Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi's Operas in the 1840s

Author(s): Peter Stamatov

Source: American Sociological Review , Jun., 2002, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jun., 2002), pp. 345-
366
Published by: American Sociological Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3088961

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 INTERPRETIVE ACTIVISM AND THE
POLITICAL USES OF VERDI'S OPERAS
IN THE 1840s

PETER STAMATOV
University of California, Los Angeles

The concept of interpretive activism as a relational position and a practical accom-

plishment is a useful analytical tool for the study of audiences conceived not as a
conglomerate of individuals but as loose networks in which the ability to construct
and impose political meanings is unequally distributed. An analysis of the political
uses of Verdi's operas in the 1840s demonstrates the power of interpretive activists
to impose on audience co-members a political interpretation of cultural objects.
There is significant variation in the ways in which these operas were used for the
construction of expressive collective statements by contemporary audiences. Opera
performances were interpreted as symbolic representations of different political
idioms, and audiences expressed their political stance by both affiliating with, and
disaffiliating from, these performances. The practices of interpretive activists, not
the patriotic symbolism inherent in the operas, account for this variation in out-
come. Symbolism, along with the formal properties of opera and the normative en-
forcement of behavior, is just one of the different contextually grounded resources
that interpretive activists use for the construction and imposition of politicized inter-
pretations of cultural objects.

THE MOST PROMINENT composer of herently political function of art (Bermbach

Italian opera in the nineteenth century,
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), has been con-
sidered a leading voice of Italian Risorgi-
mento nationalism. This emblematic status
of the composer was initially codified by the
nationalist interpretation of opera history af-
ter the creation of the Italian state (Pauls
1996) and has been disseminated more re-
cently not only by "middlebrow" popular
writing on the subject (Donakowski 1972;
Martin 1988; Osborne 1969, 1987) but also
by musicologists and historians who inter-
pret Verdi's works as exemplary of the in-
Direct all correspondence to Peter Stamatov,
UCLA Department of Sociology, 264 Haines
Hall, Box 951551, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
(stamatov@ucla.edu). This paper was prepared
for a graduate seminar convened by Rick
Biernacki at the University of California, San
Diego. A subsequent draft was presented to the
Sociology of Culture section at the August 2000
annual meeting of the American Sociological As-
sociation, Washington, D.C. Comments by
Mabel Berezin, Rogers Brubaker, Jon Fox,
1997; Bimberg 1976; Engelhardt 1988;
Gossett 1990; Porter 1993; Smart 1997). In
contrast, the recent social history of nine-
teenth-century Italian musical theater has
documented the relative isolation of the art
world of opera from politics (Conati 1983;
Leydi 1988; Parker 1989, 1997; Pauls 1996,
1997; Rosselli 1984), suggesting that "the
alleged close bond between early nineteenth-
century Italian opera and liberal nationalism
is one of those cliches that go marching on
in the face of evidence" (Rosselli 1991:65).
The fact remains, however, that during the
1848 revolutions, the musical theater was
occasionally a place where Italian audiences
articulated political statements through their
Rossitza Guentcheva, Mara Loveman, Manny
Schegloff, Vera Zolberg, and the ASR Editors
and anonymous reviewers are gratefully ac-
knowledged. Special thanks to John Heritage and
Roger Parker for useful bibliographical informa-
tion, as well as to the UCLA Research Library
Staff for their exemplary support. Unless indi-
cated otherwise, all translations are mine.

AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2002, VOL. 67 (JUNE:345-366) 345

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346 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
reaction to operas-even if, typically, these
operas had not been conceived by authors
and producers as political works. This cir-
cumstance makes a more detailed study of
the political response of contemporary audi-
ences particularly informative for a better
understanding of the use of cultural objects
in collective expressive politics. If, as the
revisionist historiography of Italian opera
suggests, neither operas nor their reception
by audiences were by definition infused with
nationalist ideology, the particular cases in
which audiences did articulate a political
statement in the course of a performance
provide insights into the dynamics of politi-
cal interpretation of cultural objects as an
interactional accomplishment rather than as
a spontaneous reaction to explicit or covert
political messages.
As I demonstrate in this article, a view of
the political uses of Verdi's operas in Italy
during the 1 840s as interactional accomplish-
ments suggests that the successful mobiliza-
tion of cultural objects for the purposes of
expressive collective politics is dependent on
the interpretational activism of a minority of
their users. By mobilizing the resources
available in different contexts, interpretive
activists "translate" the cultural object to au-
dience co-members so as to demonstrate be-
yond reasonable doubt the overlap between
the meaning of the cultural object and the
meaning of a particular political idiom that
they endorse or oppose. Interpretive activ-
ism, furthermore, should be understood not
as an essential property of individuals but as
a relational position and an interactional ac-
complishment. Identifying interpretive activ-
ists allows us to see audiences not as a col-
lection of individuals, but as loosely struc-
tured networks in which the power to inter-
pret reality is not distributed equally. In con-
clusion, I argue that this perspective on audi-
ences is a useful analytical tool because it
captures important aspects of the processes
of construction of political meanings that go
unnoticed by alternative approaches.
CULTURAL OBJECTS, POLITICAL
MEANING, AND INTERPRETIVE
ACTIVISM
That the arts and literature have political im-
plications is hardly a controversial state-
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ment. Numerous works in the social sciences
(Bonnell 1997; Hunt 1992) and the humani-
ties (Jameson 1981; Said 1994) argue that
cultural objects convey dominant and oppo-
sitional ideologies. Even subtler political
implications of the arts have been demon-
strated by sociologists of culture who dis-
cuss the uneven distribution of aesthetic
preferences and competencies (Bourdieu
1984; DiMaggio and Useem 1982; Peterson
and Simkus 1992). Despite the recent cul-
tural turn in social movement research
(Johnston and Klandermans 1995; Polletta
1997), however, relatively little attention has
been paid to the issue of how cultural ob-
jects can become instrumental in the con-
struction of explicit political statements and
expressive collective action.
Typically, cultural objects such as popular
songs (Eyerman and Jamison 1998;
Roscigno and Danaher 2001) have been ana-
lyzed mainly as vehicles for the expression
and dissemination of pre-defined ideological
messages. Yet even if cultural analysis is of-
ten impossible without the assumption that
cultural objects possess some degree of fixed
meaning, contributions by the ethnography
of communicative practices (Hanks 1996),
situational semantics (Barwise 1988), and
conversation analysis (Goodwin and Heri-
tage 1990) have shown that actual meanings
are better understood as an emergent prop-
erty of the interaction between users, cul-
tural objects, and contexts rather than sim-
ply as inherent properties of texts and other
communicative products. From this point of
view, the successful use of cultural objects
in the construction of collective political
statements is a practical interactional accom-
plishment that depends on the alignment of
the emergent meaning of the cultural object
with the meaning of a particular political
idiom (Skocpol 1985). In Italy during the
1840s, audiences expressed an affiliative re-
action to an opera performance whenever
they were persuaded that the emergent
meaning of the performance could be
aligned with a political idiom they endorsed,
such as the ideology of Italian nationalism.
When they expressed a disaffiliative reac-
tion, however, the emergent meaning of the
performance and the practice of theater-go-
ing was aligned with a political idiom from
which they wanted to distance themselves,

