Transtextuality in transcription: Le Rossiniane by Mauro Giuliani

Teopini Terzetti Casagrande, F. (Author).

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the making of potpourris on popular themes was the easiest way to compose 'new' music, and music which could eventually determine the popularity of a performer. The guitarist Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829) was at the center of the exploitation of such a musical practice: he was indeed a master in arranging for his instrument, and left a substantial number of high-quality transcriptions. Among these are Le Rossiniane per Chitarra, Opp. 119-124, which are considered his masterpieces. Le Rossiniane are a series of six arrangements in potpourri genre written to honor Rossini's operatic music, as well as to exploit the composer's fame in Europe at the time. According to the famous guitar scholar Ruggero Chiesa, Le Rossiniane are "a marvelous fresco of great immediacy and inventiveness, as well as a masterful display of guitar writing." There are numerous traits in both Le Rossiniane's structural features - e.g. their title, their genre, their musical quotations, and their literal notes - as well as their historical context that makes them a transtextual set of musical works. Using the words of famous French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1930-2018), they seem to possess "all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts." This research makes a complete analysis of Le Rossiniane by using Genette's theory of transtextuality (and all of its subtypes). Genette's theory is the basis on which music and literary quotation theory is intermixed in this...