Discourse on Music in the 18th- and 19th-century Travel Writing and the Formation of the Italian Character: Overlapping Literary and National Boundaries

Since the eighteenth century, Italian music offered a much-appreciated model for most European countries. Music had not only become one of the main reasons for travelling to Italy, but started itself to travel. While the relevance of travels to cultural transfer has been extensively discussed, far less is known about the role of music in this process, which contributed to the internationalisation of cultural practices during an emerging age of nationalism. In fact, music has long been a signifier of Italian identity, and its importance led many scholars to associate it to Italian nation-building during the nineteenth century, which only recently has been seriously contested. This project investigates how Italy became mythologised as the land of music in European travel literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In their writings, travellers devoted enormous time and energy to the phenomenon of “national character”, crossing both literary and geographical boundaries, allowing us to consider the interdisciplinarity and the transnationality of this cultural construct. Sources of this study are in particular diaries, letters, Reiseberichte, memoires, and novels in a mutual relation with other forms of knowledge, such as new geographical discoveries, anthropological and ethnographic works, encyclopaedias, histoires universelles and philosophical works, through which the literary construct perpetuated. This had the potential to affect national pride within the universality of how societies developed. In order to comprehend the importance of music for “Italian-ness”, it is necessary to investigate the constant dialogue of “foreigners” with Italian responses and, borrowing the method of Mary Louise Pratt, to understand “how this entity was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out”. In this context, I investigate which role music played for the history of the concept of identity and of national character. Exploring the role of music and opera in Italian lands during this period deals with the literary construction of this myth, with the history of the concept but also with the different political, commercial, cultural links between Italian lands and different European powers. An analysis of this kind is possible only by taking into consideration different modalities of reception as well as the chain of intertextual relations from one account to another.