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Chapter I: Laying the Foundation with Adaptation and Libretto Theories

When Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco scored his operatic adaptation of William

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—his favorite Shakespearean play—both musical and

literary critics were completely unprepared to approach his work. The year was 1957, and

classical opera, especially Italian, was on the wane, fading in hackneyed musical experiments

that did not brighten the musical atmosphere in any significant way. Musical critics and

audiences, in the still-rippling wake of Richard Wagner’s and Richard Strauss’ musical

revolutions from decades earlier, wanted avant-garde works, modern in every sense of the word.

Thus Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s classical opera did not make a very big splash when it premiered at

the Florentine May Festival in 1961. It did not even appeal much to musicologists, though

through the years a few musicology doctoral candidates have studied the opera from a principally

musical angle, meanwhile grossly overlooking the libretto.1

At the same time, few if any literary critics were studying libretti as literature, deeming

libretti the domain of music scholars.2 Moreover, most literary critics of that period were utterly

enthralled with text and only text, disregarding the historical contexts of a work as irrelevant to

the prevailing theory of New Criticism. To them, therefore, a study such as mine would have

been irrelevant since each literary work, according to T.S. Eliot, is not an individual voice but a

chorus of voices singing out the collective thoughts of all the works before it.3 Study of texts thus

1 It should be noted that musicologists have traditionally overlooked libretti in general, primarily studying musical structures throughout history. It should also be noted that operas have only recently become legitimate subjects of musicological study at all, as well, being for centuries considered “low,” commercialized art, marketed principally to the masses.2 In a sense, libretti have been works without a country—fence walkers, on the boundary line between music and literature.3 See T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Longman, 1989), 26-31.

Wise 2became, to use Eliot’s word, “impersonal”4—an idea clearly diametric to the very personal

analysis of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s text in this paper.5

Fortunately the current theoretical trends among New Historical critics—such as viewing

literature through a cultural studies lens—have paved the way for my contextual approach to

Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s libretto. Using a New Historical framework, then, I can examine both the

broader cultural context in which Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote Il Mercante di Venezia while also

examining Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s own life, in a narrower context. The work which I will study

is, once again, the libretto of the 1958 Italian opera Il Mercante di Venezia, by Italian-Jewish

composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. My focus will be certain Jewish aspects of Castelnuovo-

Tedesco’s life. Taking these aspects as a guide to light my literary path, I will then study the

libretto itself, which Castelnuovo-Tedesco adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant

of Venice. My approach will be one of comparison, with my goal being to suggest ways in which

Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Jewish heritage influenced the choices he made in his adaptation,

particularly in his treatment of Shylock, which is much more sympathetic than Shakespeare’s.

Within this comparison will be further comparisons as well, between Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s

libretto and three post-Holocaust interpretations of Shylock. Along the way, I wish to add

Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s libretto to the ongoing though recently begun discussion of adaptation

theory. I hope to offer a praxis of Linda Hutcheon’s proposal, as set forth in her A Theory of

4 Eliot, 28.5 New Criticism’s emphasis on text-based interpretations, which itself began as a revolt against an overly historical interpretive approach, does not allow for the appreciation of texts as historical artifacts. This obsession with the written word has been especially detrimental to literature meant for performance, such as Shakespeare’s plays and also libretti. I will be treating libretti as scholars generally treat Shakespearean texts—as texts in their own right as well as texts that can be used for performance. For a study demonstrating the importance of historical context in Shakespearean performance, see Jean I. Marsden The Re-Imagined Text (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 9; and W.B. Worthen Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: University Press, 1997), 3. See also Gary Schmidgall’s chapter on “Staging Shakespeare and Opera,” in Shakespeare and Opera, discussing the tendency of avant-garde directors to obscure the theatricality of opera and Shakespearean plays with elaborate technological effects (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 220-233).

Wise 3Adaptation, that understanding why an author adapts is indispensable in any study of adaptation.6

Furthermore, I plan to demonstrate how opera libretti can be accessible not just to musicologists

but to literary scholars, showing the importance of libretti as poetic art in their own right. My

overarching goal, however, is to establish Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s libretto as a strong (though

long-forgotten) voice in post-Holocaust cultural discourse, a valuable contribution to Jewish

literature after the Holocaust.

