Donizetti, Vienna, Cosmopolitanism

Merelli's arrival at the Kärntnertortheater coincided with a phase of political reorganization of the Austrian Empire. On March 2, 1835, Habsburg emperor Franz I died after a long, tumultuous reign that had begun over forty years earlier, in 1792. For half of this time, until 1815, he had endured a taxing and destabilizing military confrontation with France. His realm was brought to the verge of collapse on several occasions, and while this was always avoided, it did not escape a ruinous bankruptcy in 1811, which hampered the economic development of the empire for years to come. During this time, the very nature of Franz's imperial title changed. Elected Holy Roman emperor—as Franz II—in 1792, he assumed the new dynastic title of Austrian emperor (Franz I) in 1804. In 1806, Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire altogether, and Franz now had to legitimize the dynastic nature of his “new” imperial title—a task that he would take to heart for the rest of his reign.¹⁰ Accordingly, Franz ensured that the imperial crown would legitimately pass to his eldest son, Ferdinand, despite Ferdinand's poor physical and mental health. Franz had long been advised to do otherwise, but he stubbornly maintained that dynastic logic should prevail. Thus Ferdinand was crowned emperor of Austria after his father's death.

Nevertheless, Franz had arranged that actual power be accorded to a state conference (or state cabinet), nominally presided over by Ferdinand's brother, Archduke Louis, but steered in a de facto manner by one of Franz's longtime closest advisers, Prince Clemens von Metternich. Soon after Franz's death, Count Anton von Kolowrat, minister of finances and of domestic affairs, also joined the council.¹¹ Metternich and Kolowrat stood at opposite poles of power within the Habsburg court; in fact, Kolowrat's appointment to the council is widely understood as a move to contain Metternich's authority. Nonetheless, both advocated decisively for urgent reforms through which to unify and modernize the empire's administrative, social, and economic infrastructures.¹² Already launched in the aftermath of the July Revolution in France, these reforms became a priority after 1834. In that year, the Habsburg territories were cut off from the newly formed Deutscher Zollverein, a commercial union between most of the states of the German Confederation, which included portions of the Austrian Empire. Metternich, together with other influential civil servants, demanded that the entire empire join the union to boost the economy of the state. Both within and outside of the empire, however, national lobbies were against such a move. Bohemian industrialists and Hungarian landowners, for instance, wanted to avoid direct competition with their German counterparts, while Prussia saw in the Austrian exclusion a way of reinforcing its own influence among the other states of the Confederation.¹³

Just as the political scenario at the Habsburg court was changing, so were cultural conditions in Vienna. During the 1820s, foreign influences were increasingly evident in Viennese theatrical life, especially after the Italian impresario Domenico Barbaja took over the management of the Kärntnertortheater in December 1821. Running the court opera house concurrently with the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and then, in the second half of the decade, with Milan's Teatro alla Scala, Barbaja had reinforced the operatic ties between Vienna and the Italian states, several of which had returned under direct or indirect Habsburg authority after the Congress of Vienna.¹⁴ Meanwhile, an international dramatic repertoire was also prospering in the city: no longer confined to the Burgtheater, Vienna's court playhouse, which had long been producing foreign works, plays written abroad had gradually begun to be staged in suburban theaters.¹⁵ In particular, French itinerant troupes flocked to the Austrian capital, putting the domination of the local Posse, a comedic genre featuring long sections in Viennese dialect, under threat. Local adaptations of comic and sentimental works, as well as mélodrames, provided plenty of readily available material that catered to the Viennese craving for theatrical novelties. In addition to translating their original scripts into German, these adaptations often entailed a thorough reworking of characters, sets, and dramatic situations.¹⁶ Of course, this was not the first time French dramatic culture had blossomed in Vienna: cultural Francophilia had already emerged in the mid-eighteenth century and had intensified during the Napoleonic Wars, especially when French troops had occupied the city in 1805 and 1809.¹⁷ What was new in the 1820s and 1830s was widespread perceptions of what such French influence meant for the cultural fabric of Vienna itself. No longer was French culture just an obsession of social and political elites. Rather, it came to represent those forces of modernity (industrialization, capitalism, new and faster means of transportation) with which Metternich, Kolowrat, and other high-ranking state officials believed the Austrian Empire should come to terms.

Viennese theater criticism addressed this phenomenon by reviving—and endowing with new meaning—an old idea, that of cosmopolitanism. With a history stretching back to antiquity, cosmopolitanism was a philosophical, political, and cultural concept whose meanings ranged from a sense of being unbound by borders of any kind (local, regional, national) to an open-minded approach to the world.¹⁸ In the eighteenth century, cosmopolitanism became a cornerstone of Enlightenment political philosophy, and it was foundational to Immanuel Kant's theory of moral history, which contemplated the creation of a world state that would guarantee perpetual peace.¹⁹ Kant's idea of world citizenship (Weltbürgertum) stemmed from another, less overtly political conception of cosmopolitanism. Gerard Delanty has called it “a culturally oriented cosmopolitanism,” which entailed a “turn towards a broadening of vision beyond the narrow world of ancien régime loyalties” in such areas of human activity as “science, literature, and travel.”²⁰ This notion of cultural cosmopolitanism informed the Enlightenment project of a Republic of Letters, an ideal, boundless space for the circulation and sharing of ideas imagined as ultimately leading to an improvement of the human condition. Diderot and d'Alembert regarded the publication of their Encyclopédie as integral to this project.²¹

