The Tense Present: Review of Emanuele Senici, Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2019)

As I first began writing this, the world stopped. (No, not because I began writing.) It was observance of a solemn anniversary: twenty years since the terrorist attacks that were immediately and enduringly encapsulated in the metonym “9/11.” As many have pointed out, it now seems more appropriate to read that sequence of numbers as something approaching a logo rather than a metonym, with its improbably neat encoding of an emergency call from America, its two strikes downward figuring the twin towers that were razed and an iconographic exhortation to pause. It might also be more appropriate to say that, rather than a case of pausing at anniversaries to remember, the phenomenon of 9/11 is that a part of the Western imagination was paused that day, and has remained so ever since.1 For some, it was in 2001 that the world stopped.

The main reason for replaying that observance here is that the trauma it commemorated had a cultural effect strikingly similar to the one Emanuele Senici describes in Music in the Present Tense. Violent incursion from outside—in his study, the Napoleonic invasion and three-year occupation of the Italian peninsula—causes trauma not only at the level of individuals’ bereavement and injury but also at that of the (proto-)national psyche, which results in an inability to move on from the crisis even when its immediate cause is removed (the retreat in 1799), a persistent sense of being trapped within a frozen present, and resulting compulsive repetition. For Senici, “national psyche” is far from a casual personification metaphor, because he identifies that compulsion behind a range of contemporary social behaviors and cultural production that are nothing less than forms of individual and collective “acting out” in the sense used by many psychotherapists (and some historians, notably Dominick LaCapra, whose influence Senici acknowledges). Repetition, then, is not a trivial stylistic trait (or “ironically trivializing,” depending on your point of view) of Rossini the individual composer but a symptom of something much more profound and widely shared. Rossini’s style, furthermore, is both the tell-tale sign of a cultural condition and the contagion—through the static critical discourse of reproduction and borrowing it perpetuates—by which the condition spreads.