Abstract: Romantic ideas and imagery were of vital importance for the national movement in the Risorgimento — especially, I would argue, in the period down to 1848. Romanticism, among other things, provided a common language that had previously been lacking for the generations that became active in the 1820s and 1830s. In this respect, the penetration of the South by the literature of Lombard Romanticism was particularly important. So was, as Carlotta Sorba has shown, the diffusion of Romantic stereotypes and narrative tropes through the medium of the opera libretto. Opera was ‘a form of expression and mode of collective sensibility which conditioned an entire period’, and helped to form the passionate emotional tone of the Risorgimento, its dramatic pathos. Music in Romantic opera served to raise still further the high emotional tone already present in vocabulary and gesture and to favour the exaggerated expression of intense feeling.1 George Bernard Shaw, reviewing Verdi’s Ernani, described it as ‘a grandiose Italian opera in which the executive art consists in a splendid display of personal heroism, and the drama arises out of the simplest and most universal stimulants to them.’2
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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