Both of these Enlightenment conceptions of cosmopolitanism, the political and the cultural, embraced moral values grounded in tolerance, open-mindedness, and impartiality toward otherness.²² The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars altered this conceptual landscape, gradually nourishing ideas of citizenship and patriotism that, as Martha Nussbaum has discussed, sustained forms of political activism based on communitarian feelings and emotional commitment instead of reason and universal aspirations.²³ While these new ideas coexisted with cosmopolitan ideologies (revolutionaries, for instance, often promoted universal freedom as their ultimate goal), such coexistence was uneasy. Especially in the wake of French expansionism, cosmopolitanism itself could acquire negative connotations, being identified either with elitist individualism—a condition of privileged social classes—or with political disengagement from, if not outright disloyalty to, one's own community.²⁴ Moreover, the role of French as the lingua franca of eighteenth-century European culture further cemented perceptions of cosmopolitan ideas as products of French culture. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, with German cultural nationalism on the rise, German patriots increasingly resisted cosmopolitanism as a dangerous manifestation of French hegemony. Yet recognized champions of German culture such as Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Alexander von Humboldt maintained a strong cosmopolitan intellectual outlook, while advocating a role and prestige for their native tradition on a par with those of France and Italy.²⁵

The multinational nature of the Habsburg Empire favored a more receptive approach to cosmopolitanism, one distinguished from enlightened Weltbürgertum by virtue of its emphasis on a sense of “brotherhood and interdependency of peoples” rather than on universalism.²⁶ This approach gestures toward what Dana Gooley and others have called “nationalist cosmopolitanism,” a rather vague and unsystematic “habit of thinking and writing about group affiliation” that regarded nationality as a necessary step toward the ultimate fulfillment of a broader, more “universal” good.²⁷ Although within the empire itself, as observed by Franz Leander Fillafer and Jürgen Osterhammel, patriots in Bohemia and Hungary “strongly emphasized the brotherhood and interdependency of peoples who were entitled to aspire and achieve freedom,” thus embracing the idea of a nationalist cosmopolitanism to join forces against the central government, a focus on the harmonious coexistence of peoples was a central tenet of Habsburg imperial ideology.²⁸ These antithetical conceptions of cosmopolitanism at play in imperial politics and patriotic discourse certainly had different goals: freedom and emancipation in the former case, peace and welfare in the latter. Nonetheless, neither side believed that differences among peoples should be erased. Rather, they embraced such differences as inherent features of humanity. Knowledge and appreciation of these differences helped to overcome divisions and mutual distrust and favored peaceful coexistence.

In the late 1820s and early 1830s, cosmopolitanism remained a contentious matter in Vienna, as testified by reactions to the new French cultural wave. The wounds left by the wars against France were still far from healed, but old and current concerns stirred debates in new and ever-changing ways. A typical attitude informed by German cultural nationalism was promoted by the Allgemeine Theater-Zeitung, whose contributors condemned cosmopolitanism (Weltbürgerlichkeit) as an infecting and dangerous side effect of the French Enlightenment, “a new enemy of the national course” that led diverse and discrete cultural traditions to turn “their backs on the past and on history,” to trample on their “native country, fatherland, and the world itself,” and to sink “into an ideal characterlessness.”²⁹ The Allgemeine Theater-Zeitung was unequivocal in framing cosmopolitanism in negative terms, and understandably so: its editor-in-chief, Adolph Bäuerle (1786–1859), was a preeminent author of popular comedies whose creative career had been endangered by the new French vogue. Bäuerle, moreover, had founded the newspaper in 1806, at the height of the antagonism between Austria and France, and his outlook remained firmly rooted in wartime cultural patriotism even later in life.³⁰ In the Theater-Zeitung, popular French authors such as Eugène Scribe and Alexandre Dumas père were dismissed as “cosmopolites” (Kosmopoliten) on the grounds of their stylistic adaptability and protean artistic personalities, and also with respect to their target audience.³¹ According to this newspaper, these authors' alleged cosmopolitanism was a disorienting hodge-podge, an unpredictable mixture of disparate dramatic devices that served commercial purposes rather than aesthetic ideals or a coherent artistic vision.

Other Viennese critics, however, were less eager to embrace Bäuerle's vehement rejection of cosmopolitanism. The Habsburg court, indeed, directly supported a variety of initiatives to affirm its own notion of cosmopolitanism. As early as 1808, one of the journals funded by the Austrian government, the Vaterländische Blätter für den österreichischen Kaiserstaat, began its inaugural issue by stating that its main goal was “to acquaint the inhabitants of the imperial and royal states with one another and to foster love of the fatherland through knowledge of the fatherland.”³² The court had good reason for promoting this agenda, since the survival of the multinational Habsburg Empire rested on synthesizing its many local constituencies. Celebrating the peculiarities of each as a manifestation of a larger whole was a means to this end. This attitude was very much alive and well thirty years later, when the universalism typical of eighteenth-century views of cosmopolitanism had come to appear utopian, unattainable, ineffective, and therefore unconducive to an actual improvement of the human condition. A distinction between quixotic and realistic ambitions with respect to cultural cosmopolitanism emerged in an article on travel literature published in 1838 in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode:

There is more than an echo of Habsburg antinationalistic policies in this call, since it posits that only the downplaying of national partisanships and political disagreements can sustain the ethical dimension of cultural cosmopolitanism.³⁵ The musical analogy introduced in the quotation above eloquently captures the basic tenets of the imperial agenda: the creation of a system that, like a consonant chord, is made up of different but well-integrated elements. But music not only offered a powerful image with which to describe the Habsburg cosmopolitan ideal; it also provided a discursive field in which it developed. Opera, by its nature a combination of different forms of artistic expression, became perhaps the liveliest—and most vigorously debated—forum for probing this ideal.