such as the ideology of legitimate domina-
tion by the Habsburgs.
The metaphor of alignment of meanings
here harks back to the concept of "frame
alignment" used by Snow et al. (1986) to
describe the process through which individu-
als' understandings of the world are made
congruent or even identical with the particu-
lar understanding of the world espoused by a
social movement organization. By present-
ing the issue in different terms, as the align-
ment, not of "frames," but of the meaning of
a cultural object with the meaning of a par-
ticular political idiom, I signal-and avoid-
an important limitation of the "framing per-
spective" in sociology. The description of
communicative practices in terms of the
alignment between the frames of the social
movement organization and the frames of
potential adherents assumes an idealized
communicative situation in which frames, or
political meanings, are unambiguously pre-
defined and the particulars of the communi-
cative practices through which "frame align-
ment" is achieved, as well as the context of
these practices, are of no or of negligible con-
sequence (cf. Steinberg 1999).1 I start, how-
ever, from a more realistic understanding of
human communication as an activity that is
embedded in its social environment. Com-
munication is not only about the world, but
in the world. The interpretation of cultural
objects is not a solitary accomplishment of
individuals. In the typical situations of po-
litical mobilization, in which a significant
number of other individuals are physically
co-present and individual behavior is subtly
oriented toward the behavior of other co-par-
ticipants (Clayman 1993; Heritage and
Greatbatch 1986; McPhail and Wohlstein
1983), individual interpretations can be pow-
erfully influenced by the interpretive efforts
of these co-participants (Srinivas 1998).
One can think, then, of audience members
not as individually arriving at identical in-
1 This inattention to the pragmatics of commu-the transmitters of ideas and opinion. From
nication inherent in the founding statements of
the framing perspective has been amplified by
subsequent research that, with a few notable ex-
ceptions, has focused on describing and catalog-
ing "frames" instead of analyzing the dynamic
processes of creation of collective meanings
(Benford 1997).
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POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 347
terpretations of cultural objects but as differ-
entially endowed with the ability and "sym-
bolic power" (Bourdieu 1991) to impose on
co-participants their own interpretations of
the cultural object. In this view, audiences
form a loose network in which a minority of
individuals occupy central positions and act
as interpretive activists in relation to the rest
of the audience. Interpretive activism is thus
a relational position and not necessarily a
property of the individual that can travel
across contexts and situations. This position
may be institutionalized in a specialized role
(cf. Baker and Faulkner 1991), as it is in the
case of professional reviewers or social
movement activists. Or it might be a matter
of a less predictable interactional accom-
plishment, as in the everyday situations of
persuasion among peers in which the suc-
cessful imposition of one party's interpreta-
tion on the other is not backed by larger in-
stitutional arrangements.
The relational character of this notion of
interpretive activism can be contrasted with
the concept of "interpretive community" as
used masterfully, for example, by Radway
(1991). The description of audiences as in-
terpretive communities implies a structural
equivalence among all audience members
who individually reach identical interpreta-
tions of a cultural object because of their
identical positions in the social structure.
Keeping in mind the centrality of interpre-
tive activists in the creation of socially
shared meanings, one can disaggregate this
global concept of a homogenous interpretive
community of individuals by identifying
those members of the community who are
particularly influential in the construction of
such consensual meanings.
Interpretive activism is also an interac-
tional accomplishment. Interpretive activists
influence attitudes and behavior like "opin-
ion leaders" do in the two-step model of
flow of information (Lazarsfeld, Berelson,
and Gaudet 1968). Unlike opinion leaders,
however, interpretive activists are not just
an interactionist perspective, interpretive ac-
tivists do not simply disseminate already ar-
ticulated messages. They are invested in the
production of meaning by offering to, and
potentially imposing upon, audience co-
members their own understanding of cultural
348 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
objects. And finally, in different situations,
interpretive activism relies on different re-
sources. The persuasive rhetorical power of
the symbolism inherent in discourse and
other cultural objects is an obvious example
of such a resource. As my discussion of the
political uses of Italian opera shows, how-
ever, interpretive activists can take advan-
tage of other resources such as the power to
normatively enforce behavior and those for-
mal properties of the cultural object that fa-
cilitate the construction of a collective po-
litical statement.
POLITICAL USES OF VERDI'S
OPERAS IN THE 1840S
The decades after 1815 are usually described
in Italian historiography as the period of
"Restoration," the direct product of the
Great Powers' efforts to recreate the monar-
chical status quo that existed before
Napoleon's reorganization of political space
earlier in the century (on Europe in the pe-
riod, see Hobsbawm 1962). In this period,
Italian territories were distributed among a
multitude of states under separate political
authority and with different dialects, culture, popularity thus coincided with a particularly
and legislation (Beales 1981; Duggan 1994;
Holt 1971; Woolf 1979). Although recent
historiography questions the standard repre-
sentation of these pre-unification political
regimes as uniformly retrograde and oppres-
sive (Riall 1994), the fact remains that the
status quo was increasingly being questioned
by nobility and urban middle classes. The
idea that the current political and economic
situation should be improved through
changes in political authority and some kind
of unification of the existing Italian states
had found numerous adherents, especially in
the economic crisis of the 1840s. Different
groups envisioned different solutions to this
dual problem of substantive and territorial
reorganization of political arrangements:
from a customs union to a unitary nation
state, and from recognition of the political
power of the Pope over the whole of Italy to
the creation of a republic (Lyttelton 1993).
The complex of these different political and
cultural manifestations of discontent with
the Restoration regime crystallized into a
loose ideology of Risorgimento (Resur-
gence), which drew its impetus from a re-
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newed interest in the prosperity and cultural
excellence documented in different stages of
Italian history. In 1848, the discontent with
the status quo and the desire for political
change erupted in a series of revolutions
(Mack Smith 2000) that, along with revolu-
tions in other parts of Europe (Price 1989;
Sperber 1994), shook the regimes in all Ital-
ian states.
It is in this context that Verdi's meteoric
rise to popularity occurred (see Appendix A
for a list of Verdi's operas). By 1845, six
years after the premiere of his first opera and
merely two years after Nabucco, his first op-
era to make the rounds in theaters across
Italy and abroad (Parker 1989), he was the
second most performed composer in Italy
after Gaetano Donizetti (and ahead of other
famous composers) with seven operas circu-
lating in a total of 127 productions (Conati
1989:19). In 1847, New York Tribune corre-
spondent Margaret Fuller (1991:180) wrote
that "there is little hope of hearing in Italy
other music than Verdi's" and by 1850 a
writer referred casually to Verdi as the "mae-
stro of the day" (L'Italia Musicale [IM],
April 20, 1850, p. 94). Verdi's ascent to
eventful period of Italian history that culmi-
nated in the revolutions of 1848.
Traditionally, this co-occurrence has been
interpreted to imply a strong connection be-
tween Verdi's works and their performance
history, on one hand, and the momentous
political events that characterized that early
stage of his career, on the other: Verdi's op-
eras, directly or through metaphor, expressed
the nationalist and revolutionary "spirit" of
the decade, and this political symbolism was
easily recognizable by contemporary Italian
audiences (Gossett 1990; Miller 1987;
Monterosso 1948; Parakilas 1992; Rubsamen
1961). The implication of this view is that in
order to articulate a political statement, audi-
ences simply had to display their affiliation
(through applause, encore requests, and other
expressive behavior) with the ideological
statements dramatized on the stage. More
generally, this standard view suggests that an
important way for Italian music theater to
serve as a politicized art institution was to
provide dramatic representations of political
ideology with which audience members
could expressively affiliate.
 POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 349

