Books
“Addio valle di pianti”: Giuseppe Verdi e l’immigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti (1861-1901) [Farewell, Valley of Tears: Giuseppe Verdi and Italian Immigration in the United States (1861-1901)]
This monograph explores how Giuseppe Verdi’s music shaped the lives of Italian immigrants in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Italian-language newspapers and archival sources, the study reveals how Verdi’s operas served multiple functions within Italian American communities during a period of dramatic social transformation. The book examines how Verdi’s music helped forge a sense of national identity among diverse Italian communities while also serving as a cultural weapon against the growing racial hostility faced by Italian immigrants, especially those from Southern Italy. Across four chapters, it analyzes opera performances in American theaters, Verdi’s music at community celebrations and street festivals, the crucial role of Italian band leaders in popularizing operatic melodies, and how Verdi’s final works carried political significance for Italian Americans navigating their place in U.S. society. By uncovering this overlooked chapter in Verdi’s global influence, the study fills an important gap in both opera history and the story of Italian immigration to America. It shows how Verdi’s music became a powerful tool for identity and social acceptance during one of history’s largest mass migrations.
Making Opera Italian: Music Technology and Italian American Identity (1870-1941)
This book tells the story of how Italian opera became a symbol of Italian identity in the United States. It does so through the analysis of different musical instruments and media that either preceded or emerged during the large Italian immigration wave of the turn of the twentieth century. These media, I argue, were complicit in the representation of Italian immigrants and their descendants, but they also allowed Italian Americans to pursue strategies of social and racial uplift in connection with the growing popularity that recorded technology afforded to Italian opera. At a time when hundreds of thousands of impoverished Italian newcomers found themselves socially, racially, and physically marginalized in American society, Italian opera stirred nationalistic feelings in Italian immigrants who up to that point had mostly identified themselves according to their region or even village of origin in the motherland. As a genre that had been included into the cosmopolitan musical diet of American elites, Italian opera was also “made” Italian by indexing actual people of Italian descent living in the country, and by being adopted by Italian Americans themselves as a source of ethnic pride. By deconstructing the essentialized association between Italian opera and Italian identity in the United States, Making Opera Italian promotes a new understanding of Italian opera as a cultural product readily available to Italian Americans, music industrialists, and the native, white upper classes. I argue that each of these historical actors put Italian opera at the center of new narratives and representations to be used to define communities, erect cultural boundaries, and justify systems of social and racial classification.
Articles and book chapters
“Will Negro Singers Invade La Scala?” Black Singers’ Reception and Experience at La Scala from Porgy and Bessto Macbeth (1953-1975). In Black Identities on the Operatic Stage (working title), edited by Naomi André, Elizabeth Keathley, and Kirsten M. Turner (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
In this essay, I discuss the experience and reception of African American artists at La Scala in the post-World War II decades as reflected by the Italian contemporary press and by primary sources from the theater’s historical archives. During these years, I argue, Black artists came to occupy an increasingly central position in La Scala’s programming and cultural politics. Similarly to what was happening in contemporary Germany and Austria (Thurman 2021), African American singers were initially relegated to extra-canonical titles such as Porgy and Bess (1955) or to “exotic” roles in operas such as Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri (Mattiwilda Dobbs, 1953) or Verdi’s Aida (Leontyne Price, 1960). Beginning in the 1960s, however, they were assigned main roles in operatic mainstays like Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Price, 1963), Puccini’s Tosca (Grace Bumbry, 1974), and Verdi’s Macbeth (Shirley Verrett, opening night of the 1975-76 season). Drawing on recent postcolonial approaches to the study of racial difference in post-fascist Italy (Mellino 2012, Patriarca 2015 and 2021), I show that in spite of the increasingly welcoming attitude of critics and audiences towards African American performers involved in these and other productions, racist attitudes continued to haunt, and occasionally still inform to this day, the reception of Black opera artists in Italy.
“Scossa elettrica! Dieter Schickling’s Giacomo Puccini: Catalogue of the Works Goes Online.” In Puccini 24, atti del convegno [working title] (under review)
The digital edition of Dieter Schickling’s Catalogue of the Works of Giacomo Puccini (2003), now available online through the Centro Studi Giacomo Puccini, represents a major advancement in Puccini scholarship. Following Schickling’s passing in 2023, researchers reimagined his foundational catalogue for the digital age, incorporating his annotated working copy and decades of additional discoveries. The online edition serves dual purposes: documenting new sources and compositions that have surfaced since 2003 (particularly from the Villa Puccini archives in Torre del Lago) and transforming a static reference tool into a dynamic research environment. Unlike its print predecessor, the digital catalogue enables customized searches across multiple parameters including chronology, instrumentation, source types, and archival locations, revealing patterns previously obscured by linear organization. My analysis examines the catalogue’s structure and search functionality, demonstrating its applications through the case study of Le Villi. Each entry integrates sketches, manuscripts, printed editions, and scholarly literature into an interconnected network with hyperlinked references and indexed fields. The project envisions expanding into a comprehensive “Puccini Research Engine” linking the catalogue with correspondence, newspaper archives, critical editions of librettos, and video documentation. This digital humanities initiative exemplifies how musicological scholarship can evolve beyond simple digitization to enable collaborative, dynamic knowledge production, serving as a model for reimagining composer catalogues in the digital era.
(co-authored with Giuliano Danieli) “Networks, Negotiations and Mediations: Towards a Reconstruction of the Film Music Production Chain in Postwar Italy.” (forthcoming in an edited volume collecting research carried out as part of the PRIN 2022 Project: FILMUSP – Music Publishing and Film: Toward a Production History of the Soundtrack in Italy (1958–1976))
This chapter examines the production of film music in postwar Italy through archival research spanning the 1950s to the early 1980s. Moving beyond the traditional producer-composer relationship, we argue that understanding Italian film music requires recognizing the music publisher as a pivotal third actor in a complex network of negotiations and collaborations. Drawing on materials from the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the Biblioteca “Luigi Chiarini” at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and other archives, we reconstruct the concrete practices through which scores were conceived, negotiated, recorded, and circulated. Contracts, correspondence, cue sheets, and royalty statements reveal a production chain involving not only composers, producers, and publishers, but also arrangers, copyists, sound engineers, rights societies, and distributors. We propose an eight-phase model of film music production, from preliminary contacts through contractual arrangements, composition and recording, disputes, rights deposits, preparation of performance materials, phonographic circulation, and eventual reuse. Our analysis highlights three key patterns: the diffuse, multi-agent nature of soundtrack production; the high degree of mobility across professional roles, industries, and temporal boundaries; and the constant interplay between local Italian practices and transnational frameworks, particularly in co-productions. Rather than offering a definitive framework, this study provides methodological prompts for understanding how collaborative networks were organized and how music circulated across films and industries.
Electronic resources
Online edition of Dieter Schickling, Giacomo Puccini, Catalogue of the Works (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2003)
Currently under construction. A preliminary version of the online catalogue is available here.
Siel Agugliaro 