Act 1: The flute in Italy during Mercadante’s lifetime
When Mercadante was born (1795), he was not Italian in the strictest sense of the word. Italy as a unified country did not exist yet, and the Apulian city of Altamura was part of the Kingdom of Sicily, ruled by the Bourbon family.1 In the same year, nine other different countries existed in the Italian peninsula.2
Such political fragmentation divided the country for another 75 years. Throughout the Napoleonic wars (1796-1814), parts of the country remained out of French control and therefore never joined the Italian Kingdom, created in 1805. Ten years later, the Congress of Vienna split the land’s territory into nine domains and established a political division that lasted until the capture of Rome by the Italian army in 1870 (the same year of Mercadante’s death)—an event that sanctioned the (almost) complete unification of the country.3
Inevitably, such a turbulent geopolitical situation had several consequences for the history of music, and, hence, of the Italian flute, specifically on the institutional, organological, and methodical levels.
Scene 1: The institutions
A comparison with France - a centralized country whose capital has been the nation’s political and cultural centre since the Middle Ages - can easily highlight the problems that arise while comprehensively attempting to consider the vicissitudes of the flute in the entire Italian peninsula. Giving an overview of the flute didactic in Italy during the 19th century, Ugo Piovano remarks that
There has surely never been an Italian school similar to the French one. In fact, the Paris Conservatory, starting in 1795, constituted the dominant centre of French flute teaching with several prestigious teachers […]. Almost all of them wrote flute methods and, in any case, contributed to the spread of a homogeneous way of playing, linked to certain well-identified and qualifying characteristics. There was surely no similar situation in Italy. There were in fact many important flautists, but they presented different characteristics. Moreover, there was no single central conservatory but numerous institutes scattered throughout the territory.4
Indeed, Italy “followed in this regard the fragmentation of its political situation”,5 as evidenced by the creation of several local public schools at the beginning of the 19th century, such as in Turin (1801), Bologna (1804), Milan (1808), Florence (1811), and Parma (1818).6 In Naples, the four traditional conservatori merged in 1807 into the Real Collegio di Musica.7 Given this situation, “one naturally wonders if there ever existed a [single] Italian flute school in the 19th century”,8 as Piovano adds.
Nevertheless, the political division of the land is not the only element that might have hindered the creation of a homogenous playing style in Italy. Another relevant obstacle was the lack of autonomous flute classes in the didactic offer of most of the abovementioned institutions: specialized instrumental teaching was only introduced very late in such schools9 and flute classes were generally taught by oboe players until the first decades of the 19th century.10
Moreover, the flute’s low popularity in 18th and early 19th-century Italy probably played an important role in keeping these two classes joined. In fact, the flute did not meet the same success it found in France, Germany and later England, where the numerous dilettantes motivated professional players, composers and editors to publish compositions and flute methods.11 In 1800, Gervasoni still seemed not to consider the flute an actual solo instrument: “[The flute] is that musical instrument to which the sweetest and most graceful expressions are suited. It is commonly used in place of the oboe for those particular expressions that require it.”12 Gervasoni’s description of the flute as an instrument that is commonly used by oboe players in orchestral settings matches the fact of oboists being the flute teachers of the newly created institutions at the beginning of the 19th century.
Apart from hindering the establishment of a unified and widespread flute playing style, such didactical organisation prolonged the lack of interest of Italian composers and amateur players toward the flute well into the 1800s, resulting in even fewer solo compositions than in the previous century.13 Moreover, it delayed the spread of multi-keyed flutes on the Italian territory.
Scene 2: The instruments
In the whole of Europe, the mechanization of the oboe through the additional keys started later than the flute’s mechanization. For this reason, Italian oboists continued to play and teach the traditional single-keyed flutes with their more familiar fingering system, essentially without technical or didactical innovations. Simple system (i.e. multi-keyed) flutes started to be increasingly used starting from the second decade of the 19th century when a first generation of specialized Italian flute players started to hold dedicated chairs in orchestras and autonomous flute classes and became interested in the innovations offered by contemporary makers.14
Of course, such delay influenced the work of instrument makers, which continued to produce one-keyed instruments.15 This factor, combined with the lack of an influential centre as an organological reference for the whole country (as was the case for the Parisian Conservatoire, for the standard French four- and later five-keyed flutes), forced the young generation to import the newest type of instruments from abroad. In today’s Italian collections, it is possible to find many French (e.g. Godfroy, Bellissent, Holtzapffel), English (e.g. Potter, Monzani, Clementi),16 and German/Austrian flutes (e.g. H. Grenser, Koch, Ziegler).17
In particular, probably due to the Austrian influence in Northern Italy in the first decades of the 19th century,18 flutes by the Viennese Koch and Ziegler19 rapidly spread in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and then in the whole peninsula.20 Later, when Italian makers decided to supply the local market with their own keyed flutes, they started to create instruments that were similar to the most successful models.21
Exemplary in this sense is Ubaldo Luvoni, active in Milan between 1827 and 1847.22 As Pustlauk remarks, “the design of his instruments is based on Austrian flutes. They often look like good copies of Flutes by Koch in Vienna.”23 In other parts of Italy, however, also English24 and French25 flutes were used as sources for the development of local instruments.
