Description: "In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella explores how networks of opera production and critical discourse shaped Italian cultural identity during the years before and after the country's unification in 1861. Vella sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic culture, its engagement with early technologies, and the inherent mobility of operatic productions as they physically traveled across the peninsula. Through a series of case studies, Vella explores musical criticism in the Italian press as well as specific operatic works, singers, and theatrical stagings. She also develops new tools for rethinking nineteenth-century operatic Italy by drawing inspiration from mobility studies and media archaeology. The author traces the politics of movement within and between multiple locations by attending to opera's encounters with technologies of communication and transportation, including the new railway, understood as a medium of operatic dissemination as well as a new part of opera's media infrastructure"--
Brief description: Francesca Vella is assistant professor in music at Northumbria University. She is the author of Networking Operatic Italy.
Review Quotes: "Vella breaks with the idea that nineteenth-century Italians were obsessed with their own culture and traditions and the narrow boundaries of their local communities. Networking Operatic Italy presents a new chapter in musicological research, introducing mobility studies into the history of opera and offering fascinating new interpretations of Italians' engagement with music and theater. This is a book of great erudition and imaginative power."-- "Axel Körner, University College London"