When Domenico Barbaja withdrew from the administration of the Kärntnertortheater in 1828, the Vienna-Italy axis, which had dominated during his tenure, was weakened considerably in favor of a triangle that, as in the realm of spoken drama, now included Paris. To be sure, opéras-comiques and a few French works by Cherubini and Spontini had long been popular in Vienna, but at a time when Germany's biggest operatic rival was Italy, critics tended to hear these French works as aligned more closely with German than with Italian operatic aesthetics, given the striking differences between the Italian and German repertoires. Once Rossini settled in Paris in the mid-1820s, however, there could no longer be any doubt as to a shift in the European geography of cultural power, and to Viennese eyes, France became just as threatening as Italy.

Barbaja's successor at the Kärntnertortheater, Count Robert von Gallenberg, acknowledged and tried to ride the new wave. Soon after taking office in January 1829, he asked for leave to visit France, from where he requested a state contribution toward hiring new artists and renting new scores in Paris.³⁶ After his travels, Gallenberg brought Rossini's Paris operas to Vienna, where they premiered at the Kärntnertortheater between the end of 1829 and 1831.³⁷ The latest works by Auber, Halévy, and, most importantly, Meyerbeer soon followed.³⁸ Like all French operas of the time, these composers' works were performed exclusively in German translations at the Kärntnertortheater, and were often heavily modified to appease the requirements of imperial censors.³⁹ In such adaptations, these works became staples of the theater's German seasons.

The broad dissemination of French works reconfigured the terms in which foreign cultural—including operatic—influences were debated in Vienna. As Gundula Kreuzer notes, France got in the way of the German-Italian dichotomy in the first half of the nineteenth century, turning it into what the German music historian Gustav Schilling called the geographical “holy trinity” in music history: Italy, Germany, and France.⁴⁰ Schilling's nationalistic sensibilities, however, quickly transformed this trinity back into simpler and more effective binary stereotypes. While he accepted eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French music as having been the nurturing soil for the later evolution of German music, he regarded the latest French wave as a mere development of the “Rossini fever” of the late 1810s and early 1820s, especially in view of Rossini's contributions to the genre of grand opéra. “Recent French music,” Kreuzer writes, “was either appropriated or sidelined: whatever could not illustrate German influence was lumped together with the Italians. This was done under the label of the welsch, or wälsch (‘Latin’).”⁴¹ Schilling's influential argument seemed to register and systematize broader discursive trends that had characterized music criticism in the previous decades. In the early 1820s, the most important antidote against the “Rossini fever” had been an opera as influenced by French opéra-comique as Weber's Der Freischütz, but by the 1830s the terms of these debates had changed. The well-established German-Italian dualism had evolved into a more generic—but updated, both conceptually and rhetorically—German-wälsch opposition, the term “wälsch” subsuming both “Italian” and “French.” Unsurprisingly, once this rhetorical twist gained ground, the ties that bound Weber's opera to France were severed.⁴²

The critical merging of Italian and French operatic genres into an indeterminate wälsch melting pot gained momentum in Vienna as soon as it became clear that the new cultural invasion was not going to be short-lived. When Halévy's La Juive was first produced at the Kärntnertortheater on March 3, 1836, Der Wanderer hailed it as an opera endowed with “German depth.”⁴³ In the Allgemeine Theater-Zeitung, Bäuerle likewise praised Halévy's music but added that, regarding the political aftertaste of the historical setting and the gruesome plot, “we Germans are much more direct and sensitive, and heartily enjoy our harmless comedies.”⁴⁴ In hindsight, this claim might sound like the ringing of an alarm against a new threat to local theatrical traditions—a threat coming this time from west of the Rhine rather than from south of the Alps. And indeed it took only a few seasons, in which many more French operas were performed at the Kärntnertortheater, to convince the critics at Der Wanderer that what had previously sounded deep and quintessentially German was little more than ostentatious, “a mediocre opera produced in a mediocre fashion.”⁴⁵ A few months later, another article in the same newspaper bitterly remarked,

At the same time that most Viennese critics were dismissing Donizetti as a stereotypical Italian composer, he was in fact becoming one of the leading representatives of musical cosmopolitanism. In consequence of a series of personal and professional circumstances, Donizetti left Italy for Paris in October 1838.⁴⁸ Thereafter, his career developed mainly abroad. Once in Paris, he diversified his compositional activity: he supervised revivals of some of his operas for the Théâtre-Italien, he adapted and translated others into French (Lucia di Lammermoor for the Théâtre de la Renaissance and Poliuto, revised as Les martyrs, for the Académie royale de musique), and he composed new scores, most notably La fille du régiment for the Opéra-Comique, L'ange de Nisida for the Théâtre de la Renaissance, and La favorite for the Académie royale.⁴⁹ In so doing, he worked simultaneously on a variety of operatic genres, both Italian and French, substantially rethinking his musical and dramatic language to meet the expectations of French audiences.⁵⁰ Despite the barbs of chauvinistic critics and composers (chief among them Berlioz) who felt threatened and outraged at the sweeping dissemination of Donizetti's works on the city's stages, his pragmatic and flexible attitude gained him a place alongside the two great pan-European opera composers of the time, Rossini and Meyerbeer.⁵¹

