Pierpaolo Polzonetti - Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet

PIERPAOLO POLZONETTI

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-80495-8 (cloth)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-80500-9 (e-book)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226805009.001.0001

This book has been supported by the Margarita M. Hanson Fund of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Polzonetti, Pierpaolo, author.

Title: Feasting and fasting in opera : from Renaissance banquets to the Callas diet / Pierpaolo Polzonetti.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021005729 | ISBN 9780226804958 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226805009 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Food in opera. | Opera.

Classification: LCC ML 1700 . P 66 2021 | DDC 782.1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005729

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

I will never forget that night in the 1990s, though it was twenty-five years back. A fellow musicologist was skidding down an icy street in Ithaca, New York, in his rusty Subaru Legacy. The car moved like a sled with no brakes. I guessed where he was going and decided to follow him. He headed to a run-down diner to celebrate New Years Eve alone. Perhaps he deserved to celebrate: hed spent weeks in seclusion studying feasting and fasting scenes in Verdis operas, grazing on peanuts, fortune cookies, granola bars, and smores made by toasting marshmallows under his desk lamp. He was obsessing about a recurrent pattern he saw in every Verdi drinking song or piece of banquet music. All our conversations in the corridors of Cornell Universitys music department revolved around this: that no matter the prevailing mood of the scenewhether a bride is being forced to marry a man she loathes, or terrorists are plotting to stab the governor at the masked ball, or lovers are sadly watching their mates flirt with otherswhen food is involved, the accompanying music is always uplifting.

Sitting in front of his plate at the diner, the musicologist jotted down the first law of operatic gastromusicology: No meal can be sad. He picked up his napkin and whispered, Bakhtin! This glorious phrase by the great Russian literary theorist would make a terrific first footnote: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hlne Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 8: No meal can be sad. He bent and kissed his pen: Time for a toast! The musicologist took a sip from a can of Dr. Pepper towering over a meager hamburger bloodied with tomato ketchup, the condiment camouflaging the meats unpleasant flavor. His eyes lit up as a