Italian Opera Houses Research Articles

Reluctant Innovators: Dynamic Capabilities and Digital Transformation of Italian Opera Houses in the Pandemic Crisis

This paper analyzes the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the process of digitalization of Italian opera houses. Based on a conceptual framework provided by the literature on dynamic capabilities and digital transformation, the evidence collected from six case studies is presented. Results are discussed with reference to two ideal-types of pandemic-induced paths (“back to normal” vs “new normal”) and to the variables that explain differences in strategies: history, digital mindset of human resources staff, dominance, leadership and external integration. Relevant implications for both theory and policy and managerial practice are presented with regard to present and future innovation paths.

A Dea-Malmquist Approach to Evaluate Efficiency in the Performing Arts: Focus on German and Italian Opera Houses

A Dea-Malmquist Approach to Evaluate Efficiency in the Performing Arts: Focus on German and Italian Opera Houses

The sound diffusion in Italian Opera Houses: Some examples

Soundfield diffuseness in rooms is considered a fundamental aspect of a high-quality room acoustics. Since early studies by Hodgson up to more recent studies of Shtrepi and Embrechts, it was shown that high levels of sound diffuseness could guarantee blending of music, as well as spatial sound perception by listeners, and this could enhance the global indoor acoustic quality. Conversely, Italian-style Opera houses represent an important architectural place, in which the special features of the rich decorations, and the specific characteristics of the volume, give a unique atmosphere, including a peculiar psycho-acoustics impression. However, some geometric properties of the opera houses could influence the global acoustic perception. The shape of the marmorino wall on the stalls, as well as the parallelism of the lateral walls in the boxes, often causes a lack of spaciousness and sometimes in the worst cases provokes focalization. This phenomenon leads to design special devices that could be inserted in the theatres, to avoid focalization, even if they are rarely accepted. This article deals with the design of some acoustic diffusing panels and their functioning in three different theatres, combining both acoustics needs with architectural constraints. The article starts analysing and commenting on the issues that resulted from the measurements conducted in an Italian opera house. In the following step, three examples of the design of diffusing panels are proposed. Finally, the results of diffusion and scattering coefficient of panels realized in the last theatre considered here are reported.

A virtual orchestra to qualify the acoustics of historical opera houses

Italian Historical Opera Houses are private or public spaces built around a cavea, with tiers of boxes on the surrounding walls. At the early age – from 16th to 18th century – boxes were private properties of the richest class, typically the financial responsible of the whole building. The stalls hosted the middle class, that gradually increased its social position and for this reason the wooden seats were progressively replaced by chairs. The gallery was reserved to lower classes. Does this social division correspond to a different acoustic comfort? The present work tries to answer this question using subjective preference models provided by scholars. With this aim, the room criteria defined by different authors and in distinct times are lined up with the ISO 3382 standards and analysed depending on the acoustic peculiarities of an Italian Historical Opera House selected as case study. Calibrated impulse responses were handled through the numerical simulations of a whole orchestra of virtual sound sources in the pit.

From Tangible to Intangible Heritage inside Italian Historical Opera Houses

Historical opera houses in Italy have been the place for the development of a relevant part of the National musical tradition and their design is paired with a peculiar acoustical fingerprint. Due to its relevance this can be regarded as an intangible heritage embedded in the tangible heritage constituted by the theatre building itself. In particular the presence of fairly deep lateral enclosures opened to the main hall volume, called the “boxes,” is of paramount importance for the implications it had on the listening experience perceived by the public. For instance, the positions in the box recess had a much less favourable sound field compared to the frontal ones located at the box opening towards the hall. In this work the need for the box design is briefly recalled from an historical perspective and then the sound field in the boxes is described as the combination of several sound reflections from specific interior surfaces. It is seen how the related listening experience can vary in a remarkable manner while moving from boxes at different tiers. This characteristic greatly differentiates historical opera houses from modern ones, where one of the most valuable attribute is a limited change in acoustics over large audiences. The acoustical environment of historical halls and inside boxes in particular was important in building up the ear of the Italian opera goers, thus a close consideration of the peculiarities of the intangible heritage is necessary in case of restorations and cannot be overlooked.

