A Huge Revolution Of Theatrical Commerce

In the first third of the twentieth century, South America became the most important market for many European theatrical companies. When Italy found itself in various theatrical crises, Walter Mocchi created a transoceanic theatrical empire, using his business acumen to craft viable solutions. While his efforts were most visible in the sphere of opera, he played an extremely significant role in the promotion and circulation of popular forms of musical theatre (such as operetta) and staged world premieres of works by Italian superstars in Argentina (such as Mascagni's Isabeau), thus offering an early example of what Stephen Greenblatt calls 'cultural mobility'.

In the first third of the twentieth century, South America became the most important market for many European theatrical companies. When Italy found itself in various theatrical crises, Walter Mocchi created a transoceanic theatrical empire, using his business acumen to craft viable solutions. While his efforts were most visible in the sphere of opera, he played an extremely significant role in the promotion and circulation of popular forms of musical theatre (such as operetta) and staged world premieres of works by Italian superstars in Argentina (such as Mascagni's Isabeau), thus offering an early example of what Stephen Greenblatt calls 'cultural mobility'.

This book is part of an ongoing transnational turn in cultural history. Studies on the history of urban popular culture and the entertainment industries increasingly engage with the European or global circulation of genres, actors, and shows, especially during the period of massive growth and expansion of the sector from the 1870s to the 1930s. Nevertheless, a large part of this research remains focused on exchanges between Western and Central European, and North American metropolises. To provide a fuller picture of the emergence and cross-border transfer of different genres of popular culture, this volume investigates Northern, East Central, and Southern European cities and their relations with each other and the West. The authors analyze the mediating agents, transnational networks, and local responses to new forms of entertainment from Madrid to Vyborg, and from Istanbul to Reykjavík. These examples re-focus the history of urban popular culture in Europe in view of multidirectional transfers and a wider range of regional experiences. Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of popular culture in modern societies, particularly those studying urban centers in Europe, and their transnational and transregional connections.

Although nineteenth-century legislation had tried to ensure a precise separation between genre and institution for Parisian music in the theatre, it had inadvertently laid out a field on which the politics of genre could be played out as agents and actors of all types deployed various forms of artistic power. During the Second Empire, from 1854 until 1870, the state took over day-to-day control of the Opéra in ways that were without precedent. Every element of the Opéra's activity was subjugated to the exigency of Empire; the selection or artists, works and more general questions of artistic policy were handed over to politicians. The Opéra effectively became a branch of government. The result was a stagnation of the Opéra's repertory, and beneficiaries were the composers of larger-scale works for competing organisations: the Opéra Comique and the Théâtre Lyrique.

During the 19th century, Italian opera became truly transatlantic and its rapid expansion is one of the most exciting new areas of study in music and the performing arts. Beyond the Atlantic coasts, opera searched for new spaces to expand its reach. This Element discusses about the Italian opera in Andean countries like Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia during the 1840s and focuses on opera as a product that both challenged and was challenged in the Andes by other forms of performing arts, behaviours, technologies, material realities, and business models.

As a legacy of the Habsburg Empire, performances of Jacques Offenbach's musical stage works played an important role in Budapest musico-theatrical life in the twentieth century. However, between the collapse of the Empire and the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, political ideologies strongly influenced the character of these productions, when they took place. Public performances of Offenbach's works were prohibited between 1938 and 1945 and they became the bases for propagandadistic adaptations in the 1950s. This element explores how the local operetta tradition and the vogue of operettas featuring composers as characters during the interwar period were also important factors in how Offenbach's stage works were performed in mid-twentieth century Budapest in versions that sometimes bore little resemblance to the originals.

Music has gained the increasing attention of historians. Research has branched out to explore music-related topics, including creative labor, economic histories of music production, the social and political uses of music, and musical globalization. This handbook both covers the history of music in Europe and probes its role for the making of Europe during a "long" twentieth century. It offers concise guidance to key historical trends as well as the most important research on central topics within the field.

A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification. Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts. In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.

The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond provides a comprehensive exploration of women’s participation in musical leadership from the nineteenth century to the present. Global in scope, with contributors from over thirty countries, this book reveals the wide range of ways in which women have taken leadership roles across musical genres and contexts, uncovers new histories, and considers the challenges that women continue to face. The volume addresses timely issues in the era of movements such as #MeToo, digital feminisms, and the resurgent global feminist movements. Its multidisciplinary chapters represent a wide range of methodologies, with historical musicology, models drawn from ethnomusicology, analysis, philosophy, cultural studies, and practice research all informing the book. Including almost fifty chapters written by both researchers and practitioners in the field, it covers themes including: Historical Perspectives Conductors and Impresarios Women’s Practices in Music Education Performance and the Music Industries Faith and Spirituality: Worship and Sacred Musical Practices Advocacy: Collectives and Grass-Roots Activism The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond draws together both new perspectives from early career researchers and contributions from established world-leading scholars. It promotes academic-practitioner dialogue by bringing contributions from both fields together, represents alternative models of women in musical leadership, celebrates the work done by women leaders, and shows how women challenge accepted notions of gendered roles. Offering a comprehensive overview of the varied forms of women’s musical leadership, this volume is a vital resource for all scholars of women in music, as well as professionals in the music industries and music education today.

In the tradition of the preceding volumes - the first of which was published in 1964 - this work synthesizes edited documents, including correspondence, ship logs, muster rolls, orders, and newspaper accounts, that provide a comprehensive understanding of the war at sea in the spring of 1778. The editors organize this wide array of texts chronologically by theater and incorporate French, Italian, and Spanish transcriptions with English translations throughout.