Golden-Age Thinking: Updated Stagings of Gianni Schicchi and the Popular Historical Imagination

AbstractSince 2000 a notable trend has emerged in the way in which Italian comic operas by composers from Donizetti to Puccini are staged. In British and American productions, such works are consistently updated to the mid-twentieth century, usually the 1950s. This article explores what such stagings – and their implied intertextual references to wider representations of the era in popular culture – can tell us about the reception of opera today and the ways in which opera is used to create romanticised notions of historical time. Specifically, the article considers the implications for Puccini historiography of updating Gianni Schicchi, an opera whose Renaissance setting might at first glance seem essential. Considering changing attitudes towards historicism from the nineteenth century to the present, the article proposes that ‘retro’ mid-twentieth-century stagings of Gianni Schicchi compel us to hear the opera itself in new ways and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about Puccini's place in music history.