Francesca Vella, Networking Operatic Italy

Abstract

The intersection of opera and technology has been a fruitful area of study in recent years, with scholars regularly examining audiovisual media from the mid- to late twentieth century to the present day (such as television, film, and live broadcasts) as well as their technological predecessors (sound recording, silent cinema, and radio). An increasing contingent of scholarship continues to expand such considerations back into the nineteenth century, harnessing interests in operatic intersectionality to investigate the genre’s relationship with older technologies.1 Francesca Vella’s Networking Operatic Italy engages the broad range of this discourse, presenting a rigorously researched investigation into the Italian opera industry’s encounters with nineteenth-century technologies while simultaneously reframing historical media as predecessors to those intertwined with operatic production and circulation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this persuasive and multifaceted study, Vella provides a compelling examination of the convergence of Italian opera and technology, focusing on the intersection of local, national, and international operatic networks in the decades surrounding Italian Unification. In so doing, Vella harnesses an impressive array of recent scholarly trends, engaging interdisciplinary discourses surrounding mobility, materiality, technology, temporality, and voice in crafting an innovative and nuanced study of Italian opera’s production and circulation.