Questo articolo si propone due obiettivi. Se da un lato costituisce la ‘voce’ della nazione e del suo impero coloniale in epoca fascista, sostenendo il nuovo mezzo di comunicazione come strumento di propaganda politica e culturale, dall’altro mette in discussione alcune delle fantasie geografiche e percettive che lo caratterizzano. Nell’immaginario radiofonico italiano del primo Novecento, l’opera lirica occupa una posizione complessa. Did opera, a fundamentally audiovisual genre, become invariably ‘sonified’ through radiophonic transmission? And what happened when that old broadcasting technology, the Italian voice, met the new communications medium? This article thus seeks to answer two questions. Contemporary definitions of radio as bel canto and of bel canto as radiophonic rested on a subtler, conceptual alignment between the two media, each of which foregrounded a tension between sound and meaning and implied the radial dissemination of voice ‘out’ in all directions. Second, it investigates radio and the Italian operatic voice as two mutually broadcasting technologies, ones whose critical co-construction was more than an accident of the fraught political moment. First, drawing on materials from 1920s and ‘30s radio magazines, it sketches a history of early radio listening that restores vision and touch to a more central position than they have had in previous scholarly accounts.
The overriding ‘voice’ of Italy and its radio empire under Fascism, opera supported the new technology as a political and cultural tool, even as it challenged it as a geographical and perceptual fantasy. Within the early twentieth-century Italian radiophonic imagination, opera occupied a complex position.
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