Southern Italy was the home of innovative cultural policies in XVIIIe century. Studying the political investments of opera in Naples, Mélanie Traversier renews the history of the Neapolitan state at the same time as that of theater and music.
As its title indicates, this book can be read primarily as a political history of opera. But very quickly, the reader discovers a second book: it is also a political history of the Neapolitan state, which chooses opera as a particularly relevant reading framework. However (and this would perhaps be the third book), it is also and again a social history of the State which makes individuals and groups (the king, the royal family, the court, the academies, the musicians, singers, etc.) the actors of a political mutation which takes the successive trappings of Bourbon reformism, the Revolution or the decennio francese.
Political history of music or musical history of politics ?
It is indeed a political history of music, and particularly of opera, that Mélanie Traversier offers. What is at stake in the Naples of XVIIIe century, it is first of all the recognition of the role of opera in the influence of the monarchy. This role, however, turns out to be very far from the Louis-Quatorzian model (or supposed model), to the extent that Ferdinand IV broke out, in the last third of the century, the assimilation of the king to the theater-king that is the San Carlo to multiply his musical presence through an appropriation of musical practices a priori less identified with the royal figure. It is also the surveillance of performance halls which have become “ explicitly places of political representation and communication » (p. 315), without them being spaces of real contestation: “ in a sense, the theater police exist before the political disorder of the theater that it claims to ward off » (p. 316). It is finally (but not only) an economic and social history of opera which leads to the description of a “ relative autonomy » (p. 456) from the field of Neapolitan musical creation, explaining how social visibility and the elevation of the status of theater professionals produce new instances of opera evaluation, with public recognition gradually replacing appreciation of the patron.
Governing the opera also presents itself as a history of the Neapolitan state, a history “ everything short » one would be tempted to say. What is at issue then is the nature of political power in southern Italy, which Mélanie Traversier, in keeping with the recent historiographical reassessment of the modernity of the Neapolitan State, shows is based on first on what historians have called the practicalismthat is to say on procedures, power practices, political-institutional realities. So, “ what we took (in the history of the Neapolitan State) for confusion, hesitation, chaos, is in fact the complexity of a modernity which can take paradoxical paths, is constructed and deconstructed in fits and starts, in weaving multiple temporalities. It is expressed by the coincidence of threshold effects, progress and resistance to reformism » (p. 12). For the author, opera therefore appears precisely as a procedure, a practice of power, a political-institutional reality which makes it possible to describe – for example thanks to the analysis of the theater police – how the Neapolitan State engages “ to a meticulous, tedious codification, to this empire of detail that Michel Foucault spoke of in relation to the disciplinary procedures implemented at the turn of the XVIIIe And XIXe centuries, with which another administrative modernity is invented » (p. 315).
A lesson in method
The documentary landscape of Neapolitan musical history is particularly fragmented, even incomplete. It is deliberately that Mélanie Traversier rejects the scores and librettos, which she emphasizes that they above all served as a heritage hagiography of the so-called “ Neapolitan school “. On the other hand, it values numerous and varied sources which had not, until now, found a place in the analysis of musical practices: if the testimonies (memoirs, travel stories, diaries, correspondence, press) and discourses on opera (the treatises) are still relevant to describe and explain the political uses of opera, new sources, particularly administrative and judicial, are brought to light here. They find, under the author’s pen, the qualifier of “ theater police “, which does not designate an archive fund strictly speaking, but rather brings together under a generic name scattered documents which allow “ to trace, from the administrative, legal and police supervision of theatrical life, a history of state supervision weighing on performance halls and opera artists, but also a history of conflict and negotiated standards » (p. 39).
Mélanie Traversier also arouses her reader’s interest through a use (both moderate and relevant) of concepts borrowed from other disciplines (in particular sociology and political science): the pages devoted to “ the capture of spaces and practices of elite sociability » (p. 169) by a king of whom it is necessary “ revalorize the ‘omnivorous’ nature of its cultural consumption » (p. 191) take on another dimension when they are, by the author, illuminated by the reflections of Bernard Lahire on cultural dissonance (The culture of individuals. Cultural dissonances and self-distinctionParis, La Découverte, 2004) and then part of a process “ weakening of sovereignty (which) desecrates the king, placing him at the heart of the urban arena » (p. 194). The reflection on the autonomy of the Neapolitan musical world is also based on an assessment of the sociological approaches of the artist, (p. 317-320, then p. 587-589) which Mélanie Traversier shows that it leads “ sovereign power (to) accept(s) the emergence of an autonomous intellectual or artistic field, at the risk of it becoming an occasional critical space “: thus, according to the author, “ cultural empowerment carried the process of political emancipation which expressed its critical potential to the extreme end of the XVIIIe century » (p. 456).
Of representation
Another of the threads of this book looks at the question – always questioned by historians – of representation. From the figure of the king, gradually deritualized in the performance halls, to that of Naples, erected as “ cultural capital » which the State must protect as a heritage, passing through the dizziness of virtuosity (embodied by the castrati), the elements are numerous which show how this arises, in Naples in XVIIIe century, the question of the effectiveness of the symbolic discourse carried by the opera.
The analysis of the politicization of theaters, the explanation of the recomposition of the symbolic and financial hierarchies between librettists, composers and singers, the description of the birth of a musical criticism which sanctions the weakening of aristocratic patronage show that history of the Neapolitan opera of XVIIIe century leads to a sort of paradox: the supervision of the State increases and manifests itself in particular by the birth of a real cultural policy, but at the same time the musical world becomes autonomous, especially by the emergence of a discourse criticism of expertise and by the affirmation of the copyright of composers. To think about this antinomy, Mélanie Traversier suggests promoting the concomitant existence of several musical spaces: there is that of celebration and acclamation whose effectiveness is entirely symbolic since it consists of “ rush out of speech » (p. 597), which confronts that of the music-loving nobility, a place of entertainment and sociability, more than a public space strictly speaking, while another space, that of professionals, complicates the game since it is in reality the product of monarchical intervention. The author therefore concludes that the fact that the social and political emancipation of the field is a paradoxical consequence of the politicization of music, of the State’s investment in the world of shows “ is undoubtedly the main engine of change in cultural history, its fundamental principle of instability which makes impossible any reductionism making artistic expression the reflection of a particular social concern or a particular political ambition » (p. 599). This is a program for studies, still to come, which will attempt to elucidate the relationships between the arts and the powers and which will therefore be able to rely on the firm contribution of Mélanie Traversier.