MOPRITALY
A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Project

Materialities of Operatic Performance in Risorgimento Italy

MOPRITALY

A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action funded by the European Union (Horizon Europe Framework Programme, grant agreement no. 101205907).

Scroll↓
The Project

A new history of modern operatic performance

MOPRITALY (Materialities of Operatic Performance in Risorgimento Italy) examines the wide range of new theatrical practices shaping Italian opera in the period 1815–1861.

These include the first use of a staging manual in Italy; new attention to the coordination of opera’s visual and auditory dimensions via stage directions and stage technologies; new discourses about vocal and physical acting; new practices in visual designs; the emergence of more powerful vocal types and unprecedentedly noisy orchestral soundscapes; and new media of mass production.

Italian opera at this time has long been studied in relation to the political upheavals surrounding Italian unification. MOPRITALY instead offers a new history of modern operatic performance that highlights Italian opera’s crucial role in shaping wider experiences of modernity within Italy and abroad. In so doing, it develops a more sophisticated framework for exploring relationships between opera, aesthetics and politics, and defines a new role for Italian opera in modern European and Western history, by interrogating opera’s relationship with broader social, cultural and technological developments.

❧

Opera’s power as performance — its capacity to shape collective experiences of social and cultural change.

Principal Investigator: Dr Ditlev Rindom  ·  ditlev.rindom@uniroma1.it

Overview

Reimagining opera and urban modernity

Opera’s role in shaping Italian unification (1815–61) has been the subject of intense debate in recent decades. The corporeal and sensory means by which Italian opera shaped local and national imaginaries has been significantly less examined, however. MOPRITALY engages directly with the materialities of operatic performance, reimagining relationships between Italian opera and urban modernity through a focus on a range of new theatrical practices. It offers a new perspective on this period of Italian modern history, by asking how opera participated in transforming the bodies and minds of Italian performers and audiences.

MOPRITALY’s focus on 1815–1861 also identifies a significantly larger role for Italy in recent histories of both European Romanticism and of musical and technological innovation. MOPRITALY reclaims a central role for Italy within European Romanticism by scrutinising the changing materials and mechanics of theatrical activity, engaging with both canonical and long forgotten works. It also uncovers an overlooked history of Italian technological innovation centred on the theatre, by exploring an enlarged range of now neglected historical actors. Drawing these advances and innovations together, the project overall sheds powerful new light on opera’s power as performance: its capacity to shape collective experiences of social and cultural change via new forms of aesthetic encounter.

The Principal Investigator of MOPRITALY is Dr Ditlev Rindom. The project is hosted at the University of Rome La Sapienza and is supervised by Professor Emanuele Senici. MOPRITALY also includes a non-academic placement at the Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milan.

Project at a glance

Title
Materialities of Operatic Performance in Risorgimento Italy
Acronym
MOPRITALY
Dates
January 2026 – June 2028
Funding body
Horizon Europe (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions)
Principal Investigator
Dr Ditlev Rindom
Supervisor
Professor Emanuele Senici
Hosting institution
University of Rome La Sapienza
Hosting department
Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art History and Performing Arts (SARAS)
Non-academic placement
Archivio Storico Ricordi
Full project record: CORDIS — European Commission Fact Sheet
Research Team

The people behind MOPRITALY

Principal Investigator

Dr Ditlev Rindom

Ditlev Rindom is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Rome La Sapienza. He gained his PhD at the University of Cambridge and subsequently held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at King’s College London. He is the author of Opera, Italianità and Transatlantic Exchange: In Search of Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and has published articles in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 19th-Century Music and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, as well as chapters in various edited collections.

He co-edited a special issue of Cambridge Opera Journal with Marco Ladd on Italian operetta, 1861–1955, and has chapters forthcoming including ‘Conductors’ in The Cambridge History of Italian Opera Since 1800 and ‘Puccini and Operetta’ in The Cambridge Companion to Puccini. His critical edition of Puccini’s La rondine for Casa Ricordi premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in 2024, while his reconstruction of the final 1921 version (with Martin Fitzpatrick) debuted at Barbican Hall in 2025 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

ditlev.rindom@uniroma1.it
Supervisor

Professor Emanuele Senici

Emanuele Senici studied musicology at the University of Pavia, King’s College London and Cornell University. He has been Professor of Music History at the University of Rome La Sapienza since 2008, having previously been Reader in Musicology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He was Edward T. Cone Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2006) and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (2023).

