Montevideo, Manila, Valparaíso, Havana, Vienna. These were some of the places evoked in the studies, music and reflections presented at this conference organized by Francesco Milella González-Luna (University College Dublin). The title of the event was deliberately broad – as broad as the Spanish Empire itself once was – and, like the empire, the programme was diverse and full of nuance, encompassing very different realities gathered under a label that at times revealed its own artificiality. The notions of ‘empire’ and ‘imperial’ were anything but uniform: in some papers they were approached as political structures, in others as cultural networks or shifting symbolic frameworks. Nor was the concept of ‘opera’ treated as fixed. The presentations embraced a wide range of genres – opera seria, operetta, sainetes, musical and dramatic comedies, tonadillas and, of course, zarzuelas – and highlighted the ways in which these forms circulated and hybridized across the Atlantic world.

The conference brought together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, with participants from several Latin American countries as well as from Europe and North America. Most speakers presented in person, and some participated remotely. Over four days, the sessions explored a range of topics that was broad in both chronology and approach. While the largest share of the papers was related to the nineteenth century, many focused on earlier periods; there was also general consideration of the ways in which cultural legacies from the early-modern period carried on into later times. Víctor Sánchez Sánchez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) observed that the nineteenth century seems to run ‘downhill’, with much of the key musical activity occurring towards its end – a pattern mirrored in the conference, where contributions seemed to gather pace towards the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The event unfolded in a hybrid linguistic format, with both English and Spanish in play, though Spanish predominated – in the papers themselves as well as in informal conversations during meals and other spaces for exchange. Two embassies in Ireland, those of Mexico and Chile, also played a notable role by hosting sessions and supporting activities, including a concert-lecture of Chilean opera by the Colectivo Ópera Nacional.

‘Opera and the Spanish Empire’ opened with a keynote lecture by Christopher Webber (independent scholar, London) that provided a broad, yet provocative interpretative framework. Entitled, after T. S. Eliot, ‘“In my end is my beginning”: Operatic Perspectives on Spain’s Imperial Arc’ , this presentation traced a circular historical arc for opera and zarzuela in the Spanish imperial sphere: from the 1492 encounter with the Americas to the 1898 loss of the last colonies, and onward to the lingering cultural resonances of those events. Drawing on a range of examples including Manuel Fernández Caballero’s Gigantes y cabezudos (1898) and Alberto Franchetti’s Cristoforo Colombo (1892), he examined how such works narrate both the splendour and the decline of Spain’s imperial project. A recurring thread in his talk was the persistence of the so-called leyenda negra (Black Legend) – a vision of Spain as cruel and backward that had circulated widely, especially amongst rival colonial powers in Europe, but which also shaped Spanish self-perception. Equally central was his critique of rigid taxonomies, particularly those surrounding the zarzuela, often treated as an exclusively Spanish phenomenon; Webber called instead for an ‘Atlantic’ approach that considers the circulation of repertoires, performers and audiences across the empire and throughout its extended cultural networks, including those beyond the empire. This call to rethink genres and geographies was a theme that reverberated through much of the conference.

Among the papers devoted to the ‘long’ eighteenth century, several were distinct for their focus on the circulation of Hispanic repertoires in European contexts and their dialogue with imperial imaginaries. My own paper, ‘Sainete for a Married Infanta: Opera and Hispanic Influence at the Habsburg Court’ (Clara Viloria Hernández, Harvard University), examined the presence of genres such as the sainete and other theatrical vocal music written in Spanish and related to the figure of the Spanish-born Empress Margarita Teresa and the cultural networks linking the Austrian court to the Hispanic world in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This perspective connected organically with the presentation by Leonardo J. Waisman (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), who explored representations of the ‘Spanish’ in Viennese repertoire. Waisman echoed some of the topics covered in my presentation, extending the discussion to other works, such as El Prometeo (1669), composed in Vienna by Antonio Draghi to a Spanish text during the years when the Infanta-Empress Margarita was there; he also expanded his perspective to consider Spanish musical influence in Vienna in the eighteenth century. Waisman traced a continuum from Gluck’s stylized fandangos to the famous seguidilla in Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara and the fandango in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. He highlighted how ‘Spanish’ elements in Vienna oscillated between exoticism and authenticity, challenging centre–periphery hierarchies that still shape much musicological discourse. The thematic convergence of these two papers emphasized the value of rethinking Vienna as a cultural hub with clear links to the Spanish empire.

Complementing these central European perspectives, Alfonso Colorado offered a compelling reading of Carl Heinrich Graun’s Montezuma (1755), composed for the Berlin court of Frederick the Great – who himself wrote the original libretto (later revised by Giampetro Tagliazucchi). Set against the backdrop of the Seven Years War, Colorado interpreted the opera as an allegory of enlightened despotism and imperial politics: the character of Montezuma (Aztec emperor Moctezuma II) appears as a tolerant ruler, while that of Ferdinando Cortès (Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés) embodies Machiavellian ruthlessness. This inversion of conquest narratives reflected both Prussian anxieties about and Enlightenment critiques of Catholic monarchy, illustrating how the Spanish conquest served as a mirror for non-Spanish imperial ambitions.

Within the same chronological frame, Bernardo Illari (University of North Texas) examined the Jesuit mission opera San Ignacio (archived in Chiquitos and Moxos, Bolivia), identifying it as the only complete example of ‘mission opera’ – a genre that reframed European operatic conventions for radically different colonial settings. Illari traced its dual rhetorical structure: a didactic register for Indigenous audiences, incorporating local languages and linear narrative, and a more esoteric layer for Jesuits, grounded in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (first published in 1548) and the meditation on the ‘two standards’ (a spiritual allegory contrasting the forces of good and evil, represented by Christ and Lucifer). This double coding enabled the work to function both as a tool of conversion and as missionary introspection. Illari also highlighted the local reappropriation of the work, noting that San Ignacio was reimagined as a foundational myth in Moxos and continued to be performed into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His paper also echoed the call in Webber’s keynote address to view these productions as ones in which identities were defined and in which the reconfiguring of imperial hierarchies went beyond the European artistic and historical paradigms.

