This introduction presents a historical and conceptual overview of the monograph, particularly the longer history of discourses connecting Italian opera, Italy and italianità, and ideas surrounding the Old World and the New World. Milan and Liberal Italy (1861/70–1922) are introduced first in the context of Italy’s unification and the wider social and technological transformations that defined the Second Industrial Revolution. New York and Buenos Aires are then considered together, exploring their changing position in the global operatic circuit from the 1870s onwards and the theatrical infrastructure in both cities, before the methodological approach of the monograph and an overview of the individual chapters are outlined.

Barred from many employments, Jewish artists entered the music industry and produced a twentieth-century canon of Tin Pan Alley hits, show tunes, and jazz standards combining light opera, sophistication, and Black music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat (1936) set a new paradigm: its “Ol’ Man River” blends minstrelsy, classical music, and spirituals. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) fused European influences with blues, foxtrot, ragtime, and jazz. His “I Got Rhythm” (1930) is among history’s most influential jazz compositions, and his jazz opera Porgy and Bess (1935) boldly depicts Black experience. Gershwin’s union of lowbrow-highbrow, Jewish and African American music created a radical multicultural art. Although recent scholars accuse Gershwin, Kern, and others of cultural exploitation, many Black jazz artists embraced their music. Even Duke Ellington, who denounced Porgy and Bess, eventually recorded it and imitated Gershwin’s chord progressions and rhythms.

In 1920, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso accepted a lucrative contract to sing at ten opera performances in Cuba, most of them in Havana’s recently built theater across from the Parque Central. When Caruso arrived in the island, he found a tense political climate: sugar prices had plummeted in the international market, and unemployment and economic crises had led protesting workers to the streets. During his final performance of Verdi’s Aida, a bomb exploded in the theater, sending the audience and musicians into a panic. After the explosion, Caruso’s reaction became the subject of much literary speculation. This chapter explores the accounts of Caruso and the bomb given by Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mayra Montero, and contrasts them to Caruso’s own version of the events.

This chapter reviews some of Maconchy’s most celebrated staged vocal works to tease out her tendency to inflect these works politically. Turning briefly to The Three Strangers (1957), The Departure (1961), The Birds (1967–68), as well as other collaborations with librettist Anne Ridler, the chapter examines transformations the composer expresses at simultaneous registers – whether poetic, thematic, or structural. The chapter further compares the political messaging in these works with her teacher Vaughan Williams’s ‘morality’ opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which sets much of the same symbolism extended throughout Maconchy’s oeuvre.

Music festivals have long been a significant forum in which to introduce new repertoire. In the United Kingdom well established events such as the Three Choirs, Norfolk and Norwich festivals or the London Proms season offered a synthesis of well-known works and premieres. The changing environment for the Arts in post-war Britain witnessed an expansion of festival activity. These initiatives were supported partly by the Arts Council and were encouraged by a desire to make music, old and new, accessible to a world starved by conflict. Elizabeth Maconchy takes an important role in the story of the festival. Her impressionistic orchestral suite The Land, the impact of war upon performance of her work, her experimental forays into opera, a fascination for narrative inspired by her own Celtic background and that of other countries, and her commitment to community music-making reveal much about her extensive contribution to twentieth-century festival culture.

Europe’s recovery and reconfirmation were brought about by a growing and increasingly urbanized population as well as by technological advancements and the “Columbian Exchange” that gave Europe access to American riches. Even as the balance of economic power shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the humanistic ideology first developed in Italy spread throughout the region and stimulated the emergence of new theatre forms. The theory and practice of commedia erudita (developed from the study of Roman comedy) and commedia dell’arte (Europe’s first fully professional theatre form) were brought together in the spoken theatre that filled new niches for urban commercial theatre in the leading cities of Spain, England, and France. The study of Greek tragedy, meanwhile, prompted the emergence of opera in Italy, even as royal courts in France and England glorified themselves with ballet and court masques, respectively.