But before I delve into Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s life or his operatic adaptation of

The Merchant of Venice, I would like to further construct my theoretical structures for this study

by defining some terms and anticipating questions that might arise about my work. To begin

with, I must define the highly nuanced word “adaptation.” It will be helpful to first delineate

what an adaptation is not. An adaptation is not an illegitimate child of the supposedly superior

original text, though adaptations have often been treated with this kind of condescension. As

Hutcheon observes, “Whether it be in the form of a videogame or a musical, an adaptation is

likely to be greeted as minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the original.”7 Yet

“this negative view,” as Hutcheon points out, “is actually a late addition to Western culture’s

long and happy history of borrowing and stealing or, more accurately, sharing stories.”8 Aristotle

himself viewed imitation as intrinsic to art because art reflects humans, who by nature delight in

mimicry and therefore can correlatively delight in art.9 Until perhaps the Enlightenment, art was

considered a group effort: a community’s expression of collective identity, abstractly

manifesting the “rituals of everyday life” such as “eating, courtship, worship, burial.”10

6 See Chapter 3 (“Who? Why? Adapters”) of Hutcheon, Linda A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 79-111.7 Hutcheon, xii.8 Hutcheon, 4.9 In Hutcheon, 20, citing Rudolf Wittkower.10 Heller and Lasky, 2.

Wise 4Adaptations were a natural outgrowth of this communal mindset.11 Incidentally, thanks to this

mindset, Shakespeare got away with lifting story lines from other writers, and literary legends

such as John Dryden got away with free adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in the era after

Shakespeare.12

As Marsden notes, though, with the birth of the Enlightenment “adaptation, in its guise of

rewriting, had become an object of contempt and a symbol of an earlier age’s literary failings.”13

She then compares Enlightenment “contempt” with twentieth- and twenty-first century attitudes

toward loose Shakespearean adaptations—attitudes born mainly of New Criticism, interestingly

enough.14 My point here is that for various reasons, through the past several centuries into the

twentieth century, adaptations have been wrongly called “inferior” to the text from which they

are adapted. I assert that this is a “wrong” conception because the definition of adaptation, as

demonstrated above, has itself shape-shifted throughout history.

In addition, because texts invariably feed off each other, it is a misnomer to claim that the

text from which an adaptation stems can be “original” in the truest, denotative sense. As Edward

Said notes, the very idea of “beginning” mutates throughout different epochs.15 To Lu Chi,

fourth-century Chinese poet, “the source of originality is unconscious,” and “original ideas are

11 Fortunately for aspiring adapters, as postmodernism rises in the twenty-first century, art seems to be turning communal again, and adaptations seem to be regaining legitimacy. A possible result of this shift could be a resurgence in the popularity of live plays and even of opera, which are both distinctly communal efforts.12 Marsden discusses how in the seventeenth century, modifying Shakespeare’s plays was quite common, even “widely accepted” (p. 4). Gary Schmidgall agrees, citing the 1670 Dryden-Sir William D’Avenant appropriation of The Tempest mentioned above. Another example Schmidgall offers of frank Shakespearean appropriation is Nahum Tate’s famous 1681 adaptation of King Lear, which discarded the play’s tragic ending and completely reworked the plot (e.g., created an Edgar-Cordelia romance)—and “held the English stage almost 150 years, until 1823, when Edmund Kean restored the tragic ending.” See Schmidgall, xviii.13 Marsden, 4.14 Marsden, 4-9. Steven Heller and Julie Lasky offer a brief but intriguing, correlating survey of how graphic art adaptations have gone in and out of fashion based on the critical paradigm of an era. See Heller, Steven, and Julie Lasky Borrowed Design: Use and Abuse of Historical Form (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), viii.15 Said, Edward Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), xii.

