Un Falstaff dimenticato : "La gioventù di Enrico V" di Romani-Mercadante sulle orme di Shakespeare

This essay examines a curious debacle at La Scala in the autumn of 1834, reconstructed through a small set of contemporary press reviews. At the center is La gioventù di Enrico V, a melodramma in four acts by Felice Romani and Saverio Mercadante, two of the most acclaimed figures in the operatic world. To explain both the work's failure and the surprising oblivion that followed – then and still today – the essay first traces the opera to its most direct source: the French drame Henri V et ses compagnons by Romieu and Royer, staged in Paris in 1830. That play – featuring a sequence of already familiar musical pieces and a ballet – was itself inspired by one of Shakespeare's most expansive and structurally complex history plays, Henry IV, dominated by the towering figure of Falstaff.

A comparative reading of Romani and Mercadante's opera alongside its French model (and its distinguished predecessors) sheds light on the authors' process of transposition and re-semantization, shaped by the aesthetic paradigms and operatic conventions then prevailing in Italy. The essay also addresses the broader and highly complex phenomenon of Shakespeare's nineteenth-century reception: in Italy, his theatre reached the stage late and with difficulty – one factor behind the La Scala failure –whereas elsewhere in Europe, and especially in Paris, it met with far greater success, closely tied to the Romantic movement and to the political and social ferment of the years around 1830 (including the accession of the ‘citizen king' Louis-Philippe d'Orléans).

In the end, Romani and Mercadante's singular debacle proves more illuminating for the intertextual web and thematic constellations it brings into view, as a symptom of negotiations and exchanges between different cultures (aesthetic paradigms, political-constitutional agendas, staging practices), than as a matter of individual personalities or the respective merits and failings of the two authors [Publisher's text].

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