In this section, I review the historical evi- stances of political uses of opera perfor-
dence for nineteenth-century Italian opera as mances, and (3) the cases where no
a supplier of dramatized ideology and of its affiliative political reaction occurred in the
audience as the avid consumer of direct or course of performances.
allegorical operatic representations of ideol-
ogy. Although writing on Verdi, a major
ERNANI AND PIus IX
composer of the Western canon, has been for
years a thriving industry (fueled most re- On June 16, 1846 a new Pope, Pius IX, was
cently by the centenary of his death in 2001), elected in Rome. After the traditionalist and
it is only recently that authors have started reactionary policies of his predecessor, the
to systematically consider the evidence of new head of the Catholic Church-who was
political responses by contemporary audi- ex officio the ruler of the Pontifical States-
ences. This recent research has consistently granted a limited amnesty to political pris-
questioned and dismissed the myths of the oners and seemed to many to be the propo-
nationalist impact of these works (Parker nent of liberal reforms (Caravale and
1997; Sawall 2000). Drawing on this line of Caracciolo 1978:641-49; Nasto 1994:19-60;
inquiry, I introduce evidence that has not Woolf 1979:352-54). A millenarian popular
been considered so far and reach conclusions cult around Pius IX developed in the Papal
that are perhaps more sympathetic to the ar- states and spread into other Italian territo-
gument of the patriotic aspects of opera ex- ries. Numerous public ceremonies and fes-
perience of the period. Nevertheless, I con- tivities celebrated the new Pope; numerous
cur with the authors of the new revisionist poets and musicians contributed to this
tradition that the patriotic response cannot growing cult by producing art works to be
be explained adequately by simply pointing performed on these public occasions.2 The
out the presence of transparent political foundation of this popular cult of the new
symbolism in Verdi's operas. Pope was the folk Catholicism of the day.
I focus on the occasions in which opera Yet, because the Pope combined the func-
audiences articulated a political statement tions of political ruler of a major Italian state
through behavioral responses to perfor- and religious leader for the traditionally
mances. I limit my research to the decade of Catholic Italians, and because the idea of a
the 1 840s and to the territories of the possible unification of all Italian states un-
Habsburg province of Lombardy-Veneto der the authority of the Papal throne had
and of the Papal States. The sources I use been popularized in the writings of the so
are accounts of performances in contempo- called neo-Guelphs (Clark 1998:44-45;
rary musical periodicals, police reports, as Lyttelton 1993:84-87), the enthusiasm for
well as private correspondence, diaries, and Pius IX was increasingly being used by lib-
recollections. The official censorship of eral proponents of national unification to
both periodicals and theater performances elicit popular support for their cause (Nasto
in the period (Di Stefano 1964) makes the 1994:41-42).
task of identifying relevant instances of pa- It is in this context that the first instances
triotic reaction to performances more diffi- of political uses of Verdi's operas occurred.
cult than in the more transparent public The enthusiasm for the new, presumably lib-
sphere of other contexts and times. Yet po- eral, Pope coincided with a vogue for Verdi's
litical censorship was not overwhelmingly 1844 opera Ernani (Conati 1987). A scene
efficient, and journalists were able to indi- of this opera was appropriated by audiences
cate the political motivation of audience be- as a celebration of Pius IX. The third act fi-
havior by suggesting, for example, that par-
2 The musical periodicals of the time (e.g.,
ticular pieces of an opera were applauded
Gazetta musicale di Milano [GMM] and IM) fre-
for "reasons that have nothing to do with
quently carried accounts of performances of such
the music" (IM, January 5, 1848, p. 213).
works as well as commercial advertisements for
For the sake of clarity, I present the evi- their published scores. Verdi himself, according
dence in three subsections. I describe (1) to a letter of his disciple Muzio (in Garibaldi
the expressions of symbolic support for the 1931:275), was asked to write a hymn to Pius IX
newly elected Pope Pius IX, (2) other in- but did not oblige.

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350 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Table 1. Documented Instances of Uses of Verdi's Works in Symbolic Support of Pope Pius IX

Date Location Opera, Piece

July 1846 Macerata, Papal States Ernani, Act 3 finale

August 1846 Bologna, Papal States Ernani, Act 3 finale

October 1846 Persiceto, Papal States Ernani, Act 3 finale (inserted in a performance
of Donizetti's Roberto Devereux)

September 1847 Florence, Tuscany Ernani, Act 3 finale (in concert)

October 1847 Rome, Papal States Ernani, Act 3 finale

December 1847 Treviso, Lombardy-Veneto I Lombardi, "O Signore, dal tetto natilo"

December 1847 Cremona, Lombardy-Veneto I Lombardi, "O Signore, dal tetto natio"

March 1848 Trieste, Lombardy-Veneto Ernani, Act 3 finale

April 1848 Bologna, Papal States Ernani, Act 3 finale (inserted in performance of
Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda)

June 1848 Reggio Emilia, Papal States Ernani, Act 3 finale (with first three acts of
Macbeth)

Sources: Fabbri and Verti (1987:279-81, 327); Garibaldi (1931:259); GMM (September 15, 1847, p. 294);
IM(January 5, 1848, p. 213); Magliani (1993:1187); Pantazzi (1980:122).

nale of Ernani represents a scene in which a
newly elected Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire, the Don Carlo of the opera, grants
pardon to all those who had conspired
against him. In response, soloists and choirs
burst into praise of the new emperor (for this
and other parts of Verdi's operas discussed
in this article, see the excerpted texts in Ap-
pendix B). In many performances, the name
of the Pope ("Pio Nono") was substituted for
the original "Charlemagne" in the phrase "a
Carlomagno gloria ed onor" ("glory and
honor to Charlemagne"). Several accounts
(summarized in Table 1) document the use
of this modification of the text both in inte-
gral performances of the opera and in per-
formances of the Act 3 finale interpolated in
other operas or in concerts and indicate a
relatively stable tradition of reinterpreting
this segment of the opera as a hymn to Pius
Ix.
A police report documents a similar use
of a piece from another opera by Verdi in
Treviso, Veneto, in December 1847. The
piece in question is the chorus of crusaders
and pilgrims "O Signore, dal tetto natlo"
from I Lombardi, which contains the lines
"we have hastened at the bidding of a holy
man" ("d'un pio"). This time the Italian ad-
jective for "holy" was identical with the
name of the new Pope, and this was a pre-
text for "clamorous demonstrations" (Carte
segrete e atti ufficiali della polizia
austriaca in Italia dal 4 giugno 1814 al 22
marzo 1848 [CS], vol. 3, p. 128) on the part
of the audience. Most probably, the same
mechanism was at work at the last perfor-
mance for 1847 in Cremona, Lombardy
where, according to a newspaper report,
there was an encore of the chorus "for rea-
sons not related to the music" (IM, January
5, 1848, p. 213).
OTHER INSTANCES OF POLITICAL USE
In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the fate of the
protagonist is sealed when the witches'
prophecy, that he will lose his power if he
sees the Birnam Wood moving, is fulfilled as
the soldiers of his enemies march forward
camouflaged with tree branches. In Verdi's
1847 Macbeth, this element of Shakespeare's
play is incorporated into a scene in which,
after the English troops arrive, the two ten-
ors representing Macduff and Malcolm join
the chorus of "Scottish exiles" in the stirring
allegro "La patria tradita." In the tense pre-
revolutionary atmosphere of Venice
(Ginsborg 1979; Meriggi 1987:325-29), the
audience repeatedly demanded the encore of
this piece during the run of Macbeth in De-
cember 1847 (GMM, December 29, 1847, p.