Wise 5released not at will but by nature.”16 To authors in medieval Europe, originality worked its way

down a complex chain of four causes, from the causa efficiens, or the author himself—“the

person who brought the literary work from potentiality into being”—to the causa finalis, the

supreme goal of the work—“the particular good that (in the opinion of the commentator) he had

intended to bring about.”17 Ultimately, though, the first cause, who enabled the author to begin

writing at all, was God himself. Medieval authors like Chaucer and painters like Michelangelo

therefore believed that their work was in a sense—though not in the sense pertaining to biblical

authors—supernaturally inspired. And they took their cues on this topic from Thomas Aquinas,

who in turn followed Aristotle’s model. Thus the literary greats could also be considered literary

banditti, according to purists.

As in the preceding centuries, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ideas about originality

have continued to be diverse. In 1848, Sören Kierkegaard, as Said points out, advocated a

“dialectical” agreement between an idea’s beginning with God and the “individuality of the

aesthetic repeating voice”—repeating because it reflects the indescribable divine voice.18 More

recently, the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee has asserted that art is “an organic process,”

stemming not from the mysterious, deepest part of a person but from a person’s interactions with

16 In Heller and Lasky, 2.17 Alistair Minnis, in Ebbe Klitgård Chaucer’s Narrative Voice in The Knight’s Tale (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1995), 19-20. 18 The first part of Kierkegaard’s dialectic is as follows: “If God himself had not willed repetition, the world would never have come into existence . . . Repetition is reality, and is the seriousness of life.” As the second prong of his dialectic, Kierkegaard says that “the outstanding feature of irony . . . is the subjective freedom which at every moment has within its power the possibility of a beginning and is not generated from previous conditions. There is something seductive about every beginning because the subject is still free . . .” In other words, as Said succinctly paraphrases, for Kierkegaard “the religious is a prior, more important truth given in secondary, ironic and dissembling forms.” Said, 85, 88. For a more extensive study of Kierkegaard’s dialectics on literary beginnings, see his The Point of View for my Work as an Author, trans. Walter Lowrie (London: Oxford University Press, 1939).

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life.19 To him, an art piece was “a tree whose roots dig deep into the earth—symbolizing the

unconscious—and whose branches extend outward to the conscious or ‘real’ world”; therefore

the artist “does not originate, so much as translate an existing form into an alternative

language.”20 Even this idea merely translates instead of being original or unique: it is the secular,

naturalistic counterpart of Kierkegaard’s. To sum up the matter, I agree with Heller and Lasky,

who after rhetorically asking graphic designers whether they have ever been guilty of

“borrowing” from a previous artist, facetiously conclude: “If you have never committed an act

of creative larceny, then you deserve congratulations, for you are a member of a rare breed.”21

Therefore, because of the colorful vortex of conflicting ideas on what a beginning is, it is

absurd to argue that adaptations are in any way inferior. Since a scholarly consensus on what is

original does not exist, the arguments on adaptations are often, in short, superfluous. Yet they

still rage, while adaptation scholars lament their ubiquity. These scholars inevitably begin their

treatises, as Hutcheon does, bemoaning “the constant critical denigration of the general

phenomenon of adaptation—in all its various media incarnations.”22 Deborah Cartmell and

Imelda Whelehan begin their edition of The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen by

observing how adaptation studies run generally in the rut of comparisons with the original text,

in their case a comparison of how faithful a film is to its adapted novel. This in turn leads to

value judgments: Cartmell and Whelehan for example describe the too-familiar scenario in

which film critics and literature critics square off over a cinematic adaptation of a novel (with the

19 In Heller and Lasky, 2. 20 In Heller and Lasky, 2.21 Heller and Lasky, 1.22 Hutcheon, xi.

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media23 often taking the literary side) and each side defends its own media. The debate seems to

be especially heated over filmic adaptations, probably because the genre of cinema is still

relatively new compared to several hundred years of novels. Since the debate is so recent,

though, it serves as an example of how explosive the broader dispute about adaptation can be;

pejorative terms flying around include “tampering,” “interference,” “violation,”24 in addition to

“betrayal,” “deformation,” “perversion,” “infidelity,” and “desecration.”25

Now that we have considered what adaptation is not, we can now discuss what an

adaptation is. As Hutcheon puts it, an adaptation is “repetition without replication. And there are

manifestly different intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the

memory of the adapted text or to call it into question” being just two possibilities.26 Here, though,

I will differ from Hutcheon in her use of “intentions.” For my purposes, I will be looking for

more delineable ideas such as possible reflections of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s own life in his

adaptation, or aspects of the adaptation that reflect the period in which he penned it.