This international breadth allowed Donizetti's Parisian works to circulate, with a number of modifications, in Italy and Austria as well. In Vienna, La fille du régiment was premiered during the 1841 Italian opera season and was frequently revived in German translation.⁵²Les martyrs and La favorite, too, reached Vienna, albeit—like many other grands opéras of the time—in heavily censored translations that compromised the success of the productions.⁵³ Despite these unfavorable circumstances, Viennese critics readily observed Donizetti's stylistic shift in the case of Les martyrs. The opera was first performed at the Theater in der Josephstadt on June 15, 1841, and a few months later, on October 13, at the Kärntnertortheater.⁵⁴ The reviewer for Der Humorist, a newspaper that had never minced its words when writing about Donizetti, was taken aback by the stylistic changes evinced by Les martyrs when compared with the composer's Italian works. Writing for the Paris Opéra, the critic noted, had forced Donizetti to set aside the “degenerate melodic ding-dong to which [he] had accustomed his Italian compatriots—or, to put it better, in which he had indulged them.”⁵⁵ Though not sparing him the accusation of plagiarizing from Rossini and Meyerbeer, the reviewer conceded that “we like to listen to this music more than to many of his other compositions. Here, commonplace things are mixed with something more solid, proving to us that Donizetti, when he wanted to, was capable of striving for something more competent than this eternal Lucia- and Belisario-noodling.”⁵⁶ By separating the composer from his reputation as a typically Italian assembler of sing-along melodies, this review, ambivalent as it may have been, exemplifies the beginning of a new thread in the Viennese reception of Donizetti, one ostensibly justified by the perceived positive influences of his Parisian experience upon his work. Around the same time, Merelli and Donizetti came to an agreement regarding the composition of a new opera for the Kärntnertortheater, which would eventually become Linda di Chamounix.⁵⁷

Donizetti was well aware that an opera for Vienna would require taking into account the taste of yet another foreign constituency. In a letter, he ironically described his new target audience as being made up of “scientists and wise men” who appreciated the deployment of sophisticated compositional techniques over the immediacy of Italian melodies, and who valued the elaboration of a handful of thematic ideas over their variety.⁵⁸ According to another letter from this period, Donizetti had become familiar in his youth with musical techniques for which Viennese instrumental music was renowned by “learn[ing] all the quartets of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Reicha, Mayseder, etc., which I later found very useful for saving on imagination and for constructing a piece out of few ideas.”⁵⁹ For his two operas written for the Kärntnertortheater, Linda di Chamounix and Maria di Rohan, Donizetti drew upon his knowledge of the Viennese instrumental repertoire, while loosening—without effacing—several conventional elements traditionally associated with Italian opera.⁶⁰ By working from within the conventions of the genre, he provided it with what many recognized as an original breath of cosmopolitanism. Contemporary Viennese commentators reacted by discussing whether Donizetti's “new” course was a deviation from his essentially Italian nature or an improvement upon it. More importantly, a close reading of these reviews reveals a gradual synthesis of ideas traditionally associated with German patriotism and a peculiarly Viennese understanding of cosmopolitanism itself.

The triumphant premiere of Linda di Chamounix at the Kärntnertortheater on May 19, 1842, was the culmination of a carefully planned series of events through which Donizetti, showing off both his musical versatility and his social savoir faire, established himself amid Viennese high society. Prior to departing for Vienna, he had obtained a presentation letter from Rossini to Metternich, whom he was scheduled to meet upon his arrival. Once in the Austrian capital, Donizetti reconnected with one of his former Neapolitan patrons, the Prince of Salerno (uncle of the king of Naples), who facilitated the composer's entrance to the most prestigious Viennese salons. With such excellent cards to play, he secured introductions to the Viennese crème de la crème. By April 11, he was making arrangements for a private performance of Rossini's Stabat mater at the Habsburg court, an event that took place the following month, on May 4.⁶¹ A full-scale public concert of Rossini's work under Donizetti's baton followed in the Großer Redoutensaal in the Hofburg on May 31, and contributed to the consolidation of Donizetti's reputation as an accomplished and versatile musician.⁶² Prominent members of the aristocracy, including Moritz von Dietrichstein, the court's Supreme Chamberlain, and the Archduchess Sophie, competed to have Donizetti perform in their salons.⁶³ Thanks to this strong show of support from the highest tiers of Viennese society, expectations for the premiere of Linda di Chamounix were at a fever pitch.

Critics hostile to Donizetti did not miss the opportunity to suggest that the overwhelming success of Linda was due to the composer's social connections. In what was certainly the harshest review of the production, August Schmidt, editor-in-chief of the Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung, claimed that one of the most memorable tunes of the opera, the melody of the cabaletta of the Linda-Carlo duet in act 1, owed its popularity to its social and commercial value, rather than to its musical qualities: “Without any doubt this tune will make its way into all kinds of salon music; it is popular, and this may well be its only merit. Even its melodic quality is more exterior and brilliant than interior and contemplative; and the latter quality, I would argue, should inhere in a melody that expresses the climax of deepest love.”⁶⁴ We will return to the importance of this melody for the reception of the opera in a moment. For now, suffice it to say that none of Schmidt's colleagues followed his lead in denigrating Linda. Carl Kunt, critic for the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode and a self-professed Donizetti detractor, surrendered for once to the work of a composer who, in his opinion, had built his success on a combination of talent and fashion:⁶⁵

To a significant extent, these questions underpinned the Viennese reception of Linda di Chamounix, as critics tried to make sense of, contextualize, and evaluate the triumph of Donizetti's work. Some of them saw in it the outcome of the composer's peripatetic career. For instance, the official newspaper of the Austrian government, the Oesterreichisch-Kaiserliche privilegierte Wiener Zeitung (hereinafter Wiener Zeitung), promoted Donizetti's new opera as follows:

This review sums up several themes that run through the entire body of literature on the opera's premiere. One is the contribution of Gaetano Rossi's libretto, about which critics were uniformly enthusiastic. The plot may be summarized as follows. Linda is the daughter of poor but honorable farmers from the alpine village of Chamonix in Savoy.⁷⁰ Unbeknownst to her parents, she is in love with Carlo, whom she believes to be a painter but who is in fact heir to the estate to which Chamonix belongs. To protect his daughter from the lascivious intentions of another local aristocrat, Linda's father Antonio forces her to join other young Savoyards who are traveling to Paris. Carlo follows her, reveals his true identity, and hosts a still innocent Linda in his luxurious Paris apartment. Antonio has also come to Paris and enters the apartment by chance, begging for money. Outraged at discovering his daughter there, he believes that Linda has lost her honor, and he curses her. Meanwhile, Linda's friend Pierotto reports that Carlo has been forced to agree to a marriage with another woman. Cursed and abandoned, Linda loses her mind. With great difficulty, Pierotto succeeds in guiding her back to Chamonix. Carlo also returns, now released from his arranged marriage and free to marry the girl. Though shocked at the sight of Linda's mental state, which prevents her from recognizing those dear to her, he sings their love song. Linda thus recovers her senses, obtains her father's forgiveness and blessing, and is finally able to marry Carlo.