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414; IM, January 12, 1848, p. 222). The po-
lice files documented this as a disturbance of
the public order (CS, vol 3, p. 129).
As time passed, the relations between res-
tive liberal audience members and the au-
thorities deteriorated. In February of the next
year, when the police refused to allow the
encore of a dance performed by the famous
dancer Fanny Cerrito, the liberals pledged to
stay away from the main theater of the city,
La Fenice, where the opera was playing
(Antolini 1991:320-21). In March, the po-
lice banned the performance of Act 4 of
Macbeth, which contains "La patria tradita"
(Carnesecchi 1994:40). After the outbreak of
the 1848 revolution, in November and De-
cember of that year the piece was on the pro-
gram of two amateur concerts "for the ben-
efit of the patria," the express purpose of
which was to raise funds for the defense of
Venice against Habsburg troops (Carnesec-
chi 1994:43-47). This suggests that through-
out 1848 the local tradition of patriotic re-
sponse to "La patria tradita" was alive in the
city. Outside of Venice, the only instance of
political response to the piece seems to have
occurred in Verona, Veneto (GMM, January
5, 1848, p. 6).
During the run of Verdi's Attila in Rome
that season, the aria sung by Roman general
Ezio was heavily applauded. Fuller (1991:
180) reproduced the words that drew the
most applause and noted that "the music is
in itself very pleasing, but that was not the
reason" for the enthusiastic response. The
performances of Attila in Naples during the
same season were an occasion for the cel-
ebration of the ruler, Ferdinand II, who re-
cently had been forced to adopt a liberal
constitution. Applause greeted any phrase
"that smacked of freedom" (review quoted
in Sawall 2000:149) during these perfor-
mances.
As the revolutions swept through Europe,
the Pope was forced to flee Rome in Novem-
ber 1848, and in February of 1849 a repub-
lic was proclaimed there (Caravale and
Caracciolo 1978:657-66). It is in the days of
this short-lived republic that Verdi premiered
the only opera that he wrote explicitly as an
expression of Italian national sentiment: La
battaglia di Legnano. The performances
were invariably occasions for patriotic dem-
onstrations.
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POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 351
As the revolutionary tide was eventually
contained by imperial armies, however,
French troops defeated the Republican army
and occupied the Papal states in July 1849.
A further instance of political use of a Verdi
opera in Rome occurred under French occu-
pation. The youths attending an open air
concert in Rome "erupted in clamorous ap-
plause and encore calls" after the words
"that will blow death to the foreigner" at the
end of an aria from Nabucco (Roncalli
[1848-1851] 1997:280)-a clear sign of de-
fiance to the French soldiers attending the
concert.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
The examples I have listed so far are simi-
lar to other instances of patriotically colored
applause to, and encores of, parts of operas
by other composers.3 At first sight, they
might seem to suggest that contemporary
audiences were quick to recognize the po-
litical allegories encoded in Verdi's works
and reacted accordingly. Yet in many docu-
mented cases, audiences did not offer a po-
litically motivated reaction to these puta-
tively patriotic pieces of Verdi's operas. Un-
like in the performances in Treviso and
Cremona, the chorus from I Lombardi was
met with silence in the Florence perfor-
mances that season (IM, January 5, 1848, p.
213). In Bologna the opera was taken off the
bill and national hymns were performed in-
stead (Parker 1997:95). Even though Roman
audiences applauded Ezio's aria from Attila,
a reviewer of the Ferrara production of the
opera in May 1848 complained that the sub-
ject matter of an opera that depicts "such an
humiliating period of Italian history" was at
odds with the current atmosphere of revolu-
tionary national enthusiasm (quoted in
Parker 1997:96). When Attila was playing in
Piedmont's capital of Torino in the 1848-
3 These include the introduction of Bellini's
Norma in Cremona (IM, February 9, 1848, p.
255), a chorus from Mercadante's Donna Caritea
in Bologna in April 1848, and parts of his II
Giuramento in Trieste in March 1848 (Parker
1997:91). In Trieste later in the year, the oath
scene of La disfida di Barletta by maestro Lickl,
a composer completely forgotten today, was
greeted with the same public display of enthusi-
asm (IM, May 1, 1848, p. 280).
352 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
1849 season, one reviewer lauded the opera
as a good instrument for the "political edu-
cation of the people." Well-known librettist
Felice Romani, however, wrote that the the-
ater administration had made a mistake by
choosing to stage such "Teutonic" music
(Viale Ferrero 1990:244-45).
In another Piedmontese city, Genoa, "La
patria tradita," the piece applauded by Vene-
tian audiences, was replaced in the produc-
tion of Macbeth with the tenor scene from
another of Verdi's operas, Alzira, which, ac-
cording to a newspaper report, electrified the
audience with "lyrics changed to allude to
the present circumstances" (quoted in Parker
1997:94-95). During the run of Macbeth in
Reggio Emilia in the Papal States, at least
once the act containing "La patria tradita"
was omitted and the third act finale of
Ernani advertised as "Grand Hymn of Am-
nesty in Honor of Pius IX with music by
Maestro Giuseppe Verdi" was performed in-
stead (Fabbri and Verti 1987:281, 327). This
bill was hardly revolutionary as the perfor-
mance took place in June 1848, almost two
months after the Pope had made clear that
he was not willing to engage in a war with
the Catholic Habsburgs and lead the move-
ment for unification of the Italian states
(Holt 1971:151-52).
Finally, the propaganda work, La battaglia
di Legnano, did not fare well after its trium-
phal Roman premiere. An 1850 production
in Genoa was a failure (IM, June 15, 1850,
p. 157). Nor did a concert performance of
the overture to the opera please the audience
in post-revolutionary Milan of 1850 (GMM,
April 21, 1850, p. 62). But perhaps the most
curious example of lack of patriotic engage-
ment comes from a letter of Verdi's amanu-
ensis Muzio (quoted in Phillips-Matz 1993:
237-38). In January 1848, the audience in
the Lombard city of Mantua refused to let
the singers sing the same words that else-
where were appropriated as a praise of Pope
Pius IX-"a Carlomagno gloria ed onor"-
because Charlemagne, to whom the words in
the opera are directed, was the genealogical
predecessor of the current foreign ruler of
Lombardy-Veneto, the Habsburg Emperor.
The audience responded to the authorities'
refusal to change the compromised words by
boycotting the next opera on the bill: Verdi's
Macbeth!
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VARIETIES OF POLITICAL USES
OF VERDI'S OPERAS
This enumeration of instances of political
responses to Verdi's operas in the 1840s is
not exhaustive. The reconstruction of all
such instances would involve the search for
documentary traces in an almost endless va-
riety of scattered sources. Even this admit-
tedly incomplete list, however, suggests a
great deal of variation in how contemporary
audiences engaged or failed to engage po-
litically with opera performances. What is
immediately striking is that only a minus-
cule portion of those parts of Verdi's operas
that are routinely described as expressions
of Italian patriotism were employed in the
course of these political demonstrations. Be-
yond this, two patterns emerge. First, the ex-
pressive behavior of audiences in all docu-
mented cases was not always a demonstra-
tion of Italian nationalism but was oriented
toward at least two different political idi-
oms. And second, a distinction can be drawn
between cases in which audiences expressed
affiliation with the performed opera and
cases in which, on the contrary, they disaf-
filiated from the performance.
POLITICAL IDIOMS SUPPORTED
BY AUDIENCES
The existing literature on Verdi's Risorgi-
mento reception suggests that patriotic, pro-
Italian symbolism was obvious for contem-
porary audiences: Verdi's operas represented
"thinly veiled patriotic references mixed
with religious sentiments" through which
the composer communicated to the Italian
people "the drive previously shared by a
small minority" of Italian nationalists
(Donakowski 1972:243-44; also see Miller
1987:610). In this view, patriotic meaning
emerged because the symbolism of the spec-
tacle was easily processed to express a na-
tional liberationist worldview that distin-
guished between "us," the people, and
"them," the foreign oppressors.
The audience reactions to pieces from
Macbeth, Attila, and Nabucco, as well as to
the propaganda opera La battaglia di
Legnano, suggest that such processing of
patriotic meaning did indeed occur. In these
cases, the political reinterpretation of the

