Conference Agenda

Since the 1980s operatic and fashion directors in Italy have explored the potential for symbiotic relationships within their creative areas, as evidenced by the collaborations between Missoni, Versace, and Fendi at La Scala, and most recently, between Valentino and the Teatro dell’Opera. During her collaboration with the Roman theater for their glamorous 2016 production of La traviata, Maria Grazia Chiuri, then co-creative director for Valentino, remarked: “Opera, like couture, is seen as something of the past, a little dusty, a little obsolete. Instead, it has to be rediscovered” (Povoledo 2016). The comment was apt for reasons beyond the obvious: in comparison to La Scala, the Teatro dell’Opera has historically struggled to gain cultural recognition in Italy on par with its Milanese counterpart.

Remarks about obsolescence are familiar to scholars who have long questioned opera’s contemporary status within and outside of performance institutions. From contemplating opera’s death (Abbate/Parker 2012; OQ Colloquy 2020) to examining multifaceted digitization strategies, musicologists have expressed concerns with immediacy, access, and affect in experiencing the genre. Heather Wiebe observes that scholars tend to position opera’s relevance as it “resists or escapes the world of things” through studies of liveliness and ephemerality (Wiebe 2009).

Using the Teatro dell’Opera’s archives, press coverage, and production footage, I evaluate opera’s interdisciplinary means of finding sustenance and multi-sensory presence within this very “world of things” through Valentino’s recent forays into the genre. In addition to the 2016 production in Rome, Valentino revivified operatic heroines on the runway in 2014, and in 2018 they created a collection inspired by Maria Callas, a force of repertorial revival in the twentieth century. Embracing contemporary examinations of canonic rearrangement, fluidity, and fracture (Steigerwald-Ille 2023; Newark/Weber 2020), I argue that Valentino’s revivals of nineteenth-century operatic culture—achieved two-fold through the incarnation of Callas—seek to bring Italian repertories and theaters out of obsolescence through invocations of music as material culture. Ultimately, by showcasing the economic, political, and social ramifications of Valentino’s work with the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, I show how fashion’s reformulations of operatic materials impacts both conventional and unconventional structures of contemporary performance.

Opera researchers have tended to focus on the theatres and theatrical geographies of large-scale cities that also embodied the role of political, cultural and social “centres”. Recently, however, various “operatic peripheries” have received renewed attention, thanks to their ability to produce ‘compellingly powerful meanings and messages of their different social worlds’ (Kotnik 2019), their role in theatrical and socio-political networks and geographies (Sorba 2011, Körner and Kühl 2022 and Vella 2022; see also the recently completed project 'Italienisches Provinztheater im Risorgimento', HK Bern) and, sometimes, their resistance to central or centralized models (Ellis 2019 and 2022).

In this context, the paper will focus on the town of Monza, in the outskirts of Milan, in Northern Italy. Already boosting an illustrious history, at the turn of the nineteenth century Monza was chosen as pleasure residence by both the Habsburg and Napoleonic courts of Milan (1771-1796 and 1805-1814, respectively). In all its incarnations as courtly venue, Monza included an opera house that, despite its apparent satellite status, became a catalyst for a diverse audience and artistic workforce, and a fertile centre of musical and theatrical experimentalism. Between 1778 and 1814, Monza’s teatro arciducale (built in the town's market square and its first public theatrical venue), and then its teatrino di corte (much smaller and built inside the royal palace) hosted ground-breaking performances, such as the Italian premieres of Le nozze di Figaro (1787) and of many Parisian opéras comiques in the translation by the celebrated man of letters Giuseppe Carpani (1751-1825), as well as encomiastic works of transnational nature. At the same time, the numerous accademie that took place in the court theatre and in other spaces within the palace presented excerpts from the latest operatic successes both coming from and bypassing the Lombard capital.

Using archival sources to complement the scant literature, this paper will offer a discussion of Monza’s theatre(s) as problematic, yet meaningful examples of “peripheral” socio-cultural spaces in terms of management, repertoire and audience. As well as reflecting on their role in relationship to both the regional capital of Milan and the supranational ones of Vienna and Paris, the paper will reflect on the role these experiences played within the national and transnational theatrical networks that connected Lombardy to the Austrian Monarchy and French Empire. As well as adding to the codification and problematisation of the theatrical periphery, such an inquiry will cast new (first?) light on a largely forgotten, yet impactful page of theatrical history and geography.

In the early nineteenth-century, French opera translated into German was in fashion in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. From 1799 until 1825, the region was ruled by Maximilian IV/I Joseph, who often looked to France for operatic inspiration. He commissioned a new opera house modeled after the Parisian Théâtre de l’Odéon. Moreover, during the century’s first decades, close to forty percent of performances featured translated French works. Some became staples of the repertoire; they included Cherubini’s Les Deux journées (as Graf Armand), Méhul’s Joseph (as Jakob und seine Söhne in Ägypten), and eventually Spontini’s La Vestale (as Die Vestalin). Despite this wealth of French works, the conditions of opera production were vastly different than in Paris, with tragic and comic works performed by the same troupe and performers that were largely German trained.

This paper studies how the Bavarian translations of these French operas interacted with local performance practices and contexts. To do so, it draws on historical sources (such as acting and singing treatises, performance and reception materials), and insights from workshops-experiments with “learning to perform” (Baily 2001) these translations as a historical research technique. This approach highlights that embodied knowledges of affect, emotion and gesture are key to understanding the continuous feedback-loop between translation, performance, and reception.

Three consequences of this outcome are examined. First, building on the historical acting and singing treatises, an alternative method for analysing opera libretti, their musical settings and translations is presented, which focuses on embedded affective gestures. Second, one result of such an analysis underlines that opera translation was a locus for negotiating emotional practices and norms between cultures. Third, by way of the workshops, the project explores formats for an embodied, performative engagement with historical materials, while also examining the opportunities and limits of such experiments in terms of knowledge formation and scholarly outcomes. By combining these three strands, this paper seeks to add to the recent revaluation of opera translation (e.g. Şerban and Yue Chan, 2020) and to underscore the potential of “learning to perform” as a research technique beyond the more traditional aims of historically informed performance practice.