In Vienna, the Alpine setting of the opera, an ideal mirror of the purity and innocence of the female protagonist, allowed Linda to resonate with a much-loved local theatrical tradition, whereby the Alps, as the heart of the Austrian Monarchy, represented both an escape from the daily miseries of life and an idealized source of moral and political virtues.⁷¹ Leo Herz, Oberregisseur at the Kärntnertortheater and contributor to the Allgemeine Theater-Zeitung, specifically noted the ethical qualities of the opera's subject: “In the libretto of this opera, which Rossi has crafted after the effective French drama Grâce à Dieu [sic], a purely moral plot finally rules. Here there appears neither pestilence, nor murder, nor other abominable crimes, which the recent French dramatic libertinage likes to designate ‘Romantic.’ Instead, the love of two hearts is portrayed in sentimental garb.”⁷² Herz's remarks echo the ambivalent attitude of insiders toward the internationalization of the Viennese theatrical repertoire of the time. He rebukes Victor Hugo for his tragic manner, and for an aesthetics of Romantic drama notorious for its “libertine” breaking of classical dramatic rules and its violent, morally questionable subjects.⁷³ A number of critics had indeed responded to several of Donizetti's previous Italian operas—most famously Lucrezia Borgia, based on a play by Hugo—with hostility, precisely because of the ways in which they considered those works to rub shoulders with this dramatic tradition. With Linda, however, many could breathe a sigh of relief: this time, Donizetti's French source was of a different kind. As the reviewer for Der Adler remarked, “The composer has preemptively avoided the reproach that he is fond of rather bloody librettos fashioned in the manner of Victor Hugo.”⁷⁴ And Carl Kunt commented in the Wiener Zeitschrift, “The libretto … abandons the arena of poisonings, killings, and other barbarities in which modern tragedie liriche tend to disport themselves. Here, thank God, no ill-tempered tyrant, no trespassing Amoroso, no enraged prima donna, spoils one's musical appetite.”⁷⁵

The dramatic source for Rossi's libretto was a recent French play, La grâce de Dieu, ou La nouvelle Fanchon, by Adolphe-Philippe d'Ennery and Gustave Lemoine, first performed at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris on January 16, 1841. Donizetti himself likely recommended the play, for he saw it while in Paris.⁷⁶ Because La grâce de Dieu denounced the phenomenon of child labor and exploitation and provided an utterly negative portrayal of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, the libretto had to be adjusted to avoid objections from the Austrian censorship.⁷⁷ Very little of the play's original social critique remains in the opera. Rossi and Donizetti deprived the scenes involving the young Savoyards of their original political connotations, providing them instead with a pathetic patina and touches of couleur locale that were duly praised in the Viennese press. The aristocratic villains also underwent modifications. Whereas the play depicts Carlo's mother as an utterly unsympathetic character, the operatic adaptation merely mentions her. The lustful marquis is transformed into a buffo role in the opera, so that his lasciviousness, originally threatening, becomes an element of ridicule rather than of moral corruption. Finally, the authoritative ecclesiastical figure of the play (le Curé) was secularized into a magistrate (il Prefetto) in the libretto. But the play was also a rich subject for an opera, providing an opportunity to use melodies for the leading characters (widely acknowledged as the essential feature of Italian opera) as “diegetic” stage songs, which recur as reminiscence themes throughout. This allowed Donizetti to work out the musico-dramatic structure of the opera in a manner that appealed to critics who favored German operatic aesthetics.⁷⁸ Music, and in particular singing, was not a mere exterior decoration—an effect, as it were—but was pivotal to the unfolding of the drama.

According to many Viennese critics, such careful adaptation of the original French play offered Donizetti the opportunity to adopt more cohesive and carefully worked out musical and dramatic strategies, and to embrace what they considered a more “German” approach to opera. In a long and detailed review in the Allgemeine Theater-Zeitung, for instance, the often sharp-tongued Heinrich Adami conceded that

The pervasiveness of reminiscence themes in the opera has received considerable attention from scholars and, given its importance for Viennese critics, is worth recalling again.⁸⁰ The source play for Linda includes, and owes its title to, a highly popular preexisting song of the time by Loïsa Puget, “À la grâce de Dieu” (1835), which is sung at key moments of the drama. Donizetti and his librettist, however, modified the original story line so that two distinct pieces, both introduced in the first act of the opera, are made to fulfill the two distinct tasks originally assigned to “À la grâce de Dieu.”⁸¹ One is Pierotto's folkish ballata, a stage song that, like Puget's “À la grâce de Dieu,” tells of the departure of the young Savoyards from their village to seek a better future elsewhere, as well as the morally corrupting threats to which innocent maids are exposed by leaving their homes (see example 1).⁸² Pierotto's ballata sustains the moral values of the opera: “Pierotto's voice is the voice of the community, of Chamonix, of the native valley, and therefore, by metonymy, of the family.”⁸³ In act 2, as Linda is about to yield to Carlo's attempt to seduce her, she hears Pierotto off stage playing the ballata on his hurdy-gurdy, is reminded of her mother and her duty to preserve her family's honor, and thus successfully resists her beloved's sexual advances (see example 2). In the third act, Pierotto again plays the ballata, this time to induce Linda, driven to madness, to return to their native Chamonix.

