Orpheus's Civilising Song, or, the Politics of Voice in Late Enlightenment Italy

Abstract

This article explores new conceptions of voice in late eighteenth-century Italy as expressed in discourses connected with opera reform. Inspired by the convergence of Enlightenment epistemologies of feeling and neoclassical aesthetics, certain progressive singers and literati sought to rebrand the singing voice as an agent of moral and political edification. Here, this ideology-laden project is traced through two conflicting representations of singer-poets, both of whom wield the power of lyric song to achieve political ends. First, the article unpacks Giuseppe Millico's narrative of his performance as Gluck's Orfeo (published in Naples in 1782), in which the singer argues for voice as audible interiority and, as such, a warrant of political subjectivity. It then turns to a reading of Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico's libretto for Giuseppe Sarti's dramma per musicaAlessandro e Timoteo(Parma, 1782), in which voice transforms into an instrument of anti-absolutist critique. The article concludes by considering how these two modes of voice were imagined, together, as capable of revivifying Italian culture.