Opera in Postwar Venice

What is the point of reception history? It is not a question asked by Harriet Boyd-Bennett in her new book. Forsaking any attempt ‘to define late operatic modernity as a discrete succession of sounds or styles’, she proposes to consider the 1950s as ‘a decade that exhibits a precise ideological space, a certain coherence’. Boyd-Bennett selects six Venetian operatic events of the period and enquires after ‘the artistic and critical nexus that produced and received’ them (p. 17). It may not be entirely fair to demand a specific justification for this approach. In musicology—and opera studies in particular—it has been generally accepted for some time now that detailed scrutiny of the usually hastily written accounts by the tiny number of bourgeois intellectuals employed to review performances for newspapers and journals offers a royal road to historical understanding. Nor is it hard to understand how the discipline came to find itself in such a curious position. In the wake of New Musicological condemnation of the twin ‘positivisms’ of traditional music-historical activity (philology, histories of institutions) and formal analysis, reception history doubtless offered a welcome third way. (Mark Everist already hinted at telling the story like this twenty years ago: see his ‘Reception Histories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford, 1999), 378–402 at 383.) Yet reception’s shortcomings as a historical method are easy to demonstrate. Not the least of the virtues of Boyd-Bennett’s scrupulously researched and beautifully presented study is the way it ends up pointing towards a more encompassing perspective.

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