Conference Agenda

This paper examines how the emergence of the Italian fashion industry in the early twentieth century shaped forms of artistic collaboration and aesthetic labor associated with modern operatic stage direction. While approaches to direction during the mid-twentieth century varied across national and institutional contexts, leading figures increasingly emphasized conceptual unity in production, marking a shift away from earlier collaborative models centered on singers, conductors, and impresarios (Levin 2007; Kreuzer 2010; Parker, ed. 1994). Focusing on Milan in the interwar period, I argue that the consolidation of modern operatic artistic direction was profoundly shaped by developments in Italian fashion and design culture.

In the 1920s, Milan emerged as a center for nationalist efforts to establish a distinct Italian fashion industry, with publications such as Lidel urging consumers to reject French imports in favor of domestically produced styles (Cottini 2018). These cultural and economic conditions informed the evolution of production style at La Scala, where Luigi Sapelli, known as “Caramba,” served as artistic designer from 1921 until his death in 1936. Throughout his tenure, Caramba often assumed extensive authority over costume and staging design, advancing a unified approach to operatic visuality that foregrounded costume aesthetics as central to dramaturgical meaning (Morbio 2008; Palidda 2024). Drawing on archived design sketches, surviving costumes, and materials from La Scala and its associated Ansaldo Workshop, I show how Caramba paved the way for later collaborations between opera directors and haute couture designers at the theater. In particular, I examine original costumes and accessories for Puccini’s Turandot—recovered in 2018 in the wardrobe trunks of soprano Iva Pacetti—to demonstrate how his sartorial vision unified contemporary directions in Italian fashion with operatic stage design.

By tracing Caramba’s influence on subsequent generations, this paper contends that modern operatic stage direction emerged not solely from theatrical and philosophical innovation on the part of stage directors, but also from histories of material design and fashion forged by artistic designers. Attending to these histories reveals how opera’