His research centres on Italian opera of the long nineteenth century, the theory and historiography of opera, and opera on video. His monographs include Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (University of Chicago Press, 2019). He has edited numerous volumes, and since 2024 has been co-editor of Opera Quarterly.

emanuele.senici@uniroma1.it
Archivio Storico Ricordi · General Manager

Pierluigi Ledda

Cultural manager and music collector, Pierluigi Ledda has been the general manager of the Archivio Storico Ricordi since 2011. He has implemented a strategy focused on the digitalisation of the musical heritage for free consultation through the online Digital Collection, the creation of an international network with cultural and scientific institutions, and the artistic reuse of the heritage.

Since 2018 he has been curator of the conversation series “The Music Folder”. Alongside his work at Ricordi, he teaches in the master’s degree in Music Publishing and Production at IULM in Milan, and has curated conferences on sound archives and music events.

Archivio Storico Ricordi · Direttore Scientifico

Gabriele Dotto

Born in Milan, Gabriele Dotto studied music composition and analysis in the US and Italy, then pursued a four-decade career in publishing while working as an independent scholar. At G. Ricordi & C. of Milan he served as editor-in-chief and later director of publishing, as well as director of its Historical Archive; at the University of Chicago Press he was the first managing editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi.

He is co-General Editor of the critical edition of the Operas of Gaetano Donizetti and General Editor of the complete edition of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini, and serves on the editorial boards of the complete works of Verdi, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Weill and Mayr. Editions he has prepared or supervised have been performed at La Scala, La Fenice, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan, among many others. He is Direttore scientifico of the Archivio Storico Ricordi.

Conference

Opera and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Italy

◆ 14–15 January 2027
◆ University of Rome La Sapienza

Opera and dance have been closely connected ever since the former’s emergence in late cinquecento Florence. Alongside danced episodes within individual operas, dance — and particularly ballet — has more broadly offered a wealth of sources, musical gestures and musical professionals stimulating operatic creation and performance across Italy, while operas were regularly adapted into ballets and danced musical extracts. This cross-circulation was boosted by several factors across the long nineteenth century: from the emergence of musical Romanticism offering ballet as a key aesthetic model; to interactions with French musical culture that had long foregrounded ballet scenes within operas; the proliferation of new theatres across Italy; and the rise of related theatrical genres such as operetta and pantomime during the final decades of the century.

This two-day conference invites scholars to explore interactions between opera and dance in Italy and the Italian operatic industry from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives. The overall aim is to consider what the interaction between the two art forms — extending to their literal occupation of the same theatres — might reveal about broader shifts in Italian musical culture across the period 1790–1922. The importance of dance music in Italian operas for Paris has long been recognised (Jürgensen, Smart), while recent studies have begun to examine Italian ballet (Rizzuti, Körner, Ertz, Lockhart, Williams) and dance music on the operetta stage (Oliva, Senici). Yet scholarly approaches to operatic intermediality have long focused on France and the USA, with attention within Italy largely concentrating on opera’s interaction with early cinema (Thomas, Ladd, Targa).

Programme

Thursday 14 January
14:00 – 18:00

Welcome and introductory remarks (15 mins)