The nineteenth century’s prominence in the programme brought colonial and postcolonial encounters to the fore, with opera and zarzuela mediating questions of identity, modernity and power. A cluster of papers focused on Havana’s Teatro Tacón. Charlotte Bentley (Newcastle University) explored the theatre’s mid-century repertoire, revealing the racial politics and censorship anxieties embedded in Cuban zarzuelas. Complementing this, Òscar Ferrer i Bech (Stanford University) traced the Tacón’s institutional history and its role as a conduit for touring Spanish companies and hybrid repertoires, mapping the theatre’s place within Caribbean cultural circuits.

Miguel Ángel Ríos (Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales; Universidad Alfonso X El Sabio) examined the Philippines’ sparse but telling presence in Madrid’s género chico (a genre of musical theatre related to the zarzuela), contrasting it with Cuba’s abundant representation. Compositions such as El igorrote, inspired by the 1897 Exposición General de las Islas Filipinas (General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands), highlighted how librettists crafted stereotypes – including quirks of speech and exoticized village scenes – so as to domesticate distant colonial subjects for metropolitan audiences. This asymmetry between the relative immediacy of the Caribbean and the remoteness of Southeast Asia and the Pacific laid bare the unevenness of Spain’s imperial imagination.

José Manuel Izquierdo König (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) addressed the circulation of lyric companies in Chile and Peru during the guano and nitrate wars of the 1870s–1880s, focusing on the theatres of Valparaíso and Lima. He illuminated how zarzuela and Italian opera alternated in wartime programmes, with national anthems interpolated or even lyrically altered so as to calibrate contemporaneous anti-Spanish sentiment. Francisco Manuel López Gómez (Universidad de Castilla–La Mancha) turned to Montevideo and Buenos Aires, analysing zarzuelas and operas commemorating Christopher Columbus on the 1892 quadricentennial of his first trans-Atlantic voyage – works that oscillated between heroic myth-making and critiques of conquest, framing Columbus as both ascetic visionary and romantic scientist.

Later sessions expanded this focus into the nineteenth century and beyond: Víctor Sánchez Sánchez traced opera’s proliferation in Latin America; Rondy Torres (Universidad de los Andes) explored Colombian costumbrista zarzuelas (works focusing on the customs of a particular social group) as part of a broader hispanophile turn in the late nineteenth century, reflecting a desire to reconnect with Spanish cultural traditions after independence. Carlos Figueroa (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) discussed shifting genre labels in late nineteenth-century Spanish lyric theatre, from Chapí’s use of terms such as juguete lírico, opereta and comedia lírica, to the 1881 New York staging of Castles in Spain – an adaptation of La redoma encantada with music by Juan Gulda – marketed as a comedia musical. Bringing the conference into the present, Carmen Noheda Tirado (Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, Universidad Complutense de Madrid) examined contemporary operatic productions that revisit the conquest from critical perspectives, often migrating from the ‘black box’ of the theatre to the ‘white cube’ of the museum.

A distinctive session combined scholarship and performance: the lecture-concert ‘Oh, guerrieri della Patria: Early Chilean Operas, 1898–1909’ , presented by the Colectivo Ópera Nacional (Soledad Mayorga, soprano; Rony Ancavil, tenor; Pilar Peña, piano) with commentary by Gonzalo Cuadra (Universidad Alberto Hurtado). Organized in collaboration with the Embassy of Chile in Ireland, the event offered excerpts from the first Chilean operas, which were premiered at the turn of the twentieth century.

One of the highlights of the last day of the conference was a closing roundtable, moderated by Francesco Milella González-Luna and featuring Rondy Torres, Zoila Elena Vega Salvatierra (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) and José Manuel Izquierdo König, which crystallized many of the questions that had surfaced throughout the conference. Chief among them was the fragility of the archival record – particularly in Latin America, where much of the repertoire survives only in fragments that are scattered across ecclesiastical holdings or private collections, and in a poor state – and the methodological challenges that this reality poses for reconstructing theatrical and musical practices. This very incompleteness, which works as a catalyst, encourages a historiography that is attuned less to fixed canons and more to processes of circulation, translation and reception. The panel also explored questions as to whether opera can function as a decolonial tool or whether its origins and frameworks remain inextricably tied to imperial logics.

Equally central was the issue of porous genre boundaries: the ‘zarzuelization’ of operas, the limits and limitations that genres imposed and which persist for musicologists and scholars, the incorporation of local elements into colonial adaptations, and the moral translations that softened plots or endings to suit specific contexts. Such hybridizing, evident across both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, resonated with Webber’s earlier call to move beyond ‘genre exceptionalism’ and to adopt an Atlantic perspective that privileges flows and reconfigurations over static national labels.

The closing remarks also revisited the tension between local and global frames in music historiography: how to do justice to the specificity of each context while acknowledging the imperial dynamics that connect all of them. This approach, evident across many papers, emerged as one of the conference’s key contributions: an invitation to rethink the histories of opera and zarzuela whilst leaving aside parallel narratives and aiming at interwoven stories that traverse continents and centuries. The four days in Dublin revealed constant frictions and conversations between familiarity and exoticism, hybridity and adaptation, creative appropriation and the forging of stereotypes. Beyond mapping past practices, the conference also provided the seeds for future projects: collaborative, comparative approaches that repurpose these compositions and frame them within a necessarily global perspective – one shaped, yet also unsettled, by these works’ imperial and colonial pasts.