Later in her work, Hutcheon expands her above definition of adaptation into both a

“process” and “product” and a “(re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation.”27 Essentially,

Hutcheon has constructed a dialectic to explain the subtleties of adaptation, and I will follow her

lead with my own antithesis, asserting that adaptation is both a dialogue with the adapted text

and/or author of that text and a new author’s distinct stance. Furthermore, whenever I use the

term “adaptation,” I mean its broader sense as any work that draws, whether overtly or covertly,

23 I refer particularly to newspaper film critics, along the lines of Cartmell and Whelehan’s arguments. Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).24 McFarlane’s listing, in Hutcheon, 2.25 Cartwell and Whelehan, 2.26 Hutcheon, 7.27 Hutcheon, 15, 8.

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from a previously produced work. I thus disregard the more specific “taxonomy”28 that Julie

Sanders adopts with her division between adaptations and appropriations. Namely, she restricts

the term “adaptation” to works that clearly “[signal] a relationship with an informing sourcetext

or original” and the term “appropriation” to works that deviate “from the informing source into a

wholly new cultural product and domain.”29 The latter are more covert, or even subversive,

tropes on the prior theme. For our purposes, therefore, I will use the simpler, more general term

“adaptation,” whether Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s libretto actually ends up subverting

Shakespeare’s play text or not.

To invoke a musical metaphor, adaptations can be seen as a kind of motet—an elaborate,

polyphonic, choral trope on an ancient theme. The polyphony would be composed of

commonalities between the works in question, such as shared characters and themes, points of

view, basic plot structure, word pictures, or on the individual words themselves, as in

translations.30 The polyphony becomes even more intricate if an adaptation is made of an

adaptation, such as when Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s opera libretto is adapted from Shakespeare’s

Merchant of Venice, which Shakespeare compiled from Italian folk stories such as the tale of

Portia’s caskets and the early Italian novel Il Pecorone, as hinted at earlier in this paper.

Each adaptation, then, is a voice that sings to the reading of the other work, producing a

choir of voices that sing to the audience. And the more aware an audience is of the adapted text,

the more layers they will perceive in the counterpoint they hear from the adaptation. As

Hutcheon states, this awareness makes adaptation “a kind of intertextuality”: “an ongoing

28 This term is used in Cartwell and Whelehan, 2.29 Sanders, Julie Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 26.30 Translations are arguably a kind of adaptation (though probably the most precise kind), because of the inadequacy of expression between languages and because the translator must make value judgments. For a detailed study of translation as adaptation, see Phyllis Zatlin’s Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: a Practitioner’s View (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2005).

Wise 9dialogical process,” in which the audience listens to each text’s voice.31 Whether audience

members specifically recognize an allusion to the adapted text and make the comparison, or

merely sense the connections, they are hearing both voices. As Mikhail Bakhtin says in his

seminal essay “Discourse in the Novel,” “every word is directed toward an answer and cannot

escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates.”32 While Bakhtin is

describing the multi-faceted nature of the novel, his idea applies nicely to adaptations in that they

are the “answer” to the “word” uttered by the adapted text and that both works shape each other

profoundly—and shape the audience in a special way as well.

But these voices neither speak nor are heard “in a vacuum,” as Hutcheon notes.33 Instead,

they are an intrinsic part of a historical context, and are received “in time and space, within a

particular society and a general culture.”34 These voices are also in part determined by the media

or form that they take, with each media, Hutcheon suggests, having its own “grammar and syntax

that all operate to structure meaning for the perceiving audience.”35 Yet even these forms that

determine voices are themselves first determined by social context, as Bakhtin’s essay

“Discourse in the Novel” so strongly asserts. Bakhtin reminds us that the “individual and period-

bound overtones of a style” must not obscure the “basic social tone” of a style or work.36

Essentially his words warn linguists and literary critics alike to not overlook the social, or

dialogical nature of a work. As applied to this study, Bakhtin’s words only reaffirm my emphasis

on context for the study of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s libretto. They also do not suppress the

31 Hutcheon, 21.32 Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 280.33 Hutcheon, 28.34 Hutcheon, 28.35 Hutcheon, 35.36 Bakhtin, 259.