scene referred to a diffuse "us versus them"
adversarial frame (Gamson 1992) of under-
standing the current political situation. A
rather different understanding of political
reality was indexed by the political reinter-
pretation of the Act 3 finale of Ernani and
the chorus "O Signore, dal tetto natilo" from
I Lombardi. Here the political reinterpreta-
tion of the scenes referred not to a diffuse
"us versus them" cognitive frame, but to the
ideology of the new Pope as liberator of
Italy.
There were also significant differences in
the incidence and geographical dispersal of
these two modes of political reinterpreta-
tion of the performance event. Whereas the
adversarial uses of pieces of Verdi's operas
were scattered and usually occurred in no
more than one city, the use of his music in
symbolic support of Pope Pius IX, even af-
ter the latter had demonstrated his unwill-
ingness to support the cause of national uni-
fication, was the only instance in which an
opera piece was consistently used for politi-
cal manifestations across much of Italy.
This is not surprising if one considers two
factors. First, Ernani was undoubtedly the
most popular of Verdi's operas at the time
(Conati 1987). And second, the new Pope
was perhaps the single most popular politi-
cal figure of the decade that appealed to di-
verse constituencies throughout Italy.4 In
sum, although the scattered adversarial uses
of opera performances show that there may
be a grain of truth in the standard view that
Verdi's operas were expressive of Italian
patriotism, the opera piece that contempo-
rary audiences used most consistently and
most effectively for the articulation of a po-
litical statement contained no encoded ref-
erences to the ideologies of Italian national
liberation.
4 As a contemporary wrote, "[I]n Pius IX con-
stitutionalists saw a liberal prince, republicans a
president, unificationists the head of a unified
state, federalists the head of the Italian federa-
tion, neo-Catholics the champion of the Papacy,
Protestants and rationalists the unself-conscious
demolisher of the Middle Ages, and all joined in
the sincere acclamation of the man who had in-
augurated his reign with an amnesty; the people
saluted the ruler who promised justice"
(Montanelli [1851] 1945:15-16).
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POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 353
AFFILIATION AND DISAFFILIATION
Audiences can express their positive reac-
tion to a cultural object by engaging in
affiliative behaviors, like applause
(Atkinson 1984a; Heritage and Greatbatch
1986), and their negative reaction by dis-
playing disaffiliative behaviors, like booing
(Clayman 1993). In the 1840s, opera perfor-
mances provided audiences with more than
the opportunity to express their political
commitments by reacting affiliatively-ex-
pressive disaffiliation was another symboli-
cally effective reaction (Sawall 2000:164).
In instances of disaffiliative reaction, audi-
ences expressed disapproval for the perfor-
mance or flatly refused to attend. Such was
the liberals' reaction in 1848 in Mantua and
Venice when they boycotted the perfor-
mances of Macbeth and Ernani. In Milan at
the same time, the correspondent of the Lon-
don Times found La Scala, a theater consid-
ered to be under the control of the Habsburg
imperial authorities, "reduced to nearly
empty benches." The only people present
were "spies of the police, or the clerks in the
public office who were compelled to attend"
(Honan 1852:59-60).
Disaffiliative expressive behavior during
the 1848 revolutions extended not only to
operas but to other entertainment genres and
practices as well. In February 1848, the per-
formances of famous dancer Fanny Elssler,
who previously had been received with en-
thusiasm in Milan, became the occasion for
a display of public disaffiliation. Because
Elssler was Austrian, young liberals showed
their contempt for Habsburg authorities by
booing her off the stage while more moder-
ate theatergoers, who respected the dancer
for her piety and charity, simply stayed away
from the theater (Barbiera 1925:123-26).
One of the important events leading to the
revolution in Milan was the "tobacco riots,"
which grew out of the imperial authorities'
determination to crush the city inhabitants'
sometimes violent boycott of cigars, lottery
tickets, and other luxury items, the proceeds
of which were seen as important sources of
revenue for the Habsburg administration
(Hearder 1983:201; Holt 1971:134; Honan
1852:57-58). The symbolic avoidance of ci-
gar smoking and the violent confrontations
with smokers spread from Milan to other cit-
354 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
ies of Lombardy-Veneto (Hubner 1891:48-
52; Trevelyan 1923:61-62). In this context,
even a simple behavior such as smoking in
public was enough to classify a man (typi-
cally) as pro-Austrian: "[E]very person seen
smoking in the street was considered an en-
emy by the populace" (Honan 1852:58).
Other affiliative practices, in contrast, could
be used for self-identification as Italian. The
news of the revolution against the Bourbon
king of Sicily was greeted with conspicuous
consumption of "Italian" pasta (Honan
1852:58).
The instances in which audiences reacted
disaffiliatively to opera performances are
similar to these cases of strictly enforced se-
lective consumption. Like cigars, lottery
tickets and Austrian dancers, opera perfor-
mances, including performances of Verdi's
operas, were useful in the articulation of a
collective political stance because they
could be coded as "anti-revolutionary" and
perceived as an object to avoid. Disaffilative
collective refusal to attend an opera perfor-
mance could be as clear a political statement
as the affiliative response to a potentially
patriotic piece of symbolism in an opera per-
formance. The politically expressive value
of such behavior arose from the contrast of
the empty seats and boxes with the relatively
well-attended theater that was the rule in an
epoch when opera-going was an integral part
of aristocratic and upper-middle-class expe-
rience night after night (Rosselli 1996).
THE CENTRALITY OF
INTERPRETIVE ACTIVISTS
The evidence presented so far suggests that
there was not just one type of political reac-
tion to Verdi's operas, but that these operas
could be used for the construction of a col-
lective political statement in a variety of
ideologically and expressively distinct ways.
How does one account for this variance?
What factors were ultimately responsible for
the particular ways in which these opera per-
formances were used in each of the docu-
mented cases? Obviously, the notion that
Italian opera of the period carried powerful
political symbolism does not explain this
variation in response if, in extreme cases, a
putatively patriotic opera could be coded,
along with cigars and lottery tickets, as
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"Austrian." The source of this variation is
found instead in the practices of interpretive
activists who imposed on audience co-mem-
bers their own political interpretations of the
performance event.
The surviving accounts of audience be-
havior in the instances of political uses of
operatic performances around the 1848 revo-
lutions indicate that patriotic affiliative re-
sponse was not a spontaneous public reac-
tion but was orchestrated by an active mi-
nority in the audience. According to a sec-
ondhand account of the first instance of use
of the Ernani Act 3 finale as a hymn to Pius
IX, it was the viewers in the orchestra seats,
the space allotted to middle classes in the
theater, that "started shouting 'Glory and
honor to Pius IX' until all singers and all
present started singing [these words]"
(Magliani 1993:1187). The police report
(CS, vol. 3, p. 129) on attempts to request an
encore of "La patria tradita" in Macbeth in
Venice lists by name the persons who tried
to solicit support for their demand from
other audience members. In both cases, the
political response was organized by a core
of interpretive activists who provided the
rest of the audience with a patriotically col-
ored interpretation of what they were seeing
and hearing.
The importance of this minority of inter-
pretive activists within the theater is made
clear by comparing their framing activity to
the framing activity performed by other in-
terpretive experts such as reviewers
(Baumann 2001; Levy 1988; Shrum 1991).
In both cases, the task of interpretation and
evaluation is performed by interpretive ac-
tivists who make an explicit or implicit
claim to have a more adequate understand-
ing of the object of their interpretation than
any other actual or potential audience mem-
ber. Yet the reviewers' influence reaches tar-
get audiences indirectly-through different
mass media and with a substantial time lag.
The activity of interpretive activists in the
context of a performance is much more di-
rect, as it imposes upon audience co-partici-
pants the obligation to immediately affiliate
or disaffiliate-this time not with the perfor-
mance itself, but with the activists' interpre-
tation of the performance.
Furthermore, in politically charged situa-
tions, interpretive activism in the theater

