Materialities of Operatic Performance in Risorgimento Italy

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.

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).