This article focuses on the Italian inventor, telephone pioneer and opera house technician Antonio Meucci (1808–1889), exploring the shifting relationships between Meucci’s experiments and his operatic connections across his transatlantic career. Meucci first developed an acoustic telephone while working at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola, before discovering the transmission of sound via electricity during his tenure as chief machinist at Havana’s Teatro Tacón in the 1840s. These experiments were further refined after his relocation to New York, where he continued to be part of a network of Italian musicians, thinkers, journalists and scientific practitioners while seeking to patent his invention. Feted among the Italian diasporic community in the USA – both for his technological innovations and for his close relationship with Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi – at the time of his death Meucci was nonetheless embroiled in a lengthy legal case against Alexander Graham Bell over the primacy of the telephone’s invention, a dispute not fully resolved until the twenty-first century. This article accordingly unfolds in three main parts, focusing in turn on Florence, Havana and New York. Meucci’s experiments – and his complex emigrant environment – collectively highlight the Italian opera house as a global and multidimensional site of technological and sonic innovation, during a period when the telephone gradually moved from conceptual fantasy to material reality. At the same time, Meucci’s career can challenge direct links between Italian sonic environments and Italy itself. Ultimately, I argue, the complex and changing relationships between opera and the telephone invite more nuanced approaches to histories of music and technology, while demonstrating the centrality of the Italian opera house and its sounds – within, across, and beyond the stage – to nineteenth-century auditory cultures more broadly.

Malta was a British colony for over 150 years until it became independent in 1964. Though the presence of the British in Malta was considerable and permeated all sectors of Maltese life and culture, the island’s commercial and cultural ties with neighbouring Italy never ceased. This article aims to analyse how Malta’s cultural sympathies and affinities with Italy alongside British colonialism contributed to the musical growth of the wind band tradition in Malta between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The co-existence in Malta of the political and cultural conflict brought about by the two competing cultures at this time and, paradoxically, their confluence transpire here as central to processes of musical growth through opportunities for syncretism.

This article examines the evolution of Soviet operatic conventions during Khrushchev’s Thaw. The first opera to be prematurely cancelled from the Bolshoi Theatre since Stalin was Rodion Shchedrin’s 1961 opera Not Love Alone, and as such, it set the standard for what would be deemed unacceptable in Thaw-era opera. Using this opera as a case study, I employ extensive archival material, including never-before-accessed audience surveys and internal Bolshoi Theatre meeting minutes, to analyse the opera’s path to official acceptance – and then official rejection. I thus illuminate the competing demands that composers, Party bureaucrats, and audiences expected of the Soviet opera project, and the convergences and divergences with the Stalin-era. Finally, I demonstrate why the project of creating a robust repertoire of contemporary-themed Soviet opera failed during the Thaw, never to be revived with such fervour, and demonstrate why Shchedrin’s opera was the attempt closest to achieving enduring success.