Wise 10other historical voice of my study—namely, the highly personal, “individual” study of Mario

Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s own life.

These voices of an adaptation, though in dialogue with each other, are also separate and

distinct. This is the paradox or dialectic of adaptation—each adapted work is simultaneously

saying something “old” again and something “new” as well. Sanders, borrowing a term from

Adrienne Rich, calls adaptation a kind of “re-vision” of the past.37 To keep my metaphor

continuous, I could modify Rich’s term and call adaptations a “re-voicing” of past works, motets

with their own vocal interpolations on a previously established musical theme. Moreover, it is up

to the adapters to make these kinds of re-voicing decisions—to choose which elements of an

already compiled text to interact with.38 Adaptations are thus often intensely personalized,

capturing both “individual histories” and “political moments” while also addressing universal

conditions through a dialogue with a purpose ranging from condemnation to tribute to mimesis.39

In the face of these positive aspects of adaptation, then, we should not squabble about arbitrary

judgments of “fidelity” to the “original text,” but rather seek, as Walter Benjamin puts it, to find

the “traces of the storyteller” that “cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to

the clay vessel.”40

37 Sanders, 9. Rich’s extended definition is as follows: “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction . . . We need to know the writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.” In context, Rich is calling on women writers to tackle the misogyny of past literature, but her term works here as well. For Rich’s complete argument, see “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34.1 (1972): 18-30.38 To extend a note I made earlier, adapters are not just the writers and composers of works but also the actors and performers, when the work in question is one meant for performance such as a play or an opera. For a detailed study of adapting as an ongoing responsibility of actors, see Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance.39 Hutcheon, 106.40 In Hutcheon, 111. In addition, seeking the adapter’s handprints is a practice staunchly defended by adaptation scholars. For instance, Hutcheon devotes two chapters of her A Theory of Adaptation to discussing the importance of considering adapters and to suggesting reasons that individuals adapt at all. Julie Sanders in her Adaptation and Appropriation also emphasizes the crucial nature of authorial context in any study of adaptation, devoting Part 3 of her study to discussing how adapters provide “alternative perspectives” on stories already told. Sanders, 95-155.

Wise 11Before plunging into my own examination of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s

“handprints”—those aspects of his life that may have influenced his libretto adaptation—I will

address one last theoretical point necessary to the framework of my study: the legitimacy of a

libretto adaptation for scholarly analysis. I am not alone in my need to prove the validity of

studying a libretto at all, much less from a non-musicological perspective; the libretto study

Reading Opera begins with an essay defending the very premise of the book.41 But even

musicological scholars themselves have through the years failed to give proper credence to

libretto study, assuming that libretti are inferior works not worth the time to seriously peruse

them, as Arthur Groos notes in the introductory essay.42 Instead, most critics have treated music

as superior to the text, an intriguing reversal of the word-worship that, as Marsden complains,

abounds among Shakespeare critics and downplays the power of Shakespeare’s texts in

performance.43 In fact, this long-standing prejudice against libretti gave them their name: Groos

traces the word “libretto,” meaning “little book” in Italian, to a pejorative “value judgment” of

the little opera text books printed for audiences to follow during performance.44

In general, however, libretti were probably scorned because librettists themselves were

scorned.45 Librettists have notoriously held a particularly precarious position, being on the one

hand trapped by operatic politics while simultaneously striving to create something poetic. They

