The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813–1859 by William Rothstein (review)

Reviewed by: The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813–1859 by William Rothstein Steven D. Mathews The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813–1859. By William Rothstein. (Oxford Studies in Music Theory. ) New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. xxiv, 573 p. ISBN 9780197609682 (hardcover), 120; also available as ebook (ISBN and price vary). Music examples, bibliography, indexes. William Rothstein, the eminent music theorist, has published a second monograph, The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813–1859. This book (hereafter MLIO) has at least a dual nature: it is a massive yet remarkably concise text on the musical structure of nineteenth-century Italian opera. Totaling more than 550 pages, MLIO fills a significant void belonging to the close music analysis of Italian opera by nineteenth-century Italian composers—Gioacchino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Vincenzo Bellini, Saverio Mercadante, and Gaetano Donizetti. (The only German composer whose operas Rothstein considers in detail in MLIO is Giacomo Meyerbeer. ) Until now, Rothstein's meticulous and decades-long research on this topic has appeared only in several journal articles, starting in 2008. At the same time, the analytical depth and contextual breadth of the analyses in MLIO evince a succinct writing style that invites the reader to study them repeatedly. In this review, I will first present an overview of MLIO that highlights a few of the memorable and effective analyses. I will then pose a question that may arise after reading this book and, finally, conclude with a few implications for musicians, scholars, and students. Part 1, "La Via Italiana, " contains five chapters. It is the most informationally dense part of the book, because it establishes the theoretical and historical foundations for the analytical methodology used in the subsequent parts of the book. The latter is especially true for chapters 2–5, in which Rothstein compares German-centric and Italian-centric theorists and their ideas related to the primacy of melody, diatonic and End Page 687 chromatic harmonic relationships, rhythm and meter, and musical form. Many students and scholars of the history of Western music theory will recognize the German theorists, such as Gottfried Weber, Heinrich Schenker, and Hugo Riemann, but the Italian theorists, such as Abramo Basevi and Bonifazio Asioli, may be unfamiliar and new. The introduction to the nineteenth-century Italian theorists in chapter 2, and how they compare to the more familiar German theorists studied by US music theorists today, is particularly powerful. In the chapters on rhythm and meter (chap. 4) and musical form (chap. 5), Rothstein also provides several important examples of Italian-centric concepts, such as the role of Asioli's accento comune (common accent) in a musical setting of Italian poetry and Basevi's la solita forma (conventional formal types) for multimovement duets and finales. The most compelling chapter of part 1, however, is the opening chapter, "The Anvil Chorus, " which Rothstein devotes entirely to an analysis of the short passage from Verdi's Il trovatore (1853). Readers will feel as if thrown, in an existential sense, into an entirely new world based on Rothstein's unique and pluralistic analytical choices. For example, instead of choosing a single key to label significant vertical harmonies, he applies medieval modes to the melody as if it were a cantus firmus line and tracks common tones between the formal sections. Rothstein even argues that the chorus fits into the "verse–pre-chorus–chorus" structure of 1960s rock music (p. 21). In other words, the analytical approach to this passage is just that: utterly analytical, or an exercise in "analytical defamiliarization" (p. xxi). Unlike Schenkerian analysis, for example, this approach does not feature the realization of abstract hierarchical principles of tonal music. In short, as Rothstein states strongly at the end of this chapter, "Nineteenth-century Italian opera is simply different from the German music that theorists usually study. It is composed differently, and it must be analyzed differently" (p. 23). In part 2, "Rossini, " Rothstein focuses on the harmonic and tonal organization of Rossini's serious operas. In chapter 6, "Rossini's Mediants, " he presents many examples illustrating the harmonic progression of triads whose roots are related by major or minor third. These examples also show how Rossini deploys diatonic and chromatic. . .