Networking Operatic Italy

Francesca Vella

ISBN 10: 0226815706 / ISBN 13: 9780226815701

Published by The University Of Chicago Press Jan 2022, 2022

About this Item

Neuware - 'In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella explores how networks of opera production and critical discourse shaped Italian cultural identity during the years before and after the country's unification in 1861. Vella sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic culture, its engagement with early technologies, and the inherent mobility of operatic productions as they physically traveled across the peninsula. Through a series of case studies, Vella explores musical criticism in the Italian press as well as specific operatic works, singers, and theatrical stagings. She also develops new tools for rethinking nineteenth-century operatic Italy by drawing inspiration from mobility studies and media archaeology. The author traces the politics of movement within and between multiple locations by attending to opera's encounters with technologies of communication and transportation, including the new railway, understood as a medium of operatic dissemination as well as a new part of opera's media infrastructure'.

Seller Inventory # 9780226815701

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Networking Operatic Italy
• Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press Jan 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226815706
• ISBN 13: 9780226815701
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 236W x 162H x 25D millimeters 236 millimeters width by 162 millimeters height by 25 millimeters depth
• Weight: 500 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Francesca Vella is assistant professor in music at Northumbria University. She is the author of Networking Operatic Italy.