The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813–1859 , by William Rothstein

Despite its hefty size and far-reaching title, William Rothstein’s The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813–1859 does not, as the author himself admits, “set forth a Theory of Opera” (p. 549). Readers will not find among the book’s nearly 600 pages a comprehensive analysis of Ottocento opera’s vocal gestures, schematic lexicon, recitative syntax, textural constructions, topical discourse, or other matters that such a theory would require. Instead, the book is a call for music theorists to shake the Germanic dust from their ears so that they might learn to hear the formal, rhythmic, and harmonic richness of Italian opera from Rossini to Verdi. In this, Rothstein positions himself as an enthusiastic guide rather than a thesis-wielding firebrand by, among other pursuits, introducing his readers to principles of Italian versification, guiding them through the ideas of key Italian theorists, sketching relevant structures like lyric form and la solita forma, and playing around with workhorse analytical tools of the Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian variety in a musical sandbox sourced from Italian shores. Rothstein clearly expects this book to frame his reader’s first serious encounter with the analysis of nineteenth-century Italian opera, but not their first encounter with music analysis itself. That is, the book’s central goal is to convince someone who already believes in the value of musical analysis that nineteenth-century Italian opera is worth their time.The book cleaves into two units: a theoretical primer (Part 1, “La via Italiana”) followed by a series of analytical adventures centered on canonical Italian composers (Parts 2 through 4). Part 1, which includes an important chapter on nineteenth-century Italianate music theory that would be valuable in many History of Theory seminars, sketches the perspectives on rhythm, harmony, and form that Rothstein views as essential for analyzing Italian opera. An overarching lesson across Rothstein’s analyses concerns the centrality of melodic independence in Italian opera. Thus, in the opening chapter on Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus,” Rothstein argues for a structurally disunified reading of the chorus in which an E-Phrygian melodic structure unfolds atop a vectored tonal trajectory from E minor to C major, while his fourth chapter on rhythm and meter argues persuasively that the (hyper)metrical frames that govern Italian melodies often grate against those suggested by the orchestra’s harmonic oscillations. This latter chapter is undoubtedly the book’s best, which should come as no surprise given Rothstein’s storied career as a scholar of musical rhythm. The chapter overflows with edifying explanations and insightful analyses, with highlights including a compelling account of grouping conflicts in Mozart’s “Ah! Chi mi dice mai,” a subtle reading of Bellini’s “Ah! non credea mirarti,” in which voice and orchestra gradually come into metrical coordination through subtle shifts in text declamation, and an interesting analysis of metrical re-notation as practiced by both theorists and composers.As for the book’s second half, it might best be characterized as a music-analytical history of Italian opera from Rossini to Verdi. This history is at its best when it provides stylistic snapshots of individual composers. For instance, the subheadings of Chapter 9, “Bellini and the New Diatonicism,” convey many of the composer’s central musical techniques: Unaccompanied Cadences, Mixture of Relative Keys, Avoiding the Leading Tone in Minor, Supplenti (p. 304, “a melodic dissonance that is followed by a leap, almost always downward”), The Sonorità (p. 305, a recurring pitch or motivic cell that “does not depend on key or harmonization for its definition”), Bait-and-Switch Dominants, and Tonal Pairing. This is an effective primer that equips Bellini neophytes with enough stylistic knowledge to begin formulating their own analyses and research questions. In these chapters, Rothstein’s guide-like pedagogical voice pierces through with clarity of purpose and effectiveness of prose.But for readers who are either already familiar with Ottocento opera or need to be convinced of the value of musical analysis, Rothstein’s book is far less revelatory. This is due largely to Rothstein’s unapologetic nostalgia for “old school” opera studies, his tendency to revisit decades-old battles at the expense of making his analyses relevant to opera scholars today. In the Introduction, Rothstein still laments the impact of Joseph Kerman’s critiques of analysis the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, apart from Nicholas Baragwanath, the