can become a process of in-group policing
(Laitin 1995). Inappropriate behavior by
audience co-members is implicitly or ex-
plicitly stigmatized by interpretive activists.
The boycott of imperially taxed cigars in
Milan and Venice suddenly transformed
smoking in public into a symbolic act of
self-identification for or against a particular
cause. In the same unsettled times, follow-
ing the lead of interpretive activists to af-
filiate or disaffiliate with a particular inter-
pretation of an opera performance could be
a less costly social choice than the risk of
being stigmatized by the people who attend
opera performances with you night after
night. If a family dared to go to the opera in
Milan in 1848, "they were hissed on com-
ing out, and next day formal caution not to
repeat the offence was given" (Honan 1852:
60). Those who did not comply with the lib-
eral boycott of the opera theater in Venice
were exposed to "insults and threats"
(Guiccioli 1934:158). The menacing rheto-
ric of a review of the production in Rome of
La battaglia di Legnano provides a sense of
the subtle operation of the normative en-
forcement of affiliative behavior. After
making the incorrect prediction that be-
cause of its patriotic perfection the opera
would make the rounds across Italy, the au-
thor concludes: "If there is still a cold and
selfish soul that does not go ablaze with pa-
triotic love when hearing [the music of the
opera], we'll say that that soul was cursed
at birth" (quoted in Monaldi 1928:179-80).
Interpretive activists, however, may fail to
gain the support of others in the audience.
This is illustrated by accounts of one perfor-
mance during the same run of La battaglia
di Legnano in Rome (Lancellotti 1862:77;
Roncalli [1848-1851] 1997:83-84). That
night the audience was divided between
those who wanted an encore of a symboli-
cally charged mass scene of the opera and
those who opposed it. After the burst of
cheering had subsided with defeat of the en-
core party, a drunken soldier from the boxes
demanded an encore nevertheless. As those
in the orchestra seats shouted back at him,
he started throwing weapons and chairs onto
the stage. The audience rushed toward the
exits, ladies in the boxes fainted, and after
the drunk was finally arrested the theater
was half empty.
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POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 355
ITALIAN OPERA AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF POLITICAL
AFFILIATION
So far, I have discussed two types of re-
sources that interpretive activists could use
to impose their political interpretation of the
opera performance and elicit appropriate be-
havioral response from their audience co-
members: the symbolism of the perfor-
mance, and the normative sanctions of in-
group policing. A third resource, instrumen-
tal for the construction of an affiliative reac-
tion to a political idiom, was the formal
properties of Italian opera in the period. The
art form as it had crystallized at that time
provided a complex institutional arrange-
ment designed to produce a strong affiliative
response. This strong affiliative reaction, in
turn, could be manipulated by interpretive
activists into an affiliative reaction to a po-
litical platform. In particular, two formal
features of Italian opera of the period offered
space for the production of strong affiliative
reaction: its modular structure, and the satu-
ration of the acoustic environment with pow-
erful sonorities.
MODULARITY OF OPERA
Until Richard Wagner's sweeping reform of
musical theater, an opera was organized
largely as a set of self-sufficient pieces
(Kimbell 1991:430-36). Its standardized
structure consisted of temporarily delineated
modules that were held together by the com-
mon thread of plot and characters. This con-
ventional modularity of opera fulfilled sev-
eral functions. On the production side, it not
only made composition a less time-consum-
ing process in a market with incredibly high
turnover of new works, but it also gave sing-
ers the option to substitute a piece from a
different opera for a piece that was not flat-
tering for their particular vocal abilities. Two
other functions of opera's modularity had di-
rect implications for the production of
affiliative response in the theater.
First, a set piece was formally organized
around conveying one particular emotional
state of the characters on stage. An opera
thus consisted of a series of tableaux in
which dramatic development was suspended
while singers on stage were engaged in ex-
356 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
pressing their emotional state through sing-
ing. The temporal flow of music gave mean-
ing and interest to such static tableaux that,
stripped from their music, would fail to cap-
ture the audience's attention for their entire
duration (Dahlhaus 1989:126-27; Robinson
1985: 10). Dramatic action developed in
recitatives or in orchestra-dominated pas-
sages that provided continuity between the
formally complete musical numbers.
A second function of this modular design
was to give clear indications of where
affiliative response is appropriate. Each set
piece had a clear ending that was typically
signaled by devices like the cadenza (which
gave soloists an opportunity to display vocal
virtuosity) or bursts of orchestral tutti. Such
formulas were indispensable for capturing
the attention in an environment that better
resembled a sports event of our days than the
sacral, hushed atmosphere of today's concert
and opera performances (Kimbell, 1991;
Rosselli 1991:60-63). Thus, the end of a mu-
sical number was an unambiguous "comple-
tion point," analogous to the completion
points that punctuate political oratory and
open up space for applause (Atkinson 1984b;
Heritage and Greatbatch 1986).5
Note that all the examples of affiliative
political response discussed here were typi-
cally organized around one among the sev-
eral set pieces that formed the entirety of an
opera. This process of bringing into focus
one temporal segment of the opera spectacle
was facilitated by the modular structure of
the genre. The combination of arousing emo-
tionality condensed in a tableau and a clear
invitation to applaud at the end of this tab-
leau offered excellent material out of which
interpretive activists could construct a politi-
cal statement. First, the heightened drama of
the set piece aroused the emotional level of
the audience. And then, upon completion of
the number, the ensuing affiliative response
could be redirected to express a political at-
titude that could be only conditionally re-
lated to the substantive meaning of the pre-
ceding theatrical experience.
5 A writer for the Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung was already using Atkinson's (1984b)
conceptual language in 1848 when he wrote that
orchestral tuttis in Italian operas were "a mere
invitation to applause" (quoted in Kimbell 1991:
433).
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THE GROWTH OF SOUND
Music as part of the human environment is
an excellent resource for the experiential or-
ganization of different emotional states (Cro-
zier 1997; DeNora 2000). Today, as DeNora
(2000) shows, this ability of music to create
the "scene" for different types of emotional
and bodily experiences is exploited by "prac-
tical aestheticians" like aerobics trainers,
karaoke hosts, and those in charge of the
"shopping" music played in retail stores.
From this point of view, classical composers,
whose fortunes from the late eighteenth cen-
tury on depended increasingly on the success
of their music in public performances, can be
seen as expert practitioners of the craft of
manipulation of acoustic materials for the
production of affiliative response in an audi-
ence. In a good opera performance, the audi-
ence responds to this expert arrangement of
the acoustic environment not only cogni-
tively, by processing and interpreting visu-
ally and aurally the performance on stage, but
also by reacting to this performance emotion-
ally and even physiologically (Hutcheon and
Hutcheon 2000:153-81).
One of the devices that nineteenth-century
composers could use to capture the audience
was the amplification of the dynamic range
of the acoustic resources they operated with:
soloists, choirs, and orchestra. Dauth (1981),
in her discussion of coverage of Italian op-
era performances by Viennese periodicals in
the 1840s and 1850s, found that critics rou-
tinely complained about loud effects. An En-
glish contemporary was particularly vitri-
olic. In contemporary operas, he wrote, "we
have a succession of meager and monoto-
nous choruses, in which the shouts and
screams of the singers are drowned by the
deafening and incessant accumulation of all
the noises that can be produced from the or-
chestra" (Hogarth [1851] 1972:341-42).
Such disparaging comments by critics are
suggestive of the typical acoustic environ-
ment created by composers, who in their
search for novelty and impressive effects,
employed an ever-increasing dynamic range.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century,
an emphasis on choral writing, the success-
ful campaign to eliminate castration, and the
introduction of sturdier brass instruments
(Spitzer and Zaslaw 1992) led toward a

