Description:
An exploration of the fundamental relationship between opera and urban modernity in three iconic cities: London, Paris, and New York.
At the end of the nineteenth century, London, Paris, and New York were quintessential modern metropolises and vital centers for opera. In Operatic Infrastructures, Flora Willson examines opera's roots in the material worlds of these cities. Reaching beyond histories of opera as spectacle, she investigates the physical underpinnings of opera at the century's end as an inter-urban, multimedia network.
Operatic Infrastructures considers emergent technologies such as the telephone and the subway, but it also retrieves the hidden, forgotten, and otherwise effaced traces of systems such as storage facilities and colonial trade routes. It takes seriously the mundane aspects of materiality, from the blandest clichés of newspaper columns to the fine print of insurance certificates. In doing so, the book reveals just how far these interfaces with modern urban life reached into opera's own systems of meaning-making and performance in the 1890s--making it impossible to demarcate neatly between "opera" and its "context." Without such operatic infrastructures, Willson shows, there would be no opera at all.
Brief description: Flora Willson is a UK-based writer, broadcaster, and cultural historian of music. Until 2025, she was a senior lecturer in nineteenth-century music at King's College London; her research is published in numerous journals and essay collections. Beyond academia, Willson is one of The Guardian's classical music writers, appears frequently on BBC radio, and works closely with opera companies and other arts organizations on publications and events.
Review Quotes:
"Operatic Infrastructures is a pyrotechnical achievement. Willson's prose positively flickers with insights, as she dispatches us down intercontinental telephone lines, along undercity train tracks, through postal networks and international news outlets, into insurance offices, and inside production workshops and costume storage facilities--before drawing these volatile infrastructures back into the great opera houses of 1890s London, Paris, and New York. This is the richest account we have of the art form's material history, of the hidden media we didn't know we loved, and of the flammable stuff of opera."
-- "James Q. Davies, University of California, Berkeley"