The other recurring theme of the opera is the melody of the cabaletta from the act 1 love duet for Linda and Carlo. This duet undermines the moral system represented by the ballata and paves the way for Antonio's misunderstanding of his daughter's relationship with Carlo in the second act.⁸⁴ Donizetti's treatment of the cabaletta melody throughout the opera suggests another possible reason why Viennese critics heard German influences in his music. The duet's cabaletta is subdivided into a standard pattern: four-measure phrases (aa′ba′′), the last of which leads to a six-measure coda. (See example 3, which shows Carlo's presentation of the melody; Linda then takes up his melody with minor variations, before the two characters join in the a due repetition.) Later in the opera, this melody returns in different keys and is reduced to its first period only (aa′), always in conjunction with Linda's madness. First, we hear it in Linda's mad scene in act 2. Having just lost her reason at the news of Carlo's imminent marriage to another woman and at having been cursed by her father, Linda reacts by uttering the first six measures of the cabaletta theme in the original key of G major (see example 4). At the crucial words “tua sposa” (your bride), she interrupts the metric regularity of the melody and slips into a stuttered recitative. The harmonic pattern, likewise, slips away from G major and, through an almost lamenting chromatic descent in the bass, lands on the E-flat major of the ensuing cabaletta.⁸⁵ Only in act 3, back in Chamonix, does Linda pick up the love theme from where she left it, this time in F major. At this point, the theme seems to enter into a kind of musical and dramatic tension with Pierotto's ballata, which is heard only a few moments earlier. Pierotto has with difficulty managed to bring Linda back home by playing his hurdy-gurdy (the two characters enter the stage as he plays his song), but he cannot repress his annoyance at Linda's musical obsession: he interrupts her “mechanical” repetition of the love theme with the words “For pity's sake! Always the same!” (see example 5). For a full statement of the theme's first period in the original G major, however, we have to wait until, at Linda's request, Carlo sings it to her just before she recovers her sanity. This final return of the melody sheds new light on the subtle transformations of its previous reiterations: it fulfills a “therapeutic” function, helping Linda's return to reason, signaled by the melody's return to its original shape.⁸⁶ Like the recapitulation of a theme in sonata form, the last reiteration of the love theme provides a sense of coming home, which in this case is both musical and dramatic. In sum, Donizetti wove a typical Italian melody into the French dramatic fabric of the opera through what, to Viennese ears, must have sounded like a quintessentially German compositional technique.

While such sophisticated treatment of reminiscence themes garnered Donizetti unanimous praise in the Viennese press, it also divided critics with respect to the opera's “national” origins. In the aforementioned review in the Allgemeine Theater-Zeitung, Adami suggested that Linda approached the German aesthetic ideal only because of a happy coincidence. For him, Donizetti's music remained “graceful” (“graziös”), one of the rhetorical tools usually employed to dismiss Italian opera as a sensual and superficial source of pleasure; but this time, Adami argued, the sentimental—French—subject allowed Donizetti's graceful Italian melodies to sound “characteristic,” to acquire a “deeper” dramatic raison d'être, thus redeeming them for German ears. Both Kunt and Moritz Saphir, the critic for Der Humorist, placed Linda firmly within the Italian camp, while recognizing that the opera was one of the ripest and most carefully crafted fruits of that tradition. Kunt conceded that the inclusion of non-Italian elements contributed to this improvement:

Toward the end of the 1842 Italian opera season at the Kärntnertortheater, however, the Wiener Zeitung moved the discussion of the opera closer to official conceptions of cultural cosmopolitanism, and praised it as a work that transcended national divisions:

This point, anticipated by Kunt's aforementioned assertion that Linda needed an audience who “feels with a heart that is moved by cosmopolitan art,” opens up questions regarding the representation and recognition of the work's cosmopolitan qualities. These questions, according to anthropologist Henrietta Moore, “are always bound up … in imaginative projects of identification and difference … attached to relays of cognition, emotion and longing that do not respect the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, religion or nation.”⁹² Cosmopolitanism, she argues, is one such project, a way of representing the world, a “historically situated nature of fantasy,” based on relations (between Us and Other, as well as between subject and object) and on forms of “management of images and desires.”⁹³ From this perspective, the Wiener Zeitung's projection of cosmopolitan attributes onto Linda was coterminous with an idealized vision of Viennese audiences.

By and large, indeed, the Viennese engagement with cosmopolitanism was an isolated case in the reception of Linda. The opera also fared well outside Vienna. In the 1840s it became one of Donizetti's most popular works, and he revised it for the Théâtre-Italien in Paris, where it was premiered on November 17, 1842. But with the exception of Théophile Gautier, Parisian critics were much less inclined than their Austrian colleagues to read the opera as an instance of cultural cosmopolitanism.⁹⁴ Most notably, they refused to allow it any form of French influence, criticizing the butchering and oversimplification of La grâce de Dieu that had been required to shape it into an Italian opera libretto.⁹⁵ One critic went as far as to deny the opera any international pedigree whatsoever: for him, Linda “is no less Italian than all her elder sisters: there is always the same ease, the same melodic clarity, the same outline, the same rhythm. The orchestration is polished and refined without the slightest resemblance to that of the great German masters.”⁹⁶ While in Italy, at least initially, the circulation of the opera was hampered by local censorship, in northern Germany its resounding success resulted in an escalation of hostility toward Donizetti and Vienna itself.⁹⁷ In 1842, the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung did not comment on Vienna's first production at all,⁹⁸ while German composers generally kept themselves aloof from what transpired in the Habsburg capital. Albert Lortzing, for one, found the musical atmosphere in the city “a veritable misery … only Italian music dominates!”; similarly, Carl Loewe wrote in 1844 that “one contents and amuses himself exceedingly with Italian melodic junk.”⁹⁹ And at the end of 1843, Richard Wagner, who had tried in vain to have his Rienzi performed at the Kärntnertortheater, disparagingly labeled Vienna “Donizetti's city.”¹⁰⁰

By the time Wagner wrote these words, Donizetti's ties to Vienna had indeed become closer. In response to the reception of Linda, the Wiener Zeitung expressed the wish that the administration of the Kärntnertortheater would commission a new opera from Donizetti for the following year.¹⁰¹ This wish—which, given the government's control over this very newspaper, sounds almost like an instruction—was duly met with Donizetti's second opera composed for Vienna, Maria di Rohan. Meanwhile, the composer had obtained an official position, becoming the emperor's new court composer.