scholars with whom Rothstein most frequently engages—Julian Budden, Martin Chusid, Philip Gossett, Harold Powers—were just as (if not more) well known to opera students thirty years ago as they are to readers today. Even the analytical questions themselves can feel quite old-fashioned, a problem exacerbated by the fact that Rothstein frequently declines to explain the value of those questions to readers who do not already accept their premises. The seventh chapter on “Tonal Coherence in Rossini’s Italian Operas” is a case in point, having much more to say to orthodox Schenkerians than to Rossini enthusiasts. Confronting Otello’s tonally winding third act, which begins and ends in E-flat major, Rothstein asks, “What would it mean to say that [the act is ‘in’ E-flat]?” (p. 238) only to punt the question one page later (p. 239, “to answer these questions in detail would vastly exceed the scope of this section”) and pursue a set of voice-leading sketches of the act anyway. But this question—what does it all mean?—is precisely what Rothstein must answer if he is to persuade opera scholars that the question of “tonal coherence” is one that is still worth asking at all. Why does it matter whether “the E♭-G third at the act’s beginning and end constitutes a composing-out of the E♭-major triad” (p. 243)? What does assenting to this statement or dissenting from it (as Rothstein does) change about how one hears the piece? In staging a struggle between Schenkerian theory and Rossinian opera, Rothstein certainly edifies Schenkerians on the pitfalls of analyzing whole acts prolongationally (a point already addressed by James Webster in 1990), but he fails to reveal how a listener today might productively analyze those same structures.1These and other similar analyses seem alienating precisely because they leave the significance of opera’s musical structures largely unexamined, an approach that may be disappointing for readers (like myself) who expect a book about opera’s musical language to say something significant about the semantics of that language. Rothstein does not sidestep hermeneutics entirely: at the end of the Otello analysis, for instance, Rothstein writes that “E♭ major . . . is a color, a state of feeling, an aural/emotional space in which plangent horn melodies and plagal progressions resound” (p. 245). But he is quite open about pushing such concerns to the sidelines. Meanwhile, the expressive interpretations that do emerge often feel like appendages rather than deeply integrated components of the analysis. Had Rothstein moved hermeneutics to the center of his project, the book would become not only a more powerful testament to the ways analysis can open new hearings of this meaningful multimedia genre, but also a much more faithful representative of the current state of opera analysis as a discipline. Rothstein’s book, filled to the brim with orthodox structuralist analyses of an artistic practice dominated by white men, is plainly uninterested in that. Indeed, by explicitly raising the project’s white racial frame to our attention, Rothstein (perhaps inadvertently) invites us to imagine what a queer, feminist, decolonial, disablist, or antiracist framework for analyzing the music of Italian opera might be. But readers will have to look elsewhere for scholarship that actualizes such frameworks.4Does Rothstein succeed in his “wish to revive . . . the analysis of operatic music” (p. xii) and to “nudge American theory away from the extreme Germanocentrism that has undergirded it since the 1930s” (p. xiii)? There is perhaps a nudge, but I would like to have seen a more forceful push. At its core, the book is an impassioned love letter to Italian opera written by an analyst who is clearly happy (and certainly fluent!) with most of his tools. Rothstein’s project is perhaps most successful in his second and fourth chapters, where he lays out an unquestionably rich framework for rhythmic analysis that is alive to the dynamic interplay of melody, text, and harmony that pulses within the genre’s heart. But for the rest, Rothstein’s aim seems to be to look back to the old rather than make space for the new, and to reinforce Germanic concerns about depth, unity, and organicism rather than upset them. I would, however, thoroughly recommend that readers peruse the Introduction and Part I for what I believe are the book’s most valuable insights. Beyond that, I invite readers to the Afterword, where Rothstein speaks quite plainly (and in a refreshingly personal tone) about what he thinks the book’s chief insights are. If you find those points compelling, you will find the rest of the book enjoyable. If not, there is little in the body of the book that will sway you

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