Differently than in France, even Boehm’s inventions and the spread of his 1847 cylindrical model did not achieve an organological uniformity in the land. As Lazzari explains,
The reasons [for the lack of the Boehm’s flute spread] were essentially similar to those given by Tulou and the German flautists (i.e. tone and fingering changes), and they were also linked to the Italian context, which lacked an authority capable of imposing change from above, as the Paris Conservatoire in France. The new instrument sparked a national discussion based on pamphlets and articles in musical periodicals.26
While some players, such as Emanuele Krakamp and Giulio Briccialdi, immediately started using the Boehm flute and some makers, such as the Leone family in Naples,27 started to build it, many others preferred to continue playing or building the earlier models.
Scene 3: The methods
Such inhomogeneity and foreign influence on the organological level had a certain symmetry with the didactical-methodological one. After autonomous flute classes were created and the new, more complex keyed instruments started to circulate, teachers decided to use updated books and methods to teach. Of course, the lack of one local reference - as Paris for France - resulted in the absence of a single, widespread local flute tutor among Italian teachers. Consequently, the same foreign inspiration that moulded the instrument’s market influenced the choices of the editors. The greatest part of flute methods published in Italy in the first half of the 19th century are therefore translations of French ones:28 Hugot-Wunderlich (ca. 1810) 29, Drouet (ca. 1830)30, Berbiguier (ca. 1828-1829)31, Camus for conical Boehm 1832 model (ca. 1853)32, and Kastner (Milan, Lucca, n.d.)33.
The first Italian flute method published in the 19th century34 appeared only in 1854 when Krakamp published his Metodo per il flauto cilindrico alla Böhm,35 intentionally written to allow Italian students to learn how to play not through French or German melodies, but rather on Italian ones.36 From this moment on, translations were increasingly less commonly published,37 but no complete uniformity had been reached yet: as we saw, the Boehm flute was not universally accepted and methods for both instrument types were published in the same years.38
Scene 4: Milan’s syncretism and Giuseppe Rabboni
This overview of the flute in Italy during Mercadante’s lifetime reveals a very heterogeneous and international situation, a true melting pot where foreign instruments and methods were directly used or somehow adapted in the numerous institutions of the country, often according to the most recent political revolutions. In this sense, the vicissitudes of the flute class of the Conservatorio in Milan are exemplary.
The institution was created in 1808 after the model of the Parisian Conservatoire when Milan was part of the French-controlled Italian Kingdom, ruled by the viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais.39 Giuseppe Buccinelli was appointed teacher for oboe (his primary instrument), bassoon and flute. After his death and several bureaucratic issues, Giuseppe Rabboni, a former student of Buccinelli and principal flute in La Scala, took over the flute class in 1830.
Since the conservatory was originally meant to be linked to the Paris one, the first methods that were used were the official ones of the Conservatoire, in French.40 Conversely, the teachers were later invited to write their own methods, or at least to translate a foreign one. Rabboni, therefore, chose Berbiguier’s popular Méthode. However, by the time he was going to be appointed teacher, Milan was no longer under French rule and was instead the capital of Lombardy-Venetia, as part of the Austrian Empire. Consequently, the instruments most commonly in use were not the four- or five-keyed French flutes, but the Viennese-style ones with up to thirteen keys.41 The result is the Metodo per flauto diviso in tre parti di T. Berbiguier con importanti aggiunte del professor G. Rabboni, where the “importanti aggiunte” (“important additions”) are simply fingering tables and technical exercises for the keys missing in the four-keyed flute that Berbiguier had in mind.42
This particular syncretism - an Italian flautist playing an Austrian-style instrument and using the translation of a French method as teaching material - might have been common in other parts of Italy as well. However, little information is known: Lazzari only mentions a flute class in Bologna starting in 1818 (held by Giacomo Coppi) and two in Palermo (with Barbagiovanni and Gramaglia), while no details are known about Florence.43
Luckily, some sources regarding the Neapolitan flute school are available. Although they seem to confirm the existence of a certain réunion des goûts, they also witness relevant differences from the Milanese scene, especially concerning the instruments.
[To Act 2]