Premiered at the Kärntnertortheater on June 5, 1843, Maria di Rohan scored another tremendous popular and critical success. Even more than Linda, Donizetti's new opera was immediately discussed in the press as a combination of elements of various origins. The French touch was provided once again by the literary source of Salvatore Cammarano's libretto: Un duel sous le cardinal de Richelieu (1832) by Joseph-Philippe Simon, dit Lockroy, and Edmond Badon. Donizetti had long sought to turn the subject into an opera.¹⁰² The original play fascinated him for its combination of the comic and the tragic and its spectacular potential—features that, as discussed above, were related to Hugo's vision of Romantic drama.¹⁰³ For Vienna, however, Donizetti had the most controversial aspects of the play toned down, with the result that Maria is one of his shortest and most compact operas. Scholars have regularly commented on its concise dramatic mechanism, which moves relentlessly toward its tragic conclusion.¹⁰⁴ In order to intensify such a precipitous trajectory, the composer cut a virtuosic cabaletta originally planned for Maria at the end of the opera. He also ensured that the orchestra made a crucial contribution to defining the various dramatic situations, and in this way he produced some of his most brilliant instrumental writing.

August Schmidt, who had expressed reservations about Linda di Chamounix the previous year, was won over by Donizetti's latest work. In his review for the Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung, he emphatically ascribed the composer's dramatic choices to a beneficial German influence, and he welcomed Maria di Rohan as a pathbreaking work, one through which Donizetti could rise above the contingencies of his time, of taste, and of fashion:

Despite these differences, critics agreed that the new course Donizetti had undertaken with Linda was no mere attempt to flatter local spectators for the sake of success, but the outcome of his assimilation of the cultural tenets of an explicitly Viennese aesthetics. In only one year, Viennese reviewers had transformed Donizetti from a composer bowing to a foreign audience to one inspired by the city's “mediating Muse.” Their rhetorical strategies also raised the image of Vienna as a cultural center actively pursuing reconciliation between diverse artistic traditions and “national” aesthetics, and embracing cosmopolitanism as a key feature of Viennese music history. A peculiar sense of history was indeed a crucial aspect of Habsburg ideology—a way in which the imperial community could experience a sense of belonging by sharing a common past.¹⁰⁹ From this perspective, Donizetti came to be accepted as part of this history once his operatic style proved flexible enough to transcend clear-cut national divides.

Isolated exceptions notwithstanding, by the early 1840s the notion of cosmopolitanism in Viennese music criticism had lost many of its originally negative connotations, emerging instead as a flexible category, well suited to the goals and aspirations of various players on the local cultural scene. In this respect, the discrepancies evident in the reviews of Maria di Rohan—Schmidt's emphasis on the opera's German aesthetic roots in contrast to the cosmopolitan tenets recognized by other critics—are only superficial, since the similarity of the arguments behind the two positions reveals that the Viennese discourse of cosmopolitanism had absorbed some of the aesthetic stances of German nationalism. More specifically, the Viennese reconciliation of operatic cultures reformulated and reframed widespread attitudes among German nationalists with respect to the mission of their national culture—namely, the belief that Germans possessed a synthetic predisposition that allowed German artworks to build upon, improve, and ultimately overcome foreign cultural achievements.¹¹⁰ Despite a considerable degree of porosity between Viennese cosmopolitan and German national aspirations, however, some important differences remained.

Viennese cosmopolitanism recognized, at least in theory, a certain degree of equality among contributing national traditions. Once Donizetti was appointed court kapellmeister and chamber composer in July 1842, Viennese critics recognized him as being fully integrated into the musical landscape of their city. Through this official position, he became part of a musical establishment whose history had been shaped by composers of different origins (Italian, German, and Bohemian), and that took pride of place in projecting Vienna's image as the capital of a composite, supranational empire. Donizetti himself bragged about occupying a position that had once been Mozart's, almost as if his filling the shoes of a composer who had “made” Viennese music history legitimized his belonging to that history.¹¹¹ Yet Mozart's very legacy, with which Donizetti was toying, was ideologically contended. If Donizetti's claim was consistent with an “imperial” view of Vienna's music history, German nationalists regarded his appointment as a usurpation. An anonymous contributor to Robert Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, for instance, commented on the composer's new role as follows: “Donizetti's nomination as court chamber composer (a position that once was Mozart's) dealt a deadly blow to German art. The Italian influence, which had reigned supreme in Vienna since the [18]20s, is now unfortunately protected from on high, and any word pronounced against it will be either ignored or repressed.”¹¹² For this Leipzig critic, Vienna was supposed to be a bastion of German culture, and the Italian domination of the city that was supposedly signaled by Donizetti's appointment was a result of unnatural and despotic political maneuvers. Following a robust tradition dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the critic's words place Mozart—also a quintessentially cosmopolitan composer—firmly within the canon of German music.¹¹³ If Mozart served German national ideology well, Donizetti's presence in Vienna was detrimental to the hegemonic aspirations of German culture. From a Viennese perspective, however, this critic's emphasis on national opposition is misleading. Indeed, the Habsburg political agenda was not aimed at establishing hierarchies among nationalities, but rather at containing national pressures of any kind. Whether or not Viennese reviewers agreed with official cultural policies, the majority of them recognized that, once in Vienna, Donizetti had become the epitome of a cultural ideal unbound to national partisanship. The different Viennese receptions of Linda di Chamounix and Maria di Rohan bespeak this attitude.

