisdiction and power between the national states and the supernational Church, the kings saw in the Society of Jesus their subtlest and most persistent enemy. They resolved to destroy it. But the first act of this drama belongs to Portugal.
IV. FROM TURIN TO FLORENCE
Entering Italy from France by Mont-Cenis, we descend the Alps into “foot-of-the-mountain” Piedmont, and pass through vineyards, fields of grain, and orchards of olive or chestnut trees to two-thousand-year-old Turin, ancient citadel of the house of Savoy. This is one of the oldest royal families in existence, founded in 1003 by Umberto Biancamano—Humbert of the White Hand. Its head in this period was among the ablest rulers of the time. Victor Amadeus II inherited the ducal throne of Savoy at the age of nine (1675), took charge at eighteen, fought now for, now against, the French in the wars of Louis XIV, shared with Eugene of Savoy in driving the French from Turin and Italy, and emerged from the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) with Sicily added to his crown. In 1718 he exchanged Sicily for Sardinia; he took the title of King of Sardinia (1720), but kept Turin as his capital. He governed with brusque competence, improved public education, raised the general prosperity, and, after fifty-five years of rule, abdicated in favor of his son Charles Emmanuel I (r. 1730-73).
During these two reigns, covering almost a century, Turin was a leading center of Italian civilization. Montesquieu, seeing it in 1728, called it “the most beautiful city in the world”25—though he loved Paris. Chesterfield, in 1749, praised the court of Savoy as the best in Europe for forming “wellbred and agreeable people.”26 Part of Turin’s splendor was due to Filippo Iuvara, an architect who still breathed the afflatus of the Renaissance. On the proud hill of Superga, towering 2,300 feet above the city, he built (1717-31) for Victor Amadeus II, to commemorate the liberation of Turin from the French, a handsome basilica in classic style of portico and dome, which for a century served as a tomb for Savoyard royalty. To the old Palazzo Madama he added (1718) a lordly staircase and massive façade; and in 1729 he designed (Benedetto Alfieri completed) the immense Castello Stupinigi, whose main hall displayed all the ornate splendor of baroque. Turin remained the capital of the Savoy dukes until, in their final triumph (1860 f.), they moved to Rome to become kings of united Italy.
Milan, long stifled by Spanish domination, revived under the milder Austrian rule. In 1703 Franz Tieffen, in 1746 and 1755 Felice and Rho Clerici, aided by the government, established textile factories that extended the replacement of handicrafts and guilds with large-scale production under capitalistic financing and management.—In the cultural history of Milan the great name was now Giovanni Battista Sammartini, whom we can still hear occasionally over the affluent air. In his symphonies and sonatas the contrapuntal solemnity of the German masters was replaced by a dynamic interplay of contrasted themes and moods. The young Gluck, coming to Milan (1737) as chamber musician to Prince Francesco Melzi, became the pupil and friend of Sammartini, and adopted his method of constructing an opera. In 1770 the Bohemian composer Josef Myslivecek, listening with the youthful Mozart to some of Sammartini’s symphonies in Milan, exclaimed, “I have found the father of Haydn’s style!”27—and therefore one of the fathers of the modern symphony.
Genoa had a bad eighteenth century. Its commerce had declined through the competition of the oceans with the Mediterranean, but its strategic location on a defensive hill overlooking a well-equipped port attracted the dangerous attention of neighboring powers. Placed between enemies without and an uneducated but passionate populace within, the government fell into the hands of old commercial families ruling through a closed council and an obedient doge. This self-perpetuating oligarchy taxed the people into a sullen and impatient poverty, and was in turn dominated and fleeced by the Banco di San Giorgio. When the allied forces of Savoy and Austria besieged Genoa in 1746 the government did not dare arm the people to resist, for fear they would kill the rulers; it preferred to open the gates to the besiegers, who exacted indemnities and ransoms that broke the bank. The commonalty, preferring indigenous exploiters, rose against the Austrian garrison, bombarded it with tiles and stones torn from roofs and streets, and drove it ignominiously out. The old tyranny was resumed.
The Genoese patriciate built new mansions like the Palazzo Deferrari, and shared with Milan in supporting a painter who has come to a second fame in our time. Almost every extant picture by Alessandro Magnasco strikes us with the dark originality of its style. Punchinello Playing the Guitar 28—an elongated figure in careless patches of black and brown; the graceful Girl and Musician before the Fire;29 The Barber, 30 apparently eager to cut his client’s throat; the massive Refectory of the Monks 31 attesting the culinary prosperity of the Church: all these are masterpieces, recalling El Greco in their gaunt forms and tricks of light, anticipating Goya in macabre exposure of life’s cruelties, and almost modernistic in rough disdain of prim detail.
Florence in this age saw the end of one of history’s most famous families. The prolonged reign of Cosimo III (1670-172 3) as Grand Duke of Tuscany was a misfortune for a people still proud with memories of Florentine grandeur under the earlier Medici. Obsessed with theology, Cosimo allowed the clergy to govern him and draw from his ailing revenues rich endowments for the Church. Despotic rule, incompetent administration, and exorbitant taxation forfeited the popular support that the dynasty had enjoyed for 250 years.
Cosimo’s eldest son, Ferdinand, preferred courtesans to courtiers, ruined his health with excesses, and died childless in 1713. Another son, “Gian” (John) Gastone, took to books, studied history and botany, and lived a quiet life. In 1697 his father forced him to marry Anne of Saxe-Lauenburg, a widow of unfurnished mind. Gian went to live with her in a remote Bohemian village, bore boredom for a year, then consoled himself with adulteries in Prague. When Ferdinand’s health failed, Cosimo called Gian back to Florence; when Ferdinand died Gian was named heir to the grand-ducal crown. Gian’s wife refused to live in Italy. Cosimo, fearing extinction of the Medici line, persuaded the Florentine Senate to decree that on the death of the childless Gian Gastone, Gian’s sister Anna Maria Ludovica should succeed to the throne.
The European powers fluttered eagerly around the dying dynasty. In 1718 Austria, France, England, and Holland refused to recognize Cosimo’s arrangement, and declared that on Gian’s death Tuscany and Parma should be given to Don Carlos, eldest son of Elizabeth Farnese, Queen of Spain. Cosimo protested, and belatedly reorganized the military defenses of Leghorn and Florence. His death left to his son an impoverished state and a precarious throne.
Gian Gastone was now (1732) fifty-two years old. He labored to remedy abuses in the administration and the economy, dismissed the spies and sycophants who had fattened under his father, reduced taxes, recalled exiles, released political prisoners, assisted the revival of industry and commerce, and restored the social life of Florence to security and gaiety. The enrichment of the Uffizi Gallery by Cosimo II and Gian Gastone, the flourishing of music under the lead of Francesco Veracini’s violin, the masked balls, the parades of decorated carriages, the popular battles of confetti and flowers, made Florence rival Venice and Rome in attracting foreign visitors; here, for example, about 1740, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole, and Thomas Gray gathered around Lady Henrietta Pomfret in the Palazzo Ridolfo. There is something wistfully attractive in a society in decay.
Exhausted by his efforts, Gian Gastone in 1731 turned the government over to his ministers, and slipped into sensual degradation. Spain sent an army of thirty thousand men to ensure Don Carlos’ suc
cession; Charles VI of Austria sent fifty thousand troops to escort his daughter Maria Theresa to the grand-ducal throne. War was averted by an agreement (1736) among Austria, France, England, and Holland that Carlos should have Naples, and that Tuscany should go to Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis of Lorraine. On July 9, 1737, the last of the Medici rulers died, Tuscany became a dependency of Austria, and Florence flowered again.
