British Patriotism in Italian Opera: The Cultural Translations of Caractacus (1759-1797)

It is a well-known fact that British theatre and opera and Italian opera coexisted in London in the late eighteenth century. The transformation of Italian operas into British versions has been explored at length by music and theatre historians. Libretti originally written in Italian were translated into English, most often in free translations that corresponded little to the original. Although such operas were popular among audiences, the importation rather than creation of operatic works was looked on by critics as unpatriotic. Scholarship on Italian opera in Britain has so far neglected the flip side of this issue, operas on British topics that were sung in Italian in London. In this paper I will focus on the opera Evelina, which is heavily based on British source material and is on a topic in British history meant to inspire patriotism. I will trace the material’s progress around Europe and interrogate larger issues of nationalism and patriotism at stake in the question of Italian opera’s residency in London in the 1790s.

In 1759, William Mason published his dramatic poem Caractacus. Set mostly in a Druid enclave, the poem dealt with themes of war and peace, treachery and fidelity in the context of the first century C.E. conflict between the British and the Romans. Even published as a poem, Caractacus came equipped with indications of music and song. Mason was able to realize its previously silent musical moments when he adapted his poem into a play, with a score composed by Thomas Arne, which premiered at the Covent Garden Theatre in 1776. Given the musical life of this work, it is not surprising that Antonio Sacchini and Nicolas-François Guillard transformed the play into an opera.Arvire et Évelina, completed by Jean-Baptiste Rey after Sacchini’s death, was premiered in Paris in 1788. This paper will address the material’s 1797 return to London, where it did not revert to its original text, as might have been expected, but rather was presented in the form of an Italian opera at London’s King Theatre, Haymarket. Guillard’s libretto was translated faithfully from French into Italian by the well-known opera poet Lorenzo da Ponte, and despite a few small cuts and the insertion of at least one additional aria (practices common for the time), Sacchini’s work remained remarkably intact.  I will present Caractacus’s return to the stage as Evelina, or the Triumph of the British over the Romans as part of a larger cultural phenomenon involving the filtering of British patriotism through the lens of Italian opera.