While German cultural nationalism enjoyed robust theoretical roots, the Viennese idea of cultural cosmopolitanism was as flexible as it was precarious. Viennese critics engaged with this precariousness by developing a sense of belonging that ran against Donizetti's international activity. In negotiating with the Habsburg court, Donizetti had stipulated that he would reside in Vienna six months of the year in order to fulfill his professional obligations there, but that for the remaining six months he would be free to travel wherever he received commissions. After writing Maria for the Kärntnertortheater, he moved back to Paris to supervise the premiere of his latest grand opéra, Dom Sébastien, at the Académie royale de musique. While there he also produced a heavily modified version of Maria di Rohan at the Théâtre-Italien. Among the changes Donizetti made to his opera were the recasting of Gondì as a trouser role with two important solo numbers (in the original Viennese version, Gondì was a tenor with no aria) and the revision of several other pieces, in some cases consisting of the addition of a showy cabaletta (as after Maria's prayer in act 3).¹¹⁴ In 1844, one year after the original production, the Kärntnertortheater hosted a revival of Maria di Rohan, which included numerous modifications that Donizetti had introduced for the Paris premiere. In Vienna, this version was widely criticized. The transformation of Gondì into a virtuosic character emphasized the typical generic mixture of French Romantic drama, and the form of Gondì's new solo pieces—particularly the couplet structure of his act 1 ballata, “Per non istare in ozio”—emphasized the character's perceived Frenchness.¹¹⁵ Other new solo pieces, and particularly the cabaletta for Maria in act 3, were judged to be concessions to Italian operatic routine, which Donizetti had supposedly overcome in the original version of the opera. Carl Kunt opened his review of the 1844 revival by praising the earlier version for its “frugal use of cabalettas and its striving for a certain concordance between words and music.”¹¹⁶ He then remarked with disappointment,

The position of these critics suggests that Viennese discourse on operatic cosmopolitanism shares one important feature with nineteenth-century conceptions of cosmopolitanism more broadly: they all reveal the crucial tensions generated by the consolidation of local and national identities.¹¹⁹ By 1844, cosmopolitan tropes were figuring in the Viennese press well beyond columns dedicated to musical or literary affairs. They accompanied discussions of the fast pace of industrialization, trade, railroad building, and the circulation of capital—all manifestations of a rapidly changing world that elicited a range of responses from various parties.¹²⁰ These changes were met with a mixture of interest and anxiety, which was also palpable in the critical discourse on Donizetti's Viennese operas. The emergence of Paris as the hotbed of the most cutting-edge theatrical trends (musical and otherwise) was perceived as both a resource and a threat, one from which a vital and robust local tradition could benefit, but one that could also subvert the aesthetic, social, and political premises of that same tradition. As many foreign works—grands opéras, opéras-comiques, and spoken plays—reached Vienna only in heavily modified adaptations, Viennese operatic cosmopolitanism often inclined toward forms of cultural domestication that traded the inclusion of a variety of cultural experiences for the protection of the ideological status quo. This kind of negotiation also affected the last grand opéra Donizetti wrote while serving at the Viennese court, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal (premiered in Paris on November 13, 1843). The first production of the opera in Vienna, which opened under the composer's baton on February 6, 1845, and which was sung in German, included revisions to the original Paris version that on the one hand added pages that were perceived as Italianate (thus contributing to the cosmopolitan flavor of the score) and on the other toned down the political outcome of the plot.¹²¹

Ryan Minor has argued that one way to make sense of the tensions resulting from overlapping discourses of cosmopolitanism and nationalism is “to look at cosmopolitanism in the musical cultures of nineteenth-century Europe more as a praxis than as an identity,” as a set of social relations and behaviors rather than an individual condition.¹²² The recalibration of Donizetti's image in relation to his deliberate attempts to mold his operas by drawing upon various “national” styles after moving to Paris in 1838 may be read along such lines. His international exposure expanded the range of expressive tools he had at his disposal in Italy, but he did not give them up altogether. As Roger Parker has suggested, “Donizetti was far from a single-minded pioneer in matters of dramatic style; there is certainly little evidence that he deemed one mode of operatic discourse inevitably superior to others.”¹²³ Donizetti's “cosmopolitan” versatility was a means, not an end. And regardless of his own intentions, what his noted adaptability accomplished was an enhancement of the perception of Donizetti as a cosmopolitan composer. As I have argued, this perception is caught up in the variety of political and ideological agendas that observers, whether Viennese or not, projected onto his music.

Ultimately, though, while notions of cosmopolitanism provided a conceptual framework for the Habsburg ideological edifice, neither the Austrian imperial ideal nor Viennese discourses on operatic cosmopolitanism resulted in a neutralization of national categories, encouraging rather their mutual interaction. It mattered little that the performance calendar of the Kärntnertortheater kept the Italian and German seasons formally separated, or that the Italian seasons were generally less open to non-Italian works than the German seasons were to non-German ones. The international mobility of works, composers, and performers made opera a powerful catalyst for Viennese discourse on cosmopolitanism as well as a convenient vehicle for reflection on the interconnections among—and ultimately the management of—forms of difference.¹²⁴ Donizetti's works contributed to the cross-pollination between diverse operatic experiences, testifying to the extent to which cosmopolitan cultural practices bridged perceived national divides in the service of a larger cultural project: the staging of the Austrian Empire's cosmopolitan aspirations and fantasies.