A Japanese emperor goes to Italy: The Italian adaptation and reception of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado

• Music Colloquium series 2017-2018

Speaker: Valeria De Lucca (University of Southampton)

Venue: The Dome, Bramall Music Building (3rd Floor)

All Students and Staff are welcome to attend. Attendance is required for all MA Music Students.

Abstract

On 5 December 1898 Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885) received its Italian premiere in Florence at the Teatro della Pergola, marking the beginning of a tour that in a few years would take the opera around the Italian peninsula: not only did it reach theatres in Genoa, Rome, Palermo, Naples, Milan and Cremona, but also a few private venues, such as the Palace of the Albrizzi family in Venice, where it was performed by a group of sophisticated amateur performers. The work, presented in its Italian adaptation as Il Mikado, received generally warm critic response. In the words of an Italian critic for the  Gazzetta musicale di Milano, Il Mikado stood head and shoulders above French and Viennese operetta thanks to both Sullivan’s music, “most elegant and in the uttermost taste,” and the adaptation of the libretto, which “lacked the scurrilities and pornographic double-entendres” of other foreign – mostly French – comic works that had reached the Italian stages. And yet, despite the positive response, critics appear to have missed most of the subtleties of The Mikado, especially when it came to questions of genre, exoticism and humour. Examining the adaptation of the libretto by Gustavo Macchi and the music published by Ricordi, my talk explores the Italian reception of Il Mikado as a complex case of cultural transfer in the cultural milieu of late nineteenth-century Italy.