Session 1
The Opera-Ballet Business
Chair: Emanuele Senici (Sapienza Università di Roma)
  • Emmanuelle Delattre-Destemberg (Maison Française d’Oxford, CNRS/UPHF) — “Beyond national schools: dance, opera and transnational theatrical cultures between Paris and Italy in the 19th century”
  • Giulia Taddeo (Università di Genova) — “Opera e ballo nell’impero teatrale di Alessandro Lanari: programmazione, incassi, contratti”
  • Maria Venuso (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”) — “Il teatro musicale a Napoli e la danza nelle prime decadi dell’Ottocento: una prospettiva Europea”
30-minute break
Session 2
Dancers and Singers
Chair: Céline Frigau Manning (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3)
  • Elena Cervellati (Università di Bologna) — “Dive di carta. Gesti danzati e cantati nell’iconografia della ballerina e della cantante d’opera tra anni Quaranta e Sessanta dell’Ottocento Italiano”
  • Eléa Lauret Baussay (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) — “Female Dancers in the Making of Italian Operatic Culture, 1860–1900: Through Professional, Stage and Choreographic Practices”
  • Maria Cristina Esposito (AIRDanza — Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sulla Danza, Roma) — “Tradurre il romanzo in gesto: I Promessi sposi di Salvatore Taglioni (1836) tra drammaturgia coreutica e melodramma”
18:00 onwards — Conference dinner in San Lorenzo (venue TBC)
Friday 15 January
09:30 – 13:00
Session 3
Ballet-Opera Adaptations and Connections in the Early Nineteenth Century
Chair: Ditlev Rindom (Sapienza Università di Roma)
  • Annamaria Corea (Sapienza Università di Roma) — “Verità e sentimento. La pantomima fra danza e opera nell’Ottocento Italiano”
  • Giuseppe Montemagno (Conservatorio “V. Bellini”, Catania) — «“Mi sono dalla tragedia, in qualche piccola parte soltanto, deviato”. Su Zaira di Alessandro Cortesi da Voltaire a Romani e Bellini»
  • Eleonora Di Cintio (Independent Scholar, Rome) — “Salvatore Viganò va all’opera”
30-minute break
Session 4
Ballet-Opera Adaptations and Connections in the Later Nineteenth Century
Chair: Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol)
  • Ditlev Rindom (Sapienza Università di Roma) — “Dancing the Risorgimento: Rota, Verdi and Il Conte di Montecristo”
  • Terence Sinclair (University of Cambridge) — “Selective Silence: Opera, Ballet and the Reception of Masaniello in 1860s Naples”
  • Simone di Crescenzo & Silvia Garzarella (Università di Bologna) — “Due retoriche del climax: la ‘variazione’ tra musica e danza”
60-minute break
Friday 15 January
14:00 – 17:00
Session 5
Fine Secolo Exchanges
Chair: Gavin Williams (King’s College London)
  • Ornella Di Tondo (AIRDanza — Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sulla Danza, Roma) — “L’Ero e Leandro di A. Boito nella versione musicale di Luigi Mancinelli. La Guida per la messa in scena e le Coreografia di Luigi Albertieri (New York, 1899) nel fondo Mancinelli dell’Archivio di Stato di Orvieto”
  • Taryn Dubois (Brandon University / Yale University) — “Poema coreografico: a history”
  • Jane Sylvester (University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory) — “Making Spirits Move: Dance and the Materialization of the Supernatural in Le Villi”
30-minute break
Session 6
Towards Modernism
Chair: Ellen Lockhart (University of Toronto)
  • Harry Rose (Brown University) — “Smashing the Statue: Deconstructing art in Manzotti and D’Annunzio”
  • Erinn E. Knyt (University of Massachusetts Amherst) — “Ferruccio Busoni’s Operas and Dance: Architecture, Movement, and Jest”
Concluding remarks and discussion (30 mins)

Convenor & committee

Convenor: Dr Ditlev Rindom (University of Rome La Sapienza)

Call for Papers Closed

Opera and dance have been closely connected ever since the former’s emergence in late cinquecento Florence. Alongside danced episodes within individual operas, dance — and particularly ballet — has more broadly offered a wealth of sources, musical gestures and musical professionals stimulating operatic creation and performance across Italy, while operas were regularly adapted into ballets and danced musical extracts. This cross-circulation was boosted by several factors across the long nineteenth century: from the emergence of musical Romanticism offering ballet as a key aesthetic model; to interactions with French musical culture that had long foregrounded ballet scenes within operas; the proliferation of new theatres across Italy; and the rise of related theatrical genres such as operetta and pantomime during the final decades of the century.

This two-day conference invites scholars to explore interactions between opera and dance in Italy and the Italian operatic industry from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives. The overall aim is to consider what the interaction between the two art forms — extending to their literal occupation of the same theatres — might reveal about broader shifts in Italian musical culture across the period 1790–1922. The importance of dance music in Italian operas for Paris has long been recognised (Jürgensen, Smart), while recent studies have begun to examine Italian ballet (Rizzuti, Körner, Ertz, Lockhart, Williams) and dance music on the operetta stage (Oliva, Senici). Yet scholarly approaches to operatic intermediality have long focused on France and the USA, with attention within Italy largely concentrating on opera’s interaction with early cinema (Thomas, Ladd, Targa).

Possible topics for papers

  • Adaptation (danced versions of operas; operatic reworking of ballets or shared source material)
  • Thematic parallels or divergent histories
  • Musical gestures and dramatic form
  • Danced episodes within opera
  • Professional mobility between sectors and performance practice — conductors, violin directors, stage directors and dancers
  • Mise-en-scène and ideas of visuality; different configurations of media
  • Mobility and the circulation of opera-ballet materials globally
  • Musical criticism
  • Representations of opera and dance within Italian nineteenth-century fiction

Original call for papers

Proposals were invited for individual papers (20 minutes plus 10 minutes’ discussion). The official languages of the conference are Italian and English, and proposals could be submitted in either language. Each proposal was to include the speaker’s full name, institutional affiliation (if relevant), email address, paper title, an abstract (maximum 250 words) and a short biography (maximum 100 words).

The conference is funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, and financial assistance will be available to support accommodation and travel. A selection of papers will be invited to contribute to an edited publication, to be submitted to a leading journal in 2028.

Deadline for proposals
1 July 2026
Notification of acceptance
31 July 2026
Conference
14–15 Jan 2027