In the mid-nineteenth century, opéra de salon dominated residential entertainment in Parisian salons. As these short, comedic operas were adapted for household receptions, librettists and composers faced a choice: adhere to staging conventions or adapt their works to fit the idiosyncrasies of residential space. Focusing on the salon of Anne Gabrielle Orfila, who was a proponent of opéra de salon and who hosted at least ten unique productions, this study examines how opera was adapted to salon space. It shows how stage action was not always contained by a single room, with scenes often spanning adjacent rooms. This affected audience seating and shaped the dramatic experience. The study also considers the significance of salon décor as it harmonized with or competed with the opera scenery. At a time when spectacle and elaborate designs prevailed at the Paris Opéra, opéra de salon presented a contrasting model that challenged theatrical conventions.

In this chapter, I explore a selection of musical games performed at seventeenth-century French literary salons, where members of a coterie quoted recitative, parodied airs, and reimagined entire opera scenes. Though musical conversations were ephemeral, the outlines of the social practices can be reconstructed through a combined study of various types of sources. Letters crystallize conversations interwoven with opera fragments, while plays depict galant men courting women by interspersing sung quotations from contemporary operas into conversations, repurposing voguish spectacles as declarations of love. Manuscript chansonniers preserve parodies of complete opera scenes, substituting operatic characters with recognizable contemporary figures and refashioning the verse. By fostering spaces where participants ascended social hierarchies through their witty abilities as conversationalists, salon hosts transformed opera into an interactive social practice.

This chapter explores the “joint” musical education of the two siblings Fanny and Felix, taking as its point of departure the educational backgrounds of the parents which differentiated little by gender in terms of approach and content, but certainly in the intended paths for the two children. Felix was destined to become a professional composer, and the genres in which he was groomed were thus the “public” ones (opera in particular) while Fanny was expected to excel in the “small” genres: piano pieces and songs.

An examination of Meredith Monk’s 1976 opera Quarry in the context of her other works of music theater and film, as well as selected music compositions from the full span of her career. The analysis reads the opera alongside scholarship on the "post-memory" generation (characterized by its distance from the Holocaust), as well as on photography, monuments and "counter-monuments," and other memorial art.

Chapter 2 places Lucia within the context of bel canto opera in the first half of the nineteenth century and discusses the dramaturgy, voice types and fixed vocal forms that are often found in this style of opera. In addition, going beyond the mere definition of ‘beautifully sung’, Chapter 2 argues that bel canto reflects an operatic work where the singer’s vocal agility (i.e., their coloratura) is the main vehicle that defines the character’s dramatic persona and climactic journey, from an unfortunate individual who, at first glance, is powerless to change their situation, to a fully rounded character with a certain heroic potential. Lucia is unique in this regard owing to the main character’s ability to shape-shift from a quiet and somewhat naïve lover and dutiful daughter to a murderer and usurper of family values. This malleability between a tasteful showpiece for the female voice and a tragic tour-de-force is one of the main factors that keeps Lucia in the repertoire today. Such versatility places Donizetti’s opera more in line with the psychologically rich and often violent works of Verdi and Puccini at the end of the century rather than the operatic works of the 1830s.

Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory developed since the 1990s for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe, this chapter approaches opera as a crucial cultural site for (re)negotiating the relationship with “the West,” Soviet hegemony, and the Global South after 1948. It focuses on the ambivalence in representations of the racialized Other in Czech opera, which highlights the specific, lateral relationship between what was formally known as the Second and Third worlds. The chapter offers a close reading of the opera Jezero Ukereve (“Lake Ukerewe”) by Otmar Mácha, premiered in 1966. Featuring Black and mixed-race characters, the opera generally expresses empathy for and solidarity with the colonized populations, informed by the Czechs’ experience with German oppression, yet it unavoidably reproduces the colonial ideology of a civilizational mission. The opera is interpreted in relation to Czechoslovakia’s official Africa policy and the aesthetic debates about Czech New Music.

Most public music institutions in the Czech lands have been affected by the region’s complex political history. This chapter focuses on the politicization of public music institutions dedicated to opera (both opera theaters and opera companies, such as the Estates Theater, the Czech National Theater, and the New German Theater) and symphonic music (both concert halls, such as the Rudolfinum and the Municipal House, and the ensembles that performed in them). To avoid Pragocentrism, the chapter also explores music history in the north Bohemian spa town Teplice (Teplitz). Unlike Prague, Teplice remained a predominantly German-speaking city until the forced removal of the German population from the Czech lands after World War II. In both cities, musical institutions transformed according to their inhabitants’ social and political preferences, and musical works of the past entered the artistic canon in connection to patriotic and national agendas.