Emanuele Senici, Sapienza Universitá di Roma.
In early 1977 the influential Italian music critic Fedele D’Amico railed against live TV broadcasts of opera performances from theatres, which he regarded as a travesty: ‘Their only effect is to reduce Verdi, Mozart and Wagner to citizens of Sanremo’. D’Amico was referring to the Sanremo Song Festival, the longest-lived programme of televised live performance – in this case of pop songs – in the history of Italy’s state broadcaster RAI, screened uninterruptedly since 1955. RAI had started broadcasting live opera from theatres just one year earlier. Yet, unlike the massive success of Sanremo, the opera broadcasts had had a rather chequered career. For this reason, the first ever live transmission of the opening night of La Scala on 7 December 1976 was hailed as a rebirth and generated considerable public discourse – including D’Amico’s barbed remarks. As I discuss in this paper, RAI TV’s attitude toward live opera did indeed change starting in 1976, which can therefore be taken as a valid terminus ante quem for the early history of live opera on Italian television. But what were these early broadcasts like?
I answer this question by focusing on the few currently available among them. In the context of other opera transmissions by RAI, they emerge – perhaps unsurprisingly – as strongly conditioned by their theatrical origin. But the Sanremo Song Festival was also a theatrical event, yet RAI soon developed a specific televisual approach to its broadcast, which was not the case for live opera performances until the late 1970s. In the concluding section of the paper I discuss the differences between RAI’s Sanremo broadcasts and those of live opera performances up to the 1970s, focusing on issues of televisual grammar, especially editing and rhythm.
Biography: Emanuele Senici is Professor of Music History at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy. His research centres on Italian opera of the long nineteenth century, on the theory and historiography of opera, and on opera on video. His recent publications include Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (University of Chicago Press, 2019; Italian translation, Ricordi, 2024), ‘Staging La sonnambula in the Twenty-First Century’, in Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935–2020, ed. Emilio Sala, Graziella Seminara and Emanuele Senici (Bloomsbury, 2024), and ‘“A World Coming Back”: Operetta on Early Italian Television’ (Cambridge Opera Journal, 2024).