Political 'Voices' and Verdi's 'Cantica'

FAIN: FT-57379-10

Roberta M. Marvin
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

The project offers the first fully documented study of the performances, radio broadcast, and filming of Verdi's Hymn of the Nations by the conductor Arturo Toscanini during World War II. Drawing largely on previously untapped archival and journalistic materials, it presents new evidence that allows a critical analysis about the ways in which a single musical composition by a prominent Italian composer was appropriated by expatriate Italians and the US government for cross-cultural propaganda in America and Italy. In so doing, it addresses the intertwining of Italian and American culture with regard to art, politics, and history; investigates the aesthetic and sociological intersections between Italian and English ideologies, and inquires into the ways in which the press and broadcast media helped construct a musical weapon that traversed ethnic, aesthetic, and temporal boundaries to make a strong political statement reaching various global constituencies.