Towards Italian Opera Houses: A Review of Acoustic Design in Pre-Sabine Scholars

The foundation of architectural acoustics as an independent science is generally referred to Sabine’s early studies and their application. Nevertheless, since the 16th Century, a great number of authors wrote essays and treatises on the design of acoustic spaces, with a growing attention to the newborn typology of the Opera house, whose evolution is strongly connected to the cultural background of the Italian peninsula. With roots in the Renaissance rediscovery of Vitruvius’s treatise and his acoustic theory, 16th- to 19th-Century Italian authors tackled several issues concerning the construction of theatres—among them, architectural and structural features, the choice of the materials, the social meanings of performances. Thanks to this literature, the consolidation of this body of knowledge led to a standardisation of the forms of the Italian Opera house throughout the 19th Century. Therefore, the scope of this review paper is to focus on the treatises, essays and publications regarding theatre design, written by pre-Sabinian Italian scholars. The analysis of such literature aims at highlighting the consistencies in some 19th-Century minor Italian Opera houses, in order to understand to what extent this scientific and experimental background was part of the building tradition during the golden age of the Italian Opera.

Dancers at London's Italian Opera Houses as Recorded in the Libretti

For the audience, the purchase of a libretto when attending the King's Theatre, London's elite house for foreign opera and dance, was a commonplace. It offered the text of the opera, and a parallel English translation; it could also contain an argument for the opera, and other material relevant to the performance. A dramatis personae was nearly always included, together with a cast list, and after the mid-century, the libretti often contained the names of the dancers and choreographers. This article sets out to document the mentions of these names, and to chart their inclusion in the context of the history of the libretto. It identifies the first inclusion of a choreographer's name (in Antigono, in May 1746), the first dancers (in Ipermestra, in November 1754), and the first leader of the dancers (in the libretti for the 1790–1791 season), and identifies the inexplicable tailing off, and then total omission, of dancer personnel from the London Italian opera libretti.

Impulse Responses Measured with MLS or Swept-Sine Signals Applied to Architectural Acoustics: An In-depth Analysis of the Two Methods and Some Case Studies of Measurements Inside Theaters

The measurement of impulse responses inside of a room or a theatre is a critical task in architectural acoustics. The impulse responses are usually measured using either Exponential Sine Sweep (ESS) or Maximum Length Sequence (MLS) signals. The theory behind MLS generation and use is well developed and does not involve computational problems. When a non-linear system is measured, the distortion appears in the deconvolved impulse response as a series of peaks distributed over time, in deterministic positions. In case of presence of noise during the measurement, the phase of any spurious noise, even an impulsive one, is randomly distributed over the entire length of the recovered impulse response. The ESS signal shows some advantages over MLS, such as a better signal to noise ratio (SNR) and a robust non-linearity rejection. Typically, in the same conditions, the ESS has a dynamic range of about 15dB higher than MLS. Nonetheless, the generation of an ESS signal and the subsequent analysis of impulse responses involve some problems whose solutions are not yet common practice and short impulsive noises can contaminate the sampled data, causing bad effects on the deconvolved impulse response, in form of a frequency decreasing sweep. For the above mentioned reasons ESS is generally more suitable than MLS for use in architectural acoustics, but in some cases the use of MLS signal is still to be preferred. Differences and advantages between impulse response measurements obtained by means of MLS or ESS, are analyzed and discussed in this paper and an in-depth analysis of both measurement methods is presented. Some case studies of impulse response measurements performed inside historical Italian opera houses using both MLS and ESS, in non-ideal conditions (for example in presence of spurious noise), are presented and examined, highlighting differences, advantages and pitfalls of both measurement methods.

Extraction of the envelope from impulse responses using pre-processed energy detection for early decay estimation.

The Schroeder's backward integration method and its applications have been widely studied in the literature; some papers analyze the performance of the method, some others suggest various enhancement techniques. In spite of these findings, there exist several cases where the energy decay curve extracted using the classical backward integration method and the parameters computed from it seem not always representative of the phenomenon under study. Among them, the cases where the early decay is dependent on strong, distinct reflections occurring just after the direct wave, as in most Italian opera houses. Other cases are measured impulse responses with a very low signal-to-noise ratio or missing the direct wave. In the literature, alternatives to the Schroeder's method have been proposed, ranging from Hilbert transform to non-linear processing techniques. In this work a method for the extraction of the envelope based on pre-processed energy detection for early decay estimation is proposed. It is shown that it returns an envelope well matching the first part of the decay even in non-linear cases, returning detailed information on the first part of the decay. The performance of the proposed method is presented and discussed for some exemplary impulse responses measured in historical opera houses. A preliminary study on the perceptive relevance of the method is finally presented.

