dhbailey wrote:
This view of opera as the purview of an elite audience, at least in
Italy in the 19th century, goes counter to what I've read where the
public at large awaited the latest operas, every village had its opera
house, the public at large learned and sang (probably as poorly as a
coworker today singing some Nirvana hit or an old Beatles tune) and
revered much of the music from the opera house. When Verdi died he
was worshipped as a god, his funeral was a huge state procession.
That doesn't happen to people who only catered to the wealthy.
Italian Opera, and especially that of the mid to late 19th century was
quite a different animal to that of late 18th century Vienna. But even
then, while, most substantial cities and towns had opera houses,
villages did not. The question of to whom a composer catered is
inevitably connected to the increasingly commercial nature of the Opera,
a factor of significantly less importance in imperial Vienna. But it is
not simply a matter of catering to an audience other than the wealthy,
as the mechanisms through which music extracted from operatic repertoire
becomes widely known, and how or if a composer is compensated are rather
subtle. The popularity of Verdi, in particular, also has a political
component -- nationalism -- that is not directly paralleled in classical
Vienna.
Daniel Wolf
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