Description
During the 1820s and 1830s it would have been difficult to find a more ideal setting in which to restage Gioachino Rossini’s philhellenic opera Le Siège de Corinthe (1826) than the Nobile Teatro di San Giacomo di Corfù. The Greek Revolution was underway on the mainland, and the small Mediterranean island of Corfù was under British rule following an intense seventeen-year period (1797-1814) of the French, Russian, Ottoman, and British Empires jockeying for imperial control of it. The local theater managers had a fondness for Rossini’s opera. Therefore their 1818 contract stipulated that two of the six operas performed there, L’italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia as it turned out (Kardamis, 2014), had to be by Rossini. An Italian translation of Le Siège survives in Corfù, and yet it was the original Italian version entitled Maometto II—less explicitly philhellenic than Le Siège—that was performed at the theater in 1833 (Romanou, 2010).
This paper centers the San Giacomo theater to reconsider the role of Rossini’s orientalist operas in the Mediterranean. Given the lack of explicitly philhellenic opera in the theater’s repertoire during the first part of the nineteenth century, the importance placed on L’italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia in the 1818 contract (as well as the choice of Maometto II over Le Siège) calls into question the ideological uses of Rossini’s opera in Corfù. Drawing on recent work on both Ionian transnational patriotism (Zanou, 2019) and Rossini’s touristic gaze (Armstrong, 2023), I recontextualize the theater’s surviving Rossini libretti alongside foreign tourism in the island to suggest that in this particular institutional, geographical, and sociopolitical environment, Rossini’s operas spoke to a conflicted Mediterranean identity at once included and excluded from the rest of Western Europe.
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