Sleeper on Giuliani on Opera, And Lampedusa on Italy

This one is a few months old, but new to me. Jim Sleeper explains why Rudi should never be president: he blames it on opera (link). Sleeper may be onto something here, but he may not know that he has a learned and influential predecessor in this vein. First, Sleeper:

Giuliani’s 9/11 performance was sublime for the unnerving reason that he’d been rehearsing for it all his adult life and remained trapped in that stage role. When his oldest friend and deputy mayor Peter Powers told me in 1994 that 16-year-old Rudy had started an opera club at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, I didn’t have to connect too many of the dots I was seeing to notice that Giuliani at times acted like an opera fanatic who’s living in a libretto as much as in the real world.

In private, Giuliani can contemplate the human comedy with a Machiavellian prince’s supple wit. But when he walks on stage, he tenses up so much that even though he can strike credibly modulated, lawyerly poses, his efforts to lighten up seem labored. What really drove many of his actions as mayor was a zealot’s graceless division of everyone into friend or foe and his snarling, sometimes histrionic, vilifications of the foes. Those are operatic emotions, beneath the civic dignity of a great city and its chief magistrate.

I know a few New Yorkers who deserve the Rudy treatment, but only on 9/11 did the whole city become as operatic as the inside of Rudy’s mind. For once, his New York re-arranged itself into a stage fit for, say, Rossini’s “Le Siege de Corinth” or some dark, nationalist epic by Verdi or Puccini that ends with bodies strewn all over and the tragic but noble hero grieving for his devastated people and, perhaps, foretelling a new dawn.

It's unseemly to call New York's 9/11 agonies "operatic," but it was Giuliani who called the Metropolitan Opera only a few days after 9/11 and insisted its performances resume. At the start of one of them, the orchestra struck up a few familiar chords as the curtain rose on the entire cast and the Met's stage hands, administrators, secretaries, custodians -- and Rudy Giuliani, bringing the capacity audience leapt to its feet to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with unprecedented ardor. Then all gave the mayor what The New Yorker's Alex Ross called "an ovation worthy of Caruso." A few days later Giuliani proposed that his term be extended on an “emergency” basis beyond its lawful end on January 1, 2002. (It wasn’t, and the city did as well as it could have, anyway.)

Now, his precursor. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, says makes the same point about Italian politics in general:

[I]t seems to me that the blossoming of opera, the extraordinary favour it hass found in Italy, and the longevity of that favour, form one of the most sinister phenomena to be found in the history of any culture.

The infection began immediately after the Napoleonic wars and spread with giant steps. For more than as hundred years, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Italians went to the opera, in the great cities for eight months a year, in the lesser cities four months a year and in the small towns for two or three weeks every year. And they saw tyrants slain, lovers committing suicide, great-hearted clowns, prolific nuns and every sort of nonsense dished out in front of them in a continual whirling of papier-mâché boots, plaster chickens, leading ladies with blackened faces and devils springing out of the floor making awful grimaces. All this synthesized, without psychological passages, without development, all bare, crude, brutal and irrefutable …

When opera mania diminished after 1910, Italian intellectual life was like a field in which locusts had spent a hundred unbroken years. Italians had become accustomed to citing as gospel truth the lines of Francesco Maria Piave or Cammarano; to thinking that Enrico Caruso or Adelina Patti were the flower of the race; and to believing that war was like the chorus of Norma. …

But there was worse than this. Saturated and swollen-headed by so much noisy foolishness, the Italians sincerely believed that they knew everything. Did they not go almost every evening that God gave them to listen to Shakespeare, Schiller, Vicgtor Hugo and Goethe? …

The whole of the nineteenth century, the period in which the brightest cultural “lights” were shining all over Europe, was spent by Italians in listening frenetically and insatiably to the opera. …

—Giusseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Siren 128-9 (1995)