Strategic practices and italian opera houses' performance: the innovation dilemma

In this article it is explored the effect of innovation on Italian opera houses’ performance. Innovation is measured as the number of opera productions staged by a theatre (i.e., new in terms of set designs, costumes and stage directions not previously used by any other opera house). Opera houses’ performance is measured as occupancy rate and ability to attract private grants. Our sample includes two Italian operatic institutions: 1) lyric and symphonic foundations, and 2) teatri di tradizione. Data collected from 2007 to 2009 show that among the sampled institutions, only the lyric and symphonic foundations are able to increase their occupancy rate from opera productions. Moreover results highlight that the ability of opera houses to collect private grants is positively affected by the number of opera productions, meaning that innovation plays a key role in strengthening opera houses’ fundraising capabilities. This is particularly important in the Italian opera scenario where the severe consequences of the economic crisis and decreased public funding to opera houses have sharpened competition for scarce financial resources. Le dimensioni di performance esplorate nel presente studio si focalizzano sul tasso di occupazione della sala e sulla capacita del teatro di reperire fondi da sostenitori privati. Il sample include due tipologie di istituzioni operistiche: le fondazioni lirico sinfoniche e i teatri di tradizione. I dati, raccolti dal 2007 al 2009, mostrano che soltanto le fondazioni lirico sinfoniche migliorano la loro occupancy portando in scena nuove produzioni. Inoltre, i risultati indicano che la capacita dei teatri d’opera di attrarre fondi privati e influenzata positivamente dallo sviluppo di nuove produzioni. Cio evidenzia come l’innovazione operistica abbia un ruolo rilevante nel rafforzare le capacita di fundraising dei teatri. Il raggiungimento di tale obiettivo e particolarmente importante nello scenario italiano, dove le conseguenze della crisi e la riduzione dei finanziamenti pubblici hanno inasprito la competizione tra i teatri per l’attrazione di risorse sempre piu scarse.

Achille et Polyxène(1687): the Trojan war and a plea for peace at the Académie royale de musique

Jean-Baptiste Lully and (following Lully’s death) his disciple Pascal Collasse set to music a libretto by Jean Galbert de Campistron that deals with the reappropriation of an episode from the Trojan cycle, a heroic historical subject not previously treated on the stages of the Académie royale de musique or Italian opera houses; the result was Achille et Polyxène, a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts, premiered on 23 November 1687 (without the king in attendance). This all-encompassing spectacle marked a decisive moment in the history of the genre, at the very least as a bold synthesis of contemporary poetical and operatic practices. The theme of the opera is love thwarted by hatred between two nations, the love between Achilles, the Greek hero and king, and the Trojan princess Polyxena. The work drew from literary sources not previously used at the Académie royale: Homer’s Iliad (Books 9, 15–19, 22, 24), the Ephemeris belli Troiani (Journal of the Trojan War) attributed to Dictys Cretensis (Books 3 and 4), and Virgil’s Aeneid (Book 4); these works, which intend to interpret the question of the tragedy of mankind’s destiny, prompted the authors of the opera to emphasize the natural propensity of human beings towards wars that lead to their destruction. Thus, this tragédie en musique (not revived since 1712), is more than a large-scale entertainment for the court of the city; in the manner of ancient Greeks and Grand Siècle tragic playwrights, it is based on the power of Myth, with the understanding that the secular myth of Troy was considered as an equivalent of the myth of the Fall. This article puts together the absolutist, war-mongering strategies of Louis XIV and the strategies of an opera conceived within the circle of the Vendômes, an intellectual, artistic, free-thinking community enjoying the Grand Dauphin’s protection. The opera is thus a harmonious combination, not just of theatre, music and dance, but also homo- and hetero-eroticism, the heroic morality of the ideal prince, and the praise of peace between peoples. In this sense, Achille et Polyxène can be considered an exemplar of the ideological and creative freedom which a librettist and two composers could enjoy during the Ancien Régime, censorship notwithstanding, even while they were supposed above all to glorify the conquests and power of an absolute monarch. The method followed is transdisciplinary and aims especially at highlighting, behind and beyond the rhetoric of praise, the extremely dense network of intertextual, musical, choreographic and theatrical allusions which this opera comprises and which, taken as a whole, make it possible to characterize the styles of Campistron and Collasse.

Acoustic measurements in eleven Italian opera houses: Correlations between room criteria and considerations on the local evolution of a typology

Several studies focused on the acoustical characterisation of concert halls and opera houses analysing more or less homogeneous sets of halls and spotting reference criteria. This work presents the results of a detailed measurement campaign that was carried out over eleven small and mid-sized historical opera houses in the North of Italy with the aim of characterising this hall typology and to relate it to the reference literature. The cluster is intended to represent an adequate sample of case studies relative to different capacities and different design approaches that followed one another starting from the seventeenth century. The theatres were investigated using monaural and binaural techniques, performing impulse response measurements at each seat in the stalls and in each box. Seven ISO 3382 criteria are chosen to characterise these theatres and averaged over the three main listening areas denoted by the Italian opera house typology, i.e. the stalls, the boxes and the gallery. The correlation coefficients between interrelated criteria are presented and commented in relation to the architectural features of the theatres and to the existing literature.