41 Groos, Arthur, and Roger Parker, eds. Reading Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).42 Groos, Arthur, “Introduction,” Reading Opera, 1.43 See Marsden’s Introduction, 1-9.44 It was impossible to dim the house lights in the seventeenth century, when the libretto was introduced, so the audience could read libretti easily. The first opera composer to fully exploit the technology of stage lights was Wagner in the mid-nineteenth century. He always darkened the house lights at his Bayreuth opera house to heighten the effect of the dramatic illusion. Simultaneously, though, he severed the interactive audience-singer connection, which had been a dramatic staple in opera for centuries. In a sense, he made opera an even “higher” art by thus isolating the public from the performers.45 When I refer to librettists, I refer to those in the opera tradition of the West, which began in 15th century Italy as an attempt to recreate Greek tragedy. For an introduction to opera’s birth in the West, see Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, eds. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Wise 12received little credit and much abuse at the hands of Groos’ list of perpetrators: “composers,

singers, architect, machinist, painter, and impresario.”46 Moreover, while trying to pacify these

professional superiors, the librettist often sacrificed his own preferences—and thus the art

possibly suffered, unless those higher on the operatic totem pole judged correctly about the

matter. More likely than not, everyone else but the composer and the singer besieged the libretto

for philistinal reasons, and the poetry did suffer. That is to say, the composer and the vocalist

attacked the libretto for different, more aesthetic, reasons.47

Moreover, libretti, like adaptations, have also fallen in and out of fashion during certain

periods. For instance, in the eighteenth century, libretti became somewhat superfluous because of

the “preference for bravura singing over intelligibility,” as Groos summarizes; essentially, the

florid style associated with opera seria swallowed up the words.48 And the nineteenth-century

Romantic movement only further denigrated libretti while exalting music, especially in Italy and

Germany. But in the mid- to late-1800’s, Richard Wagner unleashed his operatic “reforms” and

permanently altered opera. Writing his own libretti, Wagner approached opera more as a play

than a series of musical numbers, emphasizing “the dramatic principle” in writing opera.49 His

famously well-crafted libretti—strong enough to stand on their own as a published text50—

46 Groos, 3.47 The only nation in which the libretto was well esteemed—even accorded primacy—was France. Groos explains how neoclassical drama’s preferential treatment of text help sustain the libretto’s popularity in France after their Revolution. See Groos, 4.48 Groos cites the advice of the theater manager of Metastasio’s 1724 Didone abbandonata to one of the lead singers in the chorus: “The libretto isn’t supposed to be understood. / Taste has been refurbished / and one doesn’t care about this: / Let one sing well and the rest needn’t matter” [“Il libretto non deve esser capito; / il gusto è ripulito, / e non si bada a questo: / si canti bene, e non importi il resto.”]49 Lindenberger, Herbert Opera: the Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 58.50 Wagner published his “Ring” cycle as a book before he had even written the opera. See Lindenberger, 58. Interestingly enough, Wagner’s story was an adaptation, from the ancient German legend The Nibelungenlied.

Wise 13increased the public’s attention to libretti while concurrently heaping pressure on librettists to

meet the highbrow standards he set for opera.51

After Wagner, the world of opera was in turmoil. Composers and librettists, not wanting

to overtly imitate Wagner’s dramatic style, were nevertheless still uncertain whether to privilege

words or music. Some composer-librettist teams seemed to have struck a tentative balance

between words and music, such as Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito, writing during and shortly

after Wagner, and Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal. According to Lindenberger,

“literary intellectuals in our time have placed special value” on the Strauss-Hoffmannsthal

partnership of the early twentieth century because Hoffmannsthal was both a poet and a literary

scholar and because together, the composer and librettist created characters that were more

“literary”—more complex, in other words—than those of previous operas.52 Moreover, the

numerous letters they exchanged about their projects show, in Lindenberger’s words, that “in

most instances, Hoffmannsthal prevailed,” with his “intellectual overbearingness.”53

Overall, at the turn of the twentieth century, libretti were starting to be valued as poetry,

though they particularly suffered criticism in Italy, probably because opera in general was