"darkening of the colours and a thickening
of the texture of Italian music compared with
the aria-based, soprano dominated opera of
the eighteenth century" (Kimbell 1991:442;
also see Rosselli 1991:69). Conati (1971)
observed that, as a result, an Italian species
of "grand opera" emerged from the 1830s on.
The acoustic world of these operas was char-
acterized by the massive accumulation of
vocal and instrumental forces for the creation
of an overwhelming "thick" sound that liter-
ally invaded the senses. One writer describes
the effect of the march from Rossini's L'asse-
dio di Corinto, which had a successful run in
concerts in Milan in 1850, with the follow-
ing words: "[T]he audience, electrified by the
fire of this music and by the miraculous ac-
cord of the imposing mass that performed it,
applauded clamorously and demanded unani-
mously an encore after the performance of
which the applause resumed" (IM, May 18,
1850, p. 124). Lighter and more transparent
music, on the other hand, could be experi-
enced as disappointing. This is how another
critic explained the indifference of the audi-
ence toward the revival of Rossini's La gazza
ladra, a so-called "semi-serious" opera:
"[W]ith their ears used to the energetic har-
monies of II Giuramento and II Bravo [both
by Mercadante] and their minds filled with
the power of the melodies of Nabucco and I
Lombardi, the young do not let themselves
be seduced by coloratura [and] simple forms"
(GMM, January 26, 1848, p. 30).
Verdi was certainly influenced by the
grand operatic form developed by his prede-
cessors Mercadante and Rossini and in par-
ticular by the latter's biblical drama Mose'
(Petrobelli 1994). With Nabucco, Verdi es-
tablished himself in this genre of grandiose
opera, a formula he consciously repeated in
his subsequent works (Parker 1997). Here
the search for striking effects of all kinds
was an integral part of his activity as a com-
poser, as is testified to by the meticulous
preparation of such effects (including mak-
ing sure that the choir was big enough) docu-
mented in his correspondence around the
premiere of Macbeth (Chegai 1996; Conati
1981). Whatever the particular mechanisms
of influence, the fact is that throughout the
1840s Verdi was operating with an amplified
acoustic apparatus that earned him the nick-
name "papa dei cori" (papa of choirs) in
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POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 357
Milan (Muzio, in Garibaldi 1931:162) and
made him vulnerable to disparaging critical
remarks on the lack of grace in his brass-
dominated orchestration.
The effect achieved by the enlarged sound
of the Italian opera of the time is based on a
simple psychological process: Complex loud
music is cognitively demanding and "usurps"
human cognitive resources from the perfor-
mance of tasks other than just listening
(North and Hargreaves 1997:98-99). The use
of expanded acoustic resources was a useful
device in the service of composers' attempts
to command the audience's attention. It is
hardly a coincidence that all the examples of
patriotic manifestations in Italian opera the-
aters around 1848 occurred in connection
with such large-scale musical tableaux char-
acterized by a large, complex, and "thick"
sound. I suggest that the emotional (and even
physiological) impact of such massive sound
on audiences could provide interpretive ac-
tivists with a resource for the construction of
a political statement.
Experimental (Konecni 1982) and ethno-
graphic (DeNora 1997, 1999,2000) work has
shown that music and the acoustic environ-
ment amplifies and directs human emotional
and behavioral response by enhancing moods
and providing the appropriate "scene" for
particular activities. The performances of
Verdi's operas in the 1840s provided a fertile
ground for interpretive activists to initiate a
collective political statement because the
logic of the art form as it existed at that time
predisposed the composer to pre-organize the
acoustic environment in a manner conducive
for the production of such statements. The
plausible reinterpretation of the visual and
auditory content of the performance event to
refer to contemporary political idioms,
events, and circumstances, was facilitated
not only by the cognitive susceptibility of
contemporary theatergoers to recognize and
affirm the validity of such interpretations, but
also by their emotional susceptibility to ex-
perientially engage with the acoustic envi-
ronment of these operas.6 The emotional ef-
6 As experimental research suggests (North
and Hargreaves 1996), such effects of the acous-
tic environment depend on whether music is in
the foreground or background relative to the topi-
cal human activity of the moment. When corn-
358 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
fect of large sound could be used as experi-
ential validation of the appropriateness of
such reinterpretation because the emotional
arousal and accompanying affiliative behav-
ior produced by the music could literally
push viewers into the current of collective
expression without conscious calculation.
CONCLUSION
My analysis started from the observation
that an interactionist view of the production
of political meaning affords a more adequate
understanding of the construction of collec-
tive expressive action. Meaning is best un-
derstood not as an inherent property of cul-
tural objects, but as emerging in the process
of the use of these cultural objects by con-
textually situated consumers. Actual emer-
gent meanings are not only the product of
the properties of the cultural object and of
the cognitive dispositions of its users, but
also of the co-dependence of these users on
other members of the audience they belong
to. Audiences can be viewed as loose net-
works in which interpretive work is un-
equally distributed.
I have demonstrated the utility of this view
by showing that the best way to account for
the various ways in which performances of
Verdi's operas were used as a pretext for the
plex music forms the background to an activity,
it is usually experienced as distracting or disturb-
ing. When, however, listening to music is fore-
grounded as primary activity-as it is today in
concert halls-the acoustic material is a power-
ful magnet for attention. Opera audiences in the
nineteenth century were unlikely to engage in
today's concerted effort of following the per-
formed music (Kimbell 1991; Rosselli 1996).
Like Indian film audiences, they were routinely
engaged in "selective viewing" (Srinivas 1998:
328-29). In this context, music constantly oscil-
lated between foreground (for example, during
the pieces performed by a famous singer) and
background (during pieces deemed less interest-
ing when refreshments or conversations with
other audience members were the primary con-
cern). That interpretive activists could use the
acoustic resources of the opera performance to
construct an expressive collective statement is to
a large extent due to the fact that the music of
Verdi's operas was experienced as enjoyable by
contemporary audiences and could thus be easily
foregrounded in theater.
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articulation of collective political statements
in Italy during the 1840s is to focus on the
practices of interpretive activists. Although
the close connection between nineteenth-
century Italian opera and Risorgimento na-
tionalism has been taken for granted by gen-
erations of scholars, a careful examination of
historical accounts of political demonstra-
tions in the course of opera performances re-
veals the limitations of this view. First, parts
of opera performances were used for the
symbolic endorsement, not necessarily of
Italian national sentiment, but of different
political idioms. And second, in the con-
struction of expressive political statements,
opera performances served both as objects of
patriotic affiliation and as objects to be
avoided when opera attendance was stigma-
tized as nonpatriotic. In these diverse uses
of opera performances, the crucial task of
political interpretation of the meaning of the
performance event was accomplished by in-
terpretive activists who were able to impose
their interpretation of the cultural object on
audience co-members. In their work of cre-
ating and imposing a political interpretation,
interpretive activists were able to take ad-
vantage of such additional resources as the
normative enforcement of behavior and the
formal property of the opera performances.
A case study like this one does not make
for a general theory. Yet there are heuristic
and methodological advantages inherent in
a framework that focuses on the practical
activities of audiences as active participants
in the production of meaning (cf. Srinivas
1998). Despite recent efforts to destabilize
reified notions of audiences as homogeneous
entities (Radway 1988), little has been done
empirically to challenge the view of audi-
ences as comprised of analytically equiva-
lent individuals. Here I have argued that au-
dience members are, usually, unequally en-
dowed with the ability to produce political
interpretations of cultural objects. Sustained
attention to the activities of those who oc-
cupy the position of interpretive activists in
relation to their audience co-members pro-
vides useful insights into the processes
through which political meaning is con-
structed in social networks of users.
The focus on the political interpretation of
cultural objects as an interactional achieve-
ment of active audiences sheds light on the
 POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 359

social processes that enable aesthetic expe-
rience and political engagement to inter-
twine. The political power of theater has
been shown by recent sociology of culture
to reside in the ideological implications of
the plots staged (Griswold 1983) or the in-
stitutional configuration of production and
reception (Berezin 1994). These studies
document the co-occurrence of particular
patterns of theatrical production and of par-
ticular ideological patterns prevalent in the
larger society and argue that theater can be
best understood as a medium that amplifies
and disseminates the political ideologies that
surround it. The co-occurrence of particular
patterns of aesthetic production and particu-
lar ideological patterns is certainly a signifi-
cant social fact. Analytical precision, how-
ever, can be gained through a closer scrutiny
of the particular social mechanisms through
which political meanings are activated in the
course of cultural practices. I have used the
documented co-occurrence of particular po-
litical ideologies and particular types of the-
atrical experiences as a starting point. My
analysis goes a step further, however, by fo-
cusing on audience behavior in order to bet-
ter understand the alignment of the meaning
of performances with particular political idi-
oms as an interactional accomplishment.
This focus on explicit audience behavior and
practices is heuristically useful, as it sheds
light on interpretive activism as an important
ingredient in the production of political
ences has important implications for the
study of contentious politics, protest, and
social movements. Admittedly, nineteenth-
century Italian opera and the focus-group
tested appeals of today's professional politi-
cal entrepreneurs and movement activists
have little in common. Despite such obvious
differences, however, our adequate under-
standing of the construction of political
meanings is well served by a sustained fo-
cus on such allegedly atypical instruments
of political mobilization as the musical the-
ater. This extension of the scope of analyti-
cal attention to include less obvious contexts
of political action provides a more realistic
and historically informed view of the often
dazzling variety of contexts in which collec-
tive political expression occurs. And beyond
that, despite the important differences be-
tween standard political communications
and aesthetic products like opera, they can
be usefully viewed as analytically analogous
in at least one important sense: They are
both cultural objects that are exposed to the
vagaries of interpretation by the audiences
they target. Understanding how political
meaning is constructed in the context of aes-
thetic experiences, therefore, provides in-
sights on how political meaning is con-
structed in the course of routine political
communication.
Peter Stamatov is a Ph.D. candidate in the De-
partment of Sociology at the University of Cali-

meanings. In contrast, this important aspect
of the production of political meaning re-
mains unnoticed in approaches that do not
deal systematically with the particulars of
audience behavior.
Finally, this view of the production of po-
litical meaning by socially structured audi-
fornia, Los Angeles. He has published on nation-
alism in Eastern Europe and is completing his
doctoral dissertation on the institutional deter-
minants of humanitarian involvement within and
across nation state borders in nineteenth-century
England. This article is part of his ongoing re-
search on the national and transnational aspects
of opera in the nineteenth century.

