“Un nodo avviluppato”. Rossini’s La Cenerentola as a prototype of multimodal resemiotisation

ABSTRACT

Since its early beginnings in Italy in the sixteenth century, opera has always been a multimodal text, integrating verbal, musical, and stage resources. Verbal resources can be unpacked in lyric verse for vocal pieces in closed form, narrative verse or prose for recitative, and stage directions; musical resources include instrumental and vocal music, whereas stage resources incorporate stage design, singers’ and dancers’ kinesics, and set and costume arrangements. However, opera has been rarely studied in multimodal terms, as it has been mainly explored from musicological standpoints, hence prioritising music and barely taking into account the interplay of other resources. As a case study, epitomising the Golden Age of opera, La Cenerentola by Rossini has been selected, as it exemplifies how the theatrical and compositional conventions of the genre work concurrently with its metatextual components. Stage adaptations will be also analysed in two film operas, that is, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s La Cenerentola (Germany, 1981) and Carlo Verdone’s Cenerentola, Una favola in diretta (Italy, 2014). Opera will be interpreted as a prototype of multi-level resemiotisation, also in a critical light, as the libretto is resemiotised (1) as a musical composition; (2) as a mise-en-scène, and (3) as a film opera.

KEYWORDS:

• Opera
• resemiotisation
• Rossini
• Cenerentola
• film opera

Acknowledgements

We thank Unitel GmbH & Co. and Dr Thomas Hieber for granting us the right to publish photographs reproduced in Figures 1 and 5, from La Cenerentola directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. We are grateful to Arnaldo Forni Editore, who granted permission to reprint in Figure 2 one photo reproduction from the anastatic edition of Rossini 1969 (unnumbered page). We also thank Rada Film Rome for the photographs reproduced in Figures 3 and 6, from Cinderella, a live fairy tale, conceived and produced by Andrea Andermann and directed by Carlo Verdone. We are grateful to Anthony Baldry for his careful reading of the manuscript and for his insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria Grazia Sindoni, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Messina. She has published four books and articles in national and international journals, and edited two books. Her main research interests include systemic-functional linguistics, multimodality, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, theories of semiosis of communication and computer-mediated interaction.

Fabio Rossi (Ph.D. in Italian linguistics, University of Florence, 1998) is Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Messina. His main research interests are the language of music (treatise writing in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and opera in nineteenth century), media discourse (Italian cinema and dubbing), spoken Italian syntactics and pragmatics. Among his numerous publications, Telecinematic Discourse. Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series (edited with R. Piazza and M. Bednarek), Amsterdam/New York, John Benjamins, 2011.

ORCID

Maria Grazia Sindoni http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6220-2981

Fabio Rossi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3301-0101

Notes

1. The numbers under brackets indicate, respectively, act and scene. Quotations from Ferretti’s libretto are all taken from Beghelli and Gallino (1991). All translations have been taken, and partially adapted, from La Cenerentola by Rossini Italian-English, translated by Woolston (2014).

2. Da Ponte ([1830] 1991, 92–93) perfectly describes the functioning of these conclusive scenes, defined as “una spezie di commediola o di picciol dramma da sé”, trans., “a sort of comedy inside the comedy itself.”

3. Syllabic or “broken” singing (or with unusual rhythmic figurations) is a common device for the representation of non-human characters: see for example, the aria of the doll Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach (1881). However, the Italian belcanto tradition tends to preserve the unity of words and sentences, preferring, for example, vocal agility on the last syllable. Syllable breaks, or evident rhythmic alterations (too quick or too slow tempo), or words treated as sounds or noises (i.e. onomatopoeia) mostly serve to create comic-grotesque purposes, or to signal the peculiarity (or inhumanity) of a character, for example in scene of madness or somnambulism (sleepwalking).

4. As can be seen, for example, from the following passage: “Allo sgruppare di sì bel gruppo possiam cantar tutti Giusti Dei, che mai sarà?”, trans. “Disentangling such a beautiful group, we can sing all Good Gods, what will ever be?” (Rubbi 1792). It is ironically commenting the virtuosic use of vocalise that quickly puts a great number of notes one after the other, akin to Rossini’s sextet, in which each singer performs the complex agility singing.

5. In a dialogue with Wagner, Rossini said that music, differently from any other art, was completely asemantic and ruled only by conventions in open contrast with Wagner’s Romantic aesthetics (Michotte [1860] 1977). On the anti-naturalism of music, cf. van Leeuwen (1999, 165) and Gossett (2006, 379).

6. A drawing is here used instead of a screenshot, because we did not obtain copyright license to reproduce it.