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Between 1880 and 1940 paternalist, philanthropic initiatives promoted the arts as an instrument to improve the condition of working people, and offer leisure opportunities to the aspiring classes o...

The history of Italian musical migration to London is rich and complex. From the beginning of the eighteenth century Italian musicians played a major role in Georgian society. During the Victorian ...

In the period spanning the years 1845–1901, Verdi came to be understood not only as the most influential representative of Italian opera worldwide, but also as the symbol of a musical tradition tha...

Italian opera was simultaneously popular and unfashionable in interwar Britain. It was popular with audiences from across the class spectrum. It was unfashionable with intellectuals who were anxiou...

During South Africa’s apartheid regime, the Eoan Opera Group found itself precariously balanced on the tenuous fringe between complicity and resistance. Their elaborate productions of Italian opera...

The focus of this collaborative paper is a form of creative collaboration: translations and adaptations across distinct historical periods and cultural contexts. The paper draws upon Edward H. Friedman's experience as an adaptor and translator, and both participants' research and scholarly work. The paper focuses on the choices made by adaptors in considering the time, place and contexts of the original while bearing in mind the exigencies and the sensibilities of the present. There is no doubt that the practice of imitatio in the Early Modern period and current practices of spin-offs and remakes differ significantly; however, this project reflects upon what Early Modernists can learn from the contemporary adaptations and stagings of the texts we study and teach. This question was central to Emilie Bergmann’s recent cross-cultural seminar on Renaissance and Baroque imitatio and centuries of translations and adaptations into French prose and theatre (Lesage and Moliere) and Italian opera (Don Giova...

Dance has traditionally been perceived as playing only a minor role in eighteenth-century Italian opera seria, including those by Handel, before mid-century. In fact, one of the distinctions common...

This article locates the beginnings of operatic globalization in the years around 1830, following the scattered appearances of opera outside Europe in the eighteenth century, and before the vast international expansion of performances after 1850. Between the two, a potent fantasy of opera spreading throughout the world coincided with a widespread attention to touring groups in the Americas and elsewhere, communicated through the transcontinental circulation of newspapers. For the newly independent republics of South America, meanwhile, Italian opera also offered an opportunity to turn away from Spanish influence. As a result, however, this opera was not typically defined through its values of italianita, as would be the case later in the century. Instead, the music of Gioachino Rossini, and later Vincenzo Bellini, became bound up in intricate ways with local and international allegiances, as can be illustrated through comparison of the situation in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Beginning from a survey of recent scholarly writing on Italian opera in the nineteenth century, the paper asks what constitutes political significance within the world of operatic composition and performance. Scholars implicitly use very different definitions of political engagement – from private interest in the events of the Risorgimento, as expressed in personal letters, to internalist arguments about homologies between opera plots and contemporary events, to anecdotes of operatic music sparking revolts or uniting crowds, to broad arguments about opera houses as places of assembly in an otherwise atomized culture. Once myths and sentimental attachments are dispelled, what kinds of evidence remain? One answer may be economic: as an almost unique way for writers and intellectuals to earn income, even in exile, operatic production drew together a wide array of progressive thinkers in shared expressive activity.

The impresario was a key figure of nineteenth-century Italian operatic life. Along with other economic, financial and organizational aspects of ottocento opera, the article examines the role of these shrewd businessmen, drawing particular attention to the role of the Habsburgs in the administration of theaters in Lombardy. Along with a general job description of the Italian opera impresario of the first half of the nineteenth century, the article explains how gambling provided a way of financing the lavish seasons of Italian opera houses. After 1861, the role of the impresario changed considerably and was subsequently taken over by the publishers. Generally speaking, the impresario's role changed from being an active creator to that of a mere participant in the opera industry. Soon after 1900 he disappeared completely from the stages of the Italian opera world.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, Carl Dahlhaus’s report that Italian opera buffa died with Rossini’s Barbiere, and that Verdi’s Falstaff (1893) and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1843) were posthumous works (N...