Opera as business? From impresari to the publishing industry

The impresario was a key figure of nineteenth-century Italian operatic life. Along with other economic, financial and organizational aspects of ottocento opera, the article examines the role of these shrewd businessmen, drawing particular attention to the role of the Habsburgs in the administration of theaters in Lombardy. Along with a general job description of the Italian opera impresario of the first half of the nineteenth century, the article explains how gambling provided a way of financing the lavish seasons of Italian opera houses. After 1861, the role of the impresario changed considerably and was subsequently taken over by the publishers. Generally speaking, the impresario's role changed from being an active creator to that of a mere participant in the opera industry. Soon after 1900 he disappeared completely from the stages of the Italian opera world.

Hard Times of Opera Houses

Performances of Italian Opera houses are today particularly affected by diminishing Government budgets, inhibited private grant making and the credit crunch. Performances of USA Opera houses are not, similarly, flourishing though, if Government grants have always been modest, private contributions have stimulated the USA opera industry for decades. Such results might be reconsidered if Opera Boards would concentrate on both paying customers, members, donors, sponsors, Government, other Administrations, etc. Willingness to pay is only one focus of Opera Boards. Marketing is as necessary as fundraising of both public and private resources. Reports of Italian Opera houses and of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Affairs are checked through for comparable data with USA ones. These ones are investigated in their performances referring to 2008 USA 990 Forms. Cluster analysis – multivariate analysis with the Ward Method – will explore some trends in performances and revenue diversification of USA Opera houses. This research will give evidence of USA and Italian trends: segmentation of paying consumers, segmentation of donors and hence, revenue diversification from multiple stakeholders could both support not-for-profit goals, gaining or consolidating a competitive advantage in the Not-For-Profit Market of Opera. If the Net Gain can be considered a performance estimate of Nonprofits, the Fundraiser Profile of both samples is successful and revenue diversification is limited and contradictory.

A NEST OF NIGHTINGALES: CUZZONI AND SENESINO AT HANDEL'S ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Italian prima donna Francesca Cuzzoni (ca. 1698–1770) was the first internationally recognized virtuosa to sing high soprano women's roles. Although her work served as a model to the female performers who followed, no in-depth critical study has been written about her groundbreaking career on the opera stage of the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she was the celebrated prima donna from 1723 to 1728. During her tenure, the Royal Academy became one of the most important opera companies in Europe, rivaling those of the Viennese court, the Paris Opera, and the Italian opera houses of Naples and Venice. Her arrival on the London stage signaled a shift in the ways composers set roles in relationship to vocal categories and gender. In particular, Cuzzoni's superior virtuosic vocal abilities influenced and inspired German George Friedrich Handel's (1685–1759) compositional style and his musical treatment of dramatic elements.

Resonant cavities and acoustics vases in Italian Opera Houses; the "Teatro Principal" of Valencia and the eighteenth century treatises about theatres

This paper describes the research job carried out at Polytechnic University of Valencia -Spain- about resonant cavities placed under the orchestra pits of Italian Opera Houses, and others acoustics mechanisms like this one. The Teatro Principal of Valencia was built following the project developed by the Italian architect Felipe Fontana in 1774 and it opened its doors in 1832. Fifteen years ago, in the last architectonic intervention in this theatre, almost a hundred of acoustic vases were found in one of those resonant cavities. What acoustics role they accomplish? How they "functioned"? This was the starting point to study this kind of artifices, throughout the eighteenth century European treatises about theatres and in our Teatro Principal.

Le Roi de Lahore, and: In convertendo (review)

