Networking Operatic Italy

by Francesca Vella

Overview

A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification.

Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts.

In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226815701
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/26/2022
Series:	Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Francesca Vella is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow and an affiliated lecturer in music at the University of Cambridge.

Table of Contents

A Note of Thanks ix

List of Figures xi

List of Musical Examples xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Stagecrafting the City 17

Florence, Opera, and Technological Modernity

Chapter 2 Funeral Entrainments 45

Errico Petrella's Jone and the Band

Chapter 3 Global Voices 79

Adelina Patti, Multilingualism, and Bel Canto (as) Listening

Chapter 4 "Ito per Ferrovia" 109

Opera Productions on the Tracks

Chapter 5 Aida, Media, and Temporal Politics circa 1871-72 133

Author's Note 169

Notes 171

Bibliography 213

Index 235

Editorial Reviews

Thoroughly and rigorously researched and at the same time beautifully written, Networking Operatic Italy is a must-read for scholars and teachers in musicology, opera studies, Italian studies, and media studies. Francesca Vella deftly negotiates media theory and historical context, including reception theory, with refined and elegant readings of her musical texts. Her chapters on Verdi’s Aida and on military bands are a model for interdisciplinary research in the humanities.

Brown University Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

Vella breaks with the idea that nineteenth-century Italians were obsessed with their own culture and traditions and the narrow boundaries of their local communities. Networking Operatic Italy presents a new chapter in musicological research, introducing mobility studies into the history of opera and offering fascinating new interpretations of Italians’ engagement with music and theater. This is a book of great erudition and imaginative power.

University College London Axel Körner

"By contextualizing operatic practices within a wide arrange of theoretical, textual, visual, and sonic sources, the book delivers an innovative look at operatic culture in the context of Italy’s national formation and the Risorgimento. It is a fresh approach to mobility and transnational studies, one that makes the connection between a 'locality' such as Piacenza, commensurably relevant vis-à-vis the globality of Milan or Venice. For the rigor and originality of its primary sources, for the brilliancy and clarity of its argument, and for the refinement and elegance of its eloquence, Networking Operatic Italy is worthy of praise."

AAIS Book Prize

"Francesca Vella’s groundbreaking debut monograph Networking Operatic Italy will certainly not go unnoticed across a wide spectrum of disciplines such as opera studies, reception, and performance studies. The author’s refreshing outlook and compelling prose contribute to making the text a must-read for any serious investigation of nineteenth-century Italian culture."

Sound Stage Screen

"In this enticing monograph, artists and operas travel the globe, technologies evolve and malfunction, and literary, archival, and musical sources are put in dialogue in innovative ways . . . The historical exploration Vella undertakes is markedly interdisciplinary. She ties and unties knots between the disciplines of literature, media studies, histories of technology, and musicology in new and unexpected ways. Her impressive synthesis reveals a fascinating tapestry of Italian culture, while inviting further research on the twists and tangles of operatic history."

Music and Letters

Networking Operatic Italy is an innovative and exciting exploration of opera on the move in mid-nineteenth-century Italy at the crucial time of national unification. Vella asks what these travels meant not only for opera, but also for a nation in the making. Her imaginative and comprehensive answers make for a compelling, multifaceted, and wholly original book.

University of Rome La Sapienza Emanuele Senici

Astutely researched, Networking Operatic Italy weaves together an impressive array of recent humanistic trends. Tending to the local and the global, to mobility, materiality, temporality, technologies, media, and the voice, its case studies offer a unique journey through Italy’s rich operatic cultures in the decades around Unification. Vella thus manages to reframe the seemingly well-traveled world of later nineteenth-century Italian opera in view of its networked affordances, contingencies, and (often conflicting) modernizing impulses.

Yale University Gundula Kreuzer

Vella breaks with the idea that nineteenth-century Italians were obsessed with their own culture and traditions and the narrow boundaries of their local communities. Networking Operatic Italy presents a new chapter in musicological research, introducing mobility studies into the history of opera and offering fascinating new interpretations of Italians’ engagement with music and theater. This is a book of great erudition and imaginative power.

University College London Axel Körner