51 Wagner’s own attitude toward music v. text is ambivalent. He seems to have privileged music over text, even though what is most remembered about his operas—and what he insisted upon—is their incredible story. Lindenberger describes Wagner’s predilection for music over text: “the poet (‘der Wortdichter’)” can “at best ‘compress moments of action, feeling, and expression perceptible only to the understanding to a single point” while “the composer (‘der Tondichter’)” can “ ‘expand the compressed, dense point to its highest fullness according to its total emotional content.’ ” In Lindenberger, 97. Yet Wagner also insists that the text is the male or “procreating” aspect of opera, while the music is the “child-bearing,” female component—thus, as Lindenberger notes, assigning “priority to words against music which his theory as a whole claims to establish.” In Lindenberger, 112.52 Lindenberger, 45, 80.53 Lindenberger, 116. Strauss’ struggle with whether to privilege words or music in opera is seen through a study of his correspondence and, more accessibly for non-German speakers, a translation of the libretto of his final opera, Capriccio. This opera actually centers on this music-or-words theme, so much that Strauss had considered naming it Prima le parole dopo la musica (“first the words then the music”) instead. Furthermore, this title does not merely show Strauss’ preoccupation with words v. music, but also his sense of adaptational humor: he was troping on the title of a 1786 opera by Salieri—Prima la musica e poi le parole (“first the music and then the words”). See Lindenberger, 111.

Wise 14deteriorating there in the wake of Wagner’s imposing triumphs to the north.54 As Gross notes, the

contributions of the poet-librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica helped increase cultural

respect for libretti, as did the birth of a new opera genre called Literaturoper,55 in which a play

was “set to music nearly verbatim.”56 Yet despite this increasing emphasis on text in opera, and

despite the systematic opera criticism done by such literary geniuses as Wagner and George

Bernard Shaw, opera has still failed to firmly latch on as an academic discipline. As noted

earlier, even musicologists have only recently embraced opera, having previously shunned

studying such frivolous popular entertainment. Libretto studies have appeared even more

recently than opera studies, born through the influence of such seminal critics as Carl Dahlaus,

whose writing stresses the dramaturgical and philosophical facets of opera.57 Dahlaus calls on

opera dramaturgists to begin with a focus not on the music, but the story line, indicating that the

text is the key to staging an opera. Following the lead of Dahlaus and others, students of libretto

are emerging from a number of disciplines, including history, economics, and even literature.58

At last literary scholars have begun to recognize libretti “as literature” in their own right, as

Groos points out.59 He then enumerates the value of these much-maligned texts as literature:

As adaptations of pre-existing literary works, libretti pose questions of

intertextuality, transposition of genre, and reception history; as verbal

artifacts, they invite the broad spectrum of contemporary reading

54 For a more detailed analysis of Italian librettists at the turn of the century, see Alan Mallach’s The Autumn of Italian Opera: from Verismo to Modernism, 1890-1915 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 225-245.55 This genre was especially popular in France, Russia, and Germany. Jürgen Maehder offers insights into the “profound crisis” that the Literaturoper created among librettists at the turn of the last century, focusing on the lesser-studied Italian emergence of Literaturoper. See “The Origins of Italian Literaturoper: Guglielmo Ratcliff, La figlia di Iorio, Parisina, and Francesca da Rimini,” Reading Opera, 92-128.56 Groos, 8.57 For an example of Dahlaus’ work, see his essay “The Dramaturgy of Italian Opera” in Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, 73-146.58 Groos, 10.59 Groos, 10.

Wise 15strategies ranging from the formalistic to the feminist; and as texts for

musical realization, they raise issues in the relation between the two

media and their respective traditions. According to such perspectives,

libretti are not “beneath contempt as literature,” but very much within

the purview of contemporary humanistic scholarship.60

Thus through this study of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s operatic adaptation of

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, I merely seek to continue this nascent tradition by

ferreting out answers within the libretto to the “questions of intertextuality” that Groos

establishes as a worthwhile endeavor. I will examine the libretto as a “verbal artifact” with the

“contemporary reading strategy” of New Historicism. And in the process, I hope to raise the

status of Il Mercante di Venezia from “beneath contempt as literature” to the “purview of

contemporary humanistic scholarship,” giving proper credit to libretti in general and particularly

to this non-canonical opera.

Having laid this study’s groundwork, then, I now turn directly to an examination of the

life of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s life itself, as a prelude to my final bars concerning his

libretto Il Mercante di Venezia.

60 Gross, 10.