Reviewed by: Le Roi de Lahore, and: In convertendo John Holland Jules Massenet. Le Roi de Lahore. DVD. Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro La Fenice di Venezia/Marcello Viotti. With Ana Maria Sanchez, Giuseppe Gipali, Vladimir Stoyanov, Riccardo Zanellato. Directed by Tiziana Mancini. Genova, Italy: Dynamic, 2006. 33487. $38.97. Jean-Philippe Rameau. In convertendo. DVD. Les Arts Florissants/William Christie. Waldron, Heathfield, East Sussex, United Kingdom: Opus Arte, 2006. OA 0956 D. $19.98. French composers have always loved the dance. Over the centuries, dance rhythms have found their way into music by Gallic composers for all occasions. On these two recent DVDs we can hear works written more than a century apart and for entirely different purposes, but both are infused with a balletic buoyancy that could not have come from a foreigner. Jean-Philippe Rameau spent his early years working as a church musician in Lyon, and it is believed that his grands motets were written during this period. These are large scale works closer in length and form to the cantatas of J. S. Bach than any other works usually identified as motets. William Christie is well known as a leading interpreter of Rameau's music, and on this disc he leads a concert performance of In convertendo by his ensemble Les Arts Florissants, recorded at the church in the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris without any visual gimmickry. As can be expected from these artists, the performance is first rate and both audio and video are state of the art. The DVD also contains performances of three Pièces de clavecin en concert performed by members of the ensemble, and a documentary called The Real Rameau, which follows the composer's career with numerous musical excerpts and commentary by Christie and other scholars. Le Roi de Lahore was Jules Massenet's third opera, and his calling card for entry into the musical establishment of Paris, where it received its premiere in 1877 at the brand new Palais Garnier opera house. Ever the calculating craftsman, Massenet had a talent for writing operas sure to capitalize on current popular taste, and his score evokes the older sound of Gounod and Saint-Saëns more than the swooning melodies associated with his mature, better known operas. The libretto too is a throwback to the pseudo-Orientalism of the mid-nineteenth century and is probably the only opera to introduce reincarnation into its plot: the tenor is killed in battle in act 2 but comes back to earth in act 4 after a brief interlude in the Hindu paradise where he watches the obligatory ballet and has a conversation with Indra himself. The Italian label Dynamic specializes in audio and video recordings of unusual repertoire recorded live at some of the smaller Italian opera houses. While Venice's Teatro La Fenice has a distinguished history, it no longer ranks among the highest tier of European opera houses, and the result is a performance which is highly respectable but contains few outstanding performances. Conductor Marcello Viotti is the star of the show, leading an impassioned and thoroughly idiomatic [End Page 124] performance, sadly, one of his last before his untimely death. He is credited with preparing the critical edition of the score used. Of the singers, only baritone Vladimir Stoyanov gives a performance of international caliber. His voice has the right sound for French music, and he uses it expressively and with attention to the text. Tenor Giuseppe Gipali and soprano Ana Maria Sanchez possess attractive instruments, but he sounds as if he would be more comfortable singing over a smaller orchestra, she in a role with a lower tessitura, and acting seems to be a foreign concept to both. The production is handsomely traditional in a stylized Hindu fairy-tale sort of way, with the exception of the scene in Paradise, which is portrayed as a Second Empire salon. Le Roi de Lahore has never entered even the fringes of the standard repertoire, so this DVD makes a welcome addition to the catalog. A musically superior performance that was issued briefly on CD with Joan Sutherland and Sherrill Milnes heading the cast appears to be out of print...

Italian opera houses and festivals

Italian opera houses and festivals

An experimental comparative study of 20 Italian opera houses: Measurement techniques

For ‘‘acoustical photography’’ we mean a set of measured impulse responses, which enable us to ‘‘listen’’ at the measured room by means of advanced auralization methods. Once these data sets have been measured, they can be employed in two different ways: objective analysis and listening test. In fact, it is possible to compute dozens of acoustical objective parameters, describing the temporal texture, the spatial effect and the frequency-domain coloring of each opera house. On the other hand, by means of the auralization technique, it becomes easy to conduct listening experiments with human subjects. This paper focuses principally on the development and specification of the measurement technique, which is the topic assigned to the research unit of Parma, to which the authors belong. It describes the hardware equipment, the software, the electro-acoustic transducers (microphones and loudspeakers), the measurement positions, the system for automatic displacement of the microphones and the conditions of the room during the measurements. Experimental results are reported about a couple of opera houses which were employed for testing the measurement procedure and showing the benefits of the new method against the previously employed ones.

BOXES AND SOUND QUALITY IN AN ITALIAN OPERA HOUSE

The “Teatro Comunale” (City Theatre) in Bologna is an Italian opera house of the 18th century, designed by the famous architect Antonio Galli Bibiena. Largely built in masonry, it has been only partially restored and altered several times, but never destroyed and rebuilt. The study of its acoustics, while interesting for itself, offers the opportunity to investigate the role of the boxes, which constitute the most evident characteristic of Italian opera houses. The study was carried on at first by measurements, acquiring binaural impulse responses in the stalls and in the boxes, and then by computer simulation, modelling also some changes which cannot be done in the real hall. The measurements revealed clear differences between the listening quality in the boxes and in the stalls, especially regarding ITDG, clarity and IACC. Computer simulations show how the sound field in the historical theatre could be if the sound absorption of the boxes were changed, adding some velvet curtains, as was done in ancient times, and clarify the effects of the cavities which constitutes the boxes.