Verdi's Operas, Risorgimento and Ideology of Interpretive Activism

The analysis performed shows that there was far more than just one type of socio-political reaction to Verdi’s operas in the 1840s (the decade before series of revolutions in Europe, including Italy), and that these operas could be used to construct different collective ideological narratives that could have brought people together for different purposes. Moreover, though the close connection between nineteenth-century Italian opera and Risorgimento nationalism has been taken for granted by many generations of scholars, a careful study of historical evidence of political manifestations during operatic performances clearly demonstrates the limitations of this “natural” view. Instead, I advance a new interactionist hypothesis of interpretive activism and interpretive activists. These activists were the minority in opera’s audience that, nevertheless, utilised different resources and techniques to rally the whole audience of a theatrical operatic performance (or at least the large part of it) around a political ideology that was profitable for these activists. It could be Risorgimento republican nationalism in favour of a future Italian unified nation. But it also could be support of pope Pius IX as a possible future leader of the country or even sympathy for the Austrians. Documentary evidence shows that a number of times Verdi’s operas were replaced with patriotic popular songs and hymns that were obviously considered “more patriotic” and “more popular” than Verdi’s art. The best way to explain the various ways in which Verdi's operas were used as an ideological tool in the Risorgimento era, is to consider opera as an audio-visual “space” that serves as a background for activities that are usually perceived as distracting or disturbing (political demonstrations, public speeches, revolutionary gatherings etc.). That interpretive activists could use the structural (modular structure) and acoustic (enormous orchestral sound range) possibilities and resources of opera to construct an ideological "story", largely results from the fact that the music of Verdi's operas was perceived by the Italians as beautiful and, therefore, could be easily used in the Italian theatrical factory of generating socio-political meanings in the 1840s. The interactionist methodological approach advanced in the paper, may be successfully applied beyond the scope of operatic performances. The interactionist view on producing the political meanings enables us to understand the construction of a collective socio-political action in more details. The best way to comprehend a political meaning closely connected with cultural objects, is to regard it as an inherent property of cultural objects, but as a phenomenon that occurs when contextually predisposed consumers use these cultural objects. The meanings that arise in the process of interaction, are not only products of a cultural object and the cognitive expectations of its users, but also the results of the interdependence of these users on the co-members of the audience to which they belong. Audiences, therefore, can be considered as free networks in which interpretive activism is distributed unevenly. This expansion of focus to include less obvious contexts of political action provides a more realistic and historically informed view of the vast variety of social and cultural contexts in which political ideologies have been expressed. Finally. despite the important differences between “standard” tools of political technologies, on the one side, and the principles and techniques of using cultural objects, such as opera, on the other, they can be perceived as instrumentally similar in at least one important aspect: both of these groups of tools are closely related to the peculiarities of interpretation by the target audience. Thus, our understanding how political and ideological meaning is constructed in the context of aesthetic experiences, can shed some light on how political meaning may be produced in the course of ordinary political communication