Although the castrato was conspicuously absent from French opera, castrati sang regularly at the Chapelle Royale throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Visiting castrati also performed in France during Mazarin's attempts at importing Italian opera during the 1640s and 1650s, and when they visited the French court as part of their travels around Europe. Meanwhile, the majority of Frenchmen and women who heard castrati sing in Italy found their performances compelling. Drawing on the writings of two French authors who held contrasting views on the castrato, I focus on the question of the castrato's suitability for the role of on-stage operatic lover (praised by the Abbe Raguenet), set against the backdrop of his ability to perform sexually off stage (questioned by Charles Ancillon). Within the Italian tradition, the castrato emerges as being eminently suited to the young lover who comes of age by becoming a hero thanks to his unique combination of femininity, masculinity and yo...

The focus of this review article is recent work in opera studies whose librettists and composers were from Italy.

In the advancing coopetition strategy literature, firms are often seen as organizations making coopetitive arrangements in an intentional fashion. Drawing on the received distinction between deliberate and emergent strategies, this paper innovatively analyzes the formation of coopetition as an unintended and therefore emergent strategy. More specifically, an in-depth case study on a renowned consortium of Italian opera houses is proposed to illustrate the role played by the external environment (e.g., the institutional one) in triggering coopetitive strategies through the imposition of cooperation. Accordingly, the specific strategic learning processes that actually intervene in the formation of coopetition are identified, and the two related brand-new concepts of imposed cooperation and induced coopetition are introduced and discussed.

(2006). Italian Opera at German Courts and the Return of Johann Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow. The Court Historian: Vol. 11, Courts and Capitals, 1815-1914, pp. 59-69.

(2004). Three cases of censorship in opera theatre: Mozart, Rossini, Verdi. The Italianist: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 208-223.

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth‐Century London, Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath, 1789–1795 By Judith Milhous, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume. xxviii + 883 pp. Illustrated....

Pierpaolo Polzonetti (2011) Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 396 pp., ISBN 9780521897082, £63.00, hard cover How did opera contribute to ...

This is the first book-length biographical treatment in English of the Italian opera and orchestral conductor Carlo Maria Giulini (1914–2005). Giulini first became known conducting opera in Europe,...

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth‐Century London, Volume 1: The King's Theatre, Haymarket 1778–1791. By Curtis Price, Judith Milhous, and Robert D. Hume. Illustrated, xxv + 698 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. $85. ISBN 0–19–816166.

The “suitcase aria” tradition, in which singers introduce arias they have sung in one opera into another, is familiar from eighteenth‐century satires and is often considered proof of the “decadence” of Italian Baroque opera. This paper reinterprets this view, demonstrating that suitcase arias were actually rare in the late seventeenth century. Although arias were frequently borrowed, the modes of transmission were more diverse than the “suitcase” model implies. The paper identifies one singer who probably served as an “aria broker,” and presents singers as vital participants in the production and dissemination of opera in the seventeenth century.

This essay explores the discursive gendering of a musical genre, Italian opera, at the specific moment of its reception in early eighteenth‐century Britain. The historical discourse about music illumines both a specific moment in the history of gender ideology, as well as Western universals of male‐female gender relations—especially the figuring of the female as the subordinate Other. The case also serves as an object lesson for how it is both possible and necessary to historicize concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality to avoid ahistorical assumptions about the essential nature of sex and gender. Finally, this case connects music history with the larger cultural moment and helps clarify a cultural (re)construction of male sexuality.

Who composed the first English opera? In between the death of Purcell and Handel’s arrival in London, several composers tried their hand at creating a fully sung, English-language equivalent of the revered Italian opera model. Daniel Purcell was one, but his Orlando Furioso never eventuated; another was Thomas Clayton, whose pasticcio Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (January, i7o5) succeeded but whose Rosamond (March I7o7) did not; a third was Jacob Greber, whose Gli amori ’Ergato (April, I7o 5) marked the opening of the Queen’s Theatre at the Haymarket.

(1998). Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 187-187.

There are not many opportunities to study the way in which an Italian opera libretto of the mid-nineteenth century took shape. There is some extant correspondence between composers and librettists, but very few examples of a librettist's draft papers. Consequently the identification amongst Cammarano's papers of drafts for one of his libretti provided an unusual chance of studying his modus operandi. The opera based on this libretto is of little importance today, but the circumstances of its origin, and the way in which Cammarano worked up his material, are of quite exceptional interest.