Music for Great Exhibitions in Post-Unification Italy
In fin-de-siècle Europe, great exhibitions of industry and arts represented one of the most characteristic media through which national communities showed awareness of their role on the international stage. Exhibitions were theaters for the self-representation of nations, and contributed to the dissemination abroad of carefully crafted images of the participating communities. In particular, exhibitions constituted a place in which each national identity was defined by contrast with its neighbors. Music played a central role in shaping such definitions. On one hand, it was considered as an object to be traded, displayed and classified, and therefore participated in the panoply of cultural goods each modern nation possessed. On the other, music was also as an irreplaceable complement to the celebrations, contributing to the festive character of the fairs’ space and time. In fact, when exhibitions closed, their resonances were prolonged through the publication and circulation of occasional anthems, songs, and dance music.
The first fifty years of the Italian nation-state constitute a remarkable study case in order to understand the functions of music in the process of locating national identities. Starting from 1861, the year of the country’s formal unification, Italian cities hosted many national, international and local exhibitions, culminating in Turin in 1911 with the first proper world’s fair ever held in Italy. Due to the characteristic fragmentation of a nation resulting from the assembly of former states, exhibitions in Italy are critical to the definition of clear identity boundaries, both internally – where nationalist narratives were frustrated by regionalisms – and in comparison with foreign, more powerful empires.
A good example in this respect is the General Italian Exhibition held in Palermo in 1891-92; it was the first, and for long time only national exhibition taking place in southern Italy. Despite its national scope, the music presented there reveals a strong regionalist agenda. For example, one may focus on the re-enactment of fanfares and historical events of Sicily that accompanied the celebrations, or the not coincidental publication, in the same year, of a double collection of Sicilian traditional songs, and biographies of Sicilian composers. Modern scholarship has dismissed this exhibition as having just a local relevance, but such a view does not account for the large proportion of state funding received and the presence, for the first time, of a pavilion for the African colonies, hosting Eritrean musicians.
A focus on Italy alone does not prevent to include foreign nations in the research. For example, the presence of dedicated pavilions and the arrival of visitors from abroad allowed for a comparison between them. International tourists were attracted by the music offered in the hosting cities, and recreational concerts could also become a moment to reflect (and laugh) upon matters of identity, such as the performance, again in Palermo 1891-92, of “German music” played by musicians wearing “German costumes.”
Through the analysis of musical events, it will be possible to understand how citizens and communities were performed in Italian great exhibitions and to decipher the conflicts behind such performances.
