Global Currents, Musical Streams: European Opera in Colonial Southeast Asia

Abstract

The advancement of the new transportation and communications technologies in the nineteenth century changed the landscape of the trade between Asia and Europe. Steam transportation, the telegraph, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 heightened the pace of material trade and labour migrations (including cultural workers), along with commercial transactions of cultural goods and performance cultures. These steamships that carried the raw products from East to the West also carried musical instruments, musical scores, and opera and theatre companies from Europe to Asia. This article surveys primary archival sources and recent literature on the itinerant European opera companies that arrived in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and analyses the economic and sociological aspects of this phenomenon. This article also examines the local responses to the travelling theatre troupes which took residencies in the different Southeast Asian cities.