I searched through the website ilsaxofonoitaliano.it and found one of the oldest works for saxophone in Italian repertoire: the 1855 Giuseppe Apolloni opera, L’ebreo. There is little information about the saxophone, so I went to find out more about this work and how the saxophone became a part of the opera.
Looking at my database, L’ebreo is the 5th oldest opera in the database. What stands out is that unlike every other opera from this period, this is the first opera written and debuted outside of France that uses the saxophone. How did the saxophone end up in this production? L’ebreo debuted in Venice in January, 1855. After a successful run in Venice, it toured the major opera houses in Italy and Spain, before disappearing from the repertoire. A performance from 1989 is the only recording of the opera, and the saxophone is absent from this performance.
This is opera is a great example of how I go about researching the saxophone in opera. The first search is to find the score. I can generally see if any copies are in libraries using Worldcat.org. A handful of scores exist in libraries in Italy. I found the manuscript score at Ricordi, the major publisher of Italian operas, they have quite an extensive archive of scores, correspondence, and other documents from composers. Unfortunately, they have yet to digitize their scores, and it is not in the IMSLP database. Without looking at the score, it is difficult to see what saxophone is used and how it is used.
The next search is for contemporaneous reviews on the opera. This can be done using RIPM database or other Proquest databases. I found many reviews of the opera, but they were also not very helpful. Italy is completely taken up with Verdi fever, everything and everyone is compared to his operas, whether or not that comparison is warranted. So I now know how L’ebreo compares to Verdi’s operas, but not a lot about the orchestration.
I went back to ilsaxofonoitaliano.it to see if there is any information about the opera that is useful. The description details a band of saxophones on the stage. This seems unlikely to me. Here’s my reasoning. In all of the contemporaneous reviews of the work, I did not see any mention of a band of saxophones. Now would a reviewer in Venice know what a saxophone looked like or sounded like? I looked back in Italian music journals to see what Italians wrote about Adolphe Sax and his inventions. I could find descriptions of the saxophone in 1850, no pictures accompanied those descriptions. It is entirely possible that a band of saxophones made it in the production, and the reviewers did not know what they were hearing or seeing. Would that same instrumentation make it to other productions on Italy or Spain? Once again I find that unlikely.
There may be answers to this question. Once again, at ilsaxofonoitaliano.it, I found a paper by Frederico Alba published in the Edizioni Momenti on origins, evolution, and literature of the saxophone. Unfortunately, I do no have access to a database that contains that journal. The paper is in the National Libary of Firenze. I reached another dead-end.
There may be a simpler explanation to this mystery of the saxophone in L’ebreo. One thing I have neglected to mention is the translation of the title, which means “the Jew.” Oddly enough, this isn’t the only opera named after “the Jew” in my database. In 1852, J. F. Fromental Halévy used a saxophone quartet in his opera, Le Juif errant at the Paris Opéra with Sax himself playing the bass saxophone. Le Juif errant translates into “the wandering Jew.” Is this just a case of mistaken identity?
Overall, researching Italian saxophone works can be frustrating. There is a lot of cultural exchange between France and Italy at this time. But when I started researching operas during Adolphe Sax’s lifetime, I found that the first work written by an Italian opera composer was Gioacchino Rossini’s “La Corona d’Italia,” a work for band from 1868. The Roman military bands did not have any saxophones so Rossini shipped a quintet of saxophones down to Rome so the bands could play his piece. It’s not clear what happened to the saxophones after the performance; the music was ultimately forgotten about until its rediscovery in 1978.
The lack of adoption of the saxophone in military bands, with the lack of saxophones in Rome, makes it hard for me to believe that an Italian opera from 1855 used a band of saxophones in Venice. If the saxophone was in Venice and with the musical traditions of that city, I would suspect additional compositions for the saxophone coming out of Venice. But for now, it’s just this opera. I’m keeping it in the database for now, additional info may pop up that confirms the use of saxophones in this opera. Sometimes I run into dead ends, but I figured the period and place of this particular opera warranted further research.
the Operatic Saxophone 