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CHAPTER 1
Music in 19th Century Argentina
It is necessary to take a brief look at the historical evolution of music institutions in Argentina if we are to understand the familial, societal, and cultural influences that molded Héctor Panizza.
The nation's taste for opera was born when Gioachino Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia premiered on September 27, 1825, in Buenos Aires at the Coliseo Provisional. Opera had been present in Argentina since the birth of the country itself. The nation's first governing body gathered to consolidate power after the capture of King Fernando VII by Napoleon Bonaparte. This fact left the viceroy alone: he represented nobody. Furthermore, the now-captured Spanish monarch was also responsible for the arrival of Mariano Pablo Rosquellas, the first promotor of Rossini's opera on these shores.
Rosquellas was a singer, violinist, and composer who was born in Madrid in 1790 and trained in Italy. As a child, he became a victim of political persecution when his family became involved with revolutionary activity within Spanish territory. He left his home for stranger shores and after passing through Brazil, arrived in the city of Buenos Aires where he continued to develop and sharpen his musical skills.
The music scene at this time was ripe for a renaissance. The city's major performance venue, the Teatro de la Ranchería, burned down in 1792, only to be replaced by the previously mentioned Coliseo Provisional, which opened in 1804 at the corner of Reconquista and Cangallo (today Perón) streets, diagonally from the church of La Merced. What passed for opera at this time amounted to an assortment of theater plays, arias, opera scenes, and performances of popular songs. Rosquellas immediately took note of this cultural weakness and decided to introduce himself as a serious musician by singing arias written by the most famous composer of the time: Gioachino Antonio Rossini.
Following the successful local premiere of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rosquellas' devotion to Rossini's work led to a torrent of productions. In 1826, he conducted La Cenerentola and L'italiana in Algeri for the first time. A year later, he put on the much-anticipated local debut of Mozart s Don Giovanni, along with Rossini's Otello. In the following season, he did Tancredi and La gazza ladra. The year 1829 marked the return of the more serious Rossini contemplations with Aureliano in Palmira.
In 1830, the governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas, having just assumed office, attended the performance of a work Rosquellas had debuted in his first season: El califa de Bagdad. It seems this was not the opera by Rossini or Manuel García, but a composition with text in Spanish by Rosquellas himself. Despite his attendance, the governor allied with the church on questions of public morality and was resistant to the genre as a whole. He did little or nothing to support it. During that same year, Rosquellas brought Otello to Montevideo and later moved to Bolivia, where he would later die in the capital city Sucre in 1859.
Operatic activity entered into a predictable dark period until 1848, when the Italian impresario Antonio Pestalardo arrived to premiere the first titles of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi in this region. The renaissance took place in another venue: the Teatro de la Victoria, which had opened ten years before on the street of the same name (today Hipólito Yrigoyen), between Tacuarí and Buen Orden (today Bernardo de Irigoyen). For all practical purposes, it was the first theater hall dedicated to opera built in Argentina. Though this landmark event occurred during Rosas' rule, the political climate had to change — a constitution for the country had to be dictated — before opera could further develop. Thus just as knowledge of the Italian bel canto in the first half of the Ottocento came to Argentina thanks to Rosquellas, the first performances of the work of Giuseppe Verdi took place thanks to Pestalardo.
On September 7, 1848, Verdi's music was first heard in Buenos Aires, with the duet from the opera I lombardi alla prima crociata played on flute and clarinet. During the 1849 season, along with the local premiere of Bellini's Norma, Verdi's Ernani was also performed, but without its original orchestration. To coincide with one of the Argentine national holidays, as was tradition at the time, Pestalardo at last premiered I due Foscari at the Teatro de la Victoria on May 25, 1850. This was the first of Verdi's scores performed in Argentina with its original instrumentation. Nabucco and I lombardi alla prima crociata (1851) would follow this title in the same season, alongside other operas by Bellini, Donizetti, Mercadante, and other less well-known composers.
After the Battle of Caseros sealed the fate of Rosas's government and marked the beginning of the constitutional era in Argentina, the Teatro de la Victoria came upon hard times. Despite the existence of other minor halls, such as Buen Orden and Federación, Buenos Aires still needed an artistic space reflective of its growing metropolis, the import of the works staged there, and the planned Europeanization of the new Argentina. Such was the proposal put forth by figures like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre, who were both statesmen and opera enthusiasts.
In essence, Buenos Aires' high society encouraged the construction of what is today called the "old Teatro Colón." The venue was inaugurated on April 25, 1857, facing Plaza de Mayo and surrounded by Rivadavia, Reconquista, 25 de Mayo, and Bartolomé Mitre streets. The first opera performed there was Verdi's La traviata, with a cast headed by Sofia Vera Lorini and Enrico Tamberlick, who sang the Argentine National Anthem before the curtain opened.