APPENDIX A

Verdi's Stage Works Performed in the 1840s

Date of First
Opera Title Performance Location of First Performance

Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio November 1839 Milan, Lombardy-Veneto

(Oberto, Count of San Bonifacio)

Un giorno di regno (King for a Day) September 1840 Milan, Lombardy-Veneto

Nabucodonossor (or, contracted, March 1842 Milan, Lombardy-Veneto

Nabucco) (Nebuchadnezar)

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360 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

(Appendix A continued)

Date of First
Opera Title Performance Location of First Performance

I Lombardi alla prima crociata February 1843 Milan, Lombardy-Veneto

(The Lombards at the First Crusade)

Ernani March 1844 Venice, Lombardy-Veneto

I due Foscari (The Two Foscari) November 1844 Rome, Pontifical States

Giovanna d'Arco (Joan of Arc) February 1845 Milan, Lombardy-Veneto

Alzira August 1845 Naples, Kingdom of Sardinia

Attila March 1846 Venice, Lombardy-Veneto

Macbeth March 1847 Florence, Duchy of Tuscany

I Masnadieri (The Brigands) July 1847 London, England

Jgrusalem (Jerusalem; remake of I Lombardi) November 1847 Paris, France

II corsaro (The Corsair) October 1848 Trieste, Lombardy-Veneto

La battaglia di Legnano (The Battle at Legnano) January 1849 Rome, Roman Republic

Luisa Miller December 1849 Naples, Kingdom of Sardinia

Stiffelio November 1850 Trieste, Lombardy-Veneto

APPENDIX B

Libretto Excerpts from Operas by Giuseppe Verdi

Opera/Librettist Original Text Translated Text

Nabucco/Temistocle Solera

Part 1, "Recitativo e cavatina": High Priest Zechariach assures the assembled Hebrews that
the God will help them repel the assault by Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar.

ZACCARIA ZACCARIA
Come notte a sol fulgente, Like the night before the shining sun
come polve in preda al vento, like dust carried by the wind,
sparirai nel gran cimento thou shalt perish in the great trial,
Dio di Belo menzogner. false god of Baal.
Tu d'Abramo Iddio possente, Thou mighty God of Abraham,
a pugnar con noi, con noi discendi, descend and fight alongside us,

ZACARRIA, EBREI ZACCARIA, HEBREWS

Ne' tuoi servi un soffio accendi, Ignite in your servants the inspiration
che dia morte allo stranier. that will blow death to the foreigner.

Ernani/Francesco Maria Piave

Act 3, "Finale": Don Carlo is elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and pardons
those who have conspired to assassinate him.

DON CARLO DON CARLOS

fissando la tomba di Carlo Magno staring at the tomb of Charlemagne
0 sommo Carlo, piu del tuo nome 0 great Charles, not just your name:
le tue virtudi aver vogl'io. I want to possess your virtues.
Saro, lo giuro, a te ed a Dio, I shall be-I swear to you and to God-
delle tue gesta imitator. imitator of your deeds.
dopo qualche pausa after a pause
Perdono a tuti. (Mie brame ho dome.) I pardon all. (I have mastered my desires.)

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 POLITICAL USES OF OPERA 361

(Appendix B continued)

Opera/Librettist Original Text Translated Text

guidando Elvira tra le braccia di Ernani guiding Elvira into Ernani's arms
Sposi voi siate, v'amate ognor. You shall marry; love each other forever.
A Carlo Magno sia gloria ed onor. Glory and honor to Charlemagne!

ELVIRA, GIOVANNA, ERNANI, ELVIRA, GIOVANNA, ERNANI,

RICCARDO, JAGO, CORO RICCARDO, JAGO, CHORUS
A Carlo Quinto sia gloria ed onor. To Charles the Fifth glory and honor!
Sia lode eterna, Carlo, al tuo nome. To your name, Charles, eternal praise!
Tu, re clemente, somigli a Dio, You, merciful king, resemble God
perch l'offesa copri d'oblio, for you cover the offense with oblivion,
perched perdoni agli offensor. for you forgive the offenders.
Lode! Hail!

I Lombardi alla prima crociata/T1emistocle Solera

Act 4, "Coro di Crociati e Pellegrini": Exhausted Lombard crusaders and pilgrims in the
Holy Land reminisce about their homeland.

CROCIATI E PELLEGRINI CRUSADERS AND PILGRIMS

0 Signore, dal tetto natio 0 Lord, from our native hearths
ci chiamasti con santa promessa; thou called us with holy promise;
noi siam corsi all'invito d'un pio, we have hastened to the bidding of a holy man,
giubilando per l'aspro sentier. (...) rejoicing on the rough path. (...)

Alzira/Salvatore Cammarano

Act 2, "Scena ed Aria": Zamoro, chief of an Inca tribe, hastens to prevent the marriage of
his beloved Alzira to Spanish governor Gusmano.

ZAMORO ZAMORO
Non di codarde lagrime, This is not the time for cowardly tears,
di sangue l'ora e questa! this is the time for blood!
Al rito che s'appresta To the ceremony that is being prepared
non invitato andro! I shall go uninvited!
Se il ciel non ha piui fulmini, If heaven has no more thunderbolts,
rimane il braccio mio there remains my arm;
della vendetta il dio, I shall be the god of vengeance
empia, per te saro! for you, wicked woman!

Attila/Temistocle Solera

Act 3, "Scena ed Aria": Roman general Aetius contemplates the decline of the Roman
Empire and decides to confront Attila's troops in battle.

EZIO EZIO

Ben io verro.... Ma qual s'addice al forte, I will come.... But as a brave man
il cui poter supremo whose supreme power
la patria leverai da tanto estremo! will raise the fatherland from so much misery!
Dagli immortali vertici From the immortal hills
belli di gloria, un giorno, that were once radiant with glory,
l'ombre degli avi, ah, sorgano let the shadows of our ancestors arise
solo un instante intorno! (...) only for a day. (...)

E gettata la mia sorte, My lot is cast,

pronto sono ad ogni guerra; I stand ready for any battle;
s'io cadro, cadro da forte, if I fall, I shall fall as a brave man,
e il mio nome restera. and my name will live on.
Non vedro l'amata terra I shall not see my beloved land
svenir lenta e farsi a brano. slowly collapse and split into pieces.
Sopra l'ultimo romano Over the last Roman
tutta Italia piangera. All Italy will weep.

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362 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

(Appendix B continued)

Opera/Librettist Original Text Translated Text

Macbeth/Francesco Maria Piave

Act 4, "Scena ed Aria": Macduff and Malcolm rally their compatriots to overturn Macbeth.

MACDUFF, MALCOLM, CORO MACDUFF, MALCOLM, CHORUS

La patria tradita Betrayed, our motherland

piangendo ne invita! calls us in tears!
Fratelli! gli oppressi Brothers, let us hasten
corriamo a salvar! to rescue the oppressed!
Gia l'ira divina The wrath of God
sull'empio ruina; is already falling down upon the wicked one;
gli orribili eccessi His horrible atrocities
1'eterno stancar. have wearied the Almighty.

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