At that time, the organization of the country had not yet been completed. Although a National Constitution was approved in Santa Fe in 1853, the province of Buenos Aires rejected it and instead became an independent state with an eponymous capital city until the Battle of Pavón in 1861. During this period, a council of public works took on four projects considered to be fundamental to national progress: the first railway in the country, a new dock for the port and corresponding customs house, a gas company, and an opera house.
Curiously, the same year a steam engine barrelled through the Argentine landscape for the first time, the old Teatro Colón opened. Despite the prestige of the artists who would perform there and its considerable size, the venue would only last thirty years. By a strange paradox, in 1887 this Teatro Colón building — whose owners had never finished paying for the land — had to be sold to the National Bank to enable the construction of a new theater of the same name, using the profits from the sale. This new theater was located precisely on the property of the Estación del Parque, where the first Argentine train had set out three decades before. The current Teatro Colón stands there to this day.
The Formation of a Taste
The year of 1872 would prove to be crucial in the development of opera in Buenos Aires. The Argentine capital was recovering from the brutal epidemic of yellow fever it suffered the previous year, which killed almost 10 percent of the population. Another opera house of great importance was inaugurated, which was fated to lead musical life in the capital during the twenty-year gap between the closing of the old Colón in 1888 and the opening of the new one in 1908. On May 25, 1872, the Teatro de la Ópera opened its doors on Corrientes Avenue with Verdi's Il trovatore. From this year onward, there would be two opera houses in Buenos Aires that would be able to offer competing productions and casts, and seeking to improve.
The taste for Italian culture, established with that primitive Barbiere in 1825, began to compete with the fashion for all things French, implemented by the rising Generation of the '80, who dreamed of using France as a model to make Argentina into a nation with a European profile.
From the reviews by Paul Groussac — a French expat and writer settled in Argentina who was both an influential music critic and eventual director of the National Library — one can infer that during these seasons, new titles were presented with hardly any delay with respect to their premieres in Europe, and that the passion for Verdi was equal to the interest in Meyerbeer or Gounod and at times even paled before the latter.
Proof of this is that the Politeama Argentino, the third great theater to be added to the ranks of the old Colón and the Ópera, was inaugurated on June 16, 1879, with a work emblematic of the French repertoire: Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.
The competition between these halls was marked. For example, in 1888 the old Colón closed its doors with Verdi's Otello, with no less than the role's creator Francesco Tamagno at the head of the cast, while at the same time the Politeama presented it with the well-known tenor Roberto Stagno.
By the last quarter of the 19 century, the passion for opera was fully in place in Buenos Aires' high society, and the companies and artists brought by impresarios for each season were of a rank similar to those of a European opera house of the first order. The evolution of the taste for symphonic music would take slightly longer to arrive, and would remain in the hands of Italians (mainly maestro Ferruccio Cattelani) and the prominent Argentine composer Alberto Williams.
The creation of a true operatic "market" led to the multiplication of theaters built and dedicated to opera, additionally supported by the growing wave of immigration — mostly Italian — which counted among its ranks artisans of the most varied professions. These skilled individuals were determined to work in a society that offered them a real chance of progress, though not the rapid enrichment many people had imagined. The immigrant deluge, however, began to change the local perception of Italian culture from that of a source of prestige and innovation to a wellspring of bad habits and destabilizing political ideas, principally anarchism. With each passing year, conflict amongst differing nationalities would crescendo to ever-greater relevance in the public discourse, and would eventually balloon to excessive and pernicious significance.
The Teatro Nacional opened amidst this context in 1882 on Florida street, between Bartolomé Mitre and Cangallo. In 1889, the Teatro Onrubia (later called Victoria after the neighboring venue of the same name closed before it was finally renamed Maravillas) opened on what is currently Hipólito Yrigoyen street, at the corner of San José; in 1891 the Teatro de la Comedia opened at what is currently Carlos Pellegrini 248; in 1892 the Teatro Odeón — shamefully demolished at the end of the 20 century — opened at the corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda, where from 1872 the Variedades were placed and the first film in Argentina was projected; the Teatro Apolo opened on Corrientes and Uruguay, and today still functions as a modern theater located within a commercial gallery; the Teatro de la Zarzuela (later called Argentino) opened on Bartolomé Mitre and Uruguay; in 1893 the Teatro Mayo opened on Avenida de Mayo and Lima, and the Teatro Rivadavia, today Liceo, opened facing the Plaza Lorea. This is the only 19century theater that survives today in Buenos Aires, as all the rest were erased from the map. In general, these halls formed the circuit for performing Spanish companies.
These were not the only spaces for musical theater: in a more popular style, but with opera performances, there was the Teatro de la Alegría (1870) on Chacabuco street between Alsina and Hipólito Yrigoyen; the Teatro Casino (1885) at Maipú 326; the old Teatro San Martín (1887, rebuilt in 1892) on Esmeralda between Sarmiento and Cangallo; the Edén Argentino (1890) on Callao between Sarmiento and Corrientes; the Politeama Sudamericano (1894) at San Juan 2023; and the Teatro Doria (1887, later rebuilt as the Marconi in 1903) on Rivadavia Avenue, in the middle of the district of Once, where until the 1960s opera singers could cut their teeth before an audience that was at once enthusiastic and easygoing.
Meanwhile at the luxurious Ópera, in charge of the 1901, 1903, 1904, and 1906 seasons, there was the blazing presence of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted in Buenos Aires, along with the Italian and Wagnerian repertoire, works he would never again perform in his career, such as Mozart's Don Giovanni and Weber's Der Freischütz.
In the first years of the 20th century a few more venues of great relevance to Argentine cultural life would be inaugurated: in 1907 the Teatro Coliseo was assembled in an old circus ring. It would come to be the site of the world premiere of Mascagni's Isabeau in 1911 in the presence of the composer, and the Argentine premiere of Parsifal in 1913, anticipating the Wagnerian veto on performances of the work outside Bayreuth by half a year. It was also the venue for the first national radio broadcast in 1920, with music from the same opera. In 1908, two new theaters opened: the Teatro Avenida, later strongly associated with the Spanish community and particularly with zarzuela, and the current Teatro Colón, which would end up transforming into the monopolizing epicenter of operatic and musical activity in Argentina after the close of its competitor the Teatro de la Ópera in 1935 and its conversion into an art deco building also dedicated to cinema.
By that time, the world was still reeling in the aftermath of the First World War and the market for opera had changed irreversibly. Public support would fortunately rematerialize with the 1925 creation of the Teatro Colón's resident artistic bodies, and when its "municipalization" began to take effect at the start of the 1930s, any private initiative was supplanted.
CHAPTER 2
The Panizza Family
Héctor Panizza's father Giovanni Grazioso was unable to resist his attraction to Argentina's flourishing musical scene. He arrived in Buenos Aires during the old Teatro Colón's 1872 season in order to join the orchestra as first cello under the baton of his countryman Nicola Bassi. A year before, he had visited the Indian city of Calcutta, then served as first cello for the orchestra that premiered Verdi's Aïda at the Cairo Opera House under the baton of the double bassist and composer Giovanni Bottesini.
In Buenos Aires, Giovanni Grazioso would meet two colleagues, Pietro Melani and Tommaso Marenco (both great professionals, like Giovanni), who had already performed at the inaugural Aïda, and who would also leave their marks on Argentina. The adventurous musician had studied with Franco Faccio, the composer and conductor responsible for the Italian premiere of Aïda in 1872 and, fifteen years later, the world premiere of Otello, both at La Scala in Milan.
Born in 1851 in Gazzuolo, near Cremona, Giovanni Grazioso arrived in Argentina when he was twenty-one years old, with a background that appeared more than promising. There is no evidence that he came from a family of musicians, however, though several professional colleagues shared his cognome at the time. The Panizza family has been referred to as a "musical dynasty," with comparisons to no less than the Puccini family. Clarifying the connection between this family and our subject, however, is far from a simple task.
Although it is not possible to establish a genealogy, at least the extremes of the probable tree are clearly linked to music: the branch that begins with Giacomo Panizza culminates with the subject of this biography.
Giacomo Panizza was the first important musician to bear this surname, as far as we know. According to a contemporary source, he was born in 1803 near Alessandria and died in 1860. During the 1830s and 1840s, he was a well-known conductor and "maestro al cembalo" of La Scala (where he was successor to maestro Vincenzo Lavigna, who was also one of Verdi's teachers) in addition to a lecturer and composer, particularly of ballets. In 1837 he prepared the vocal score of the final alternative aria composed by soprano María Malibrán for the role of Adina in L'elisir d'amore by Donizetti, which was published by Casa Ricordi in Milan. The fact that in 1848 he left his position at La Scala to become musical director at Covent Garden in London, and later was also appointed by the Teatro Regio in Turin, suggests a fascinating symmetry: these were also highly significant places in the career of Ettore Panizza himself.
Between the two of them, there are several professional musicians with this surname who are mentioned by different sources. Leaving aside Héctor's father Giovanni Grazioso and his siblings (who also have well-known careers, which we will discuss further on), three "Panizzas" are consistently given credit for having conducted the 1884 world premiere of Le Villi, Puccini's first opera. They are the virtually unknown Augusto, Arturo, and Achille Panizza.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Other Toscanini"
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Copyright © 2019 Sebastiano De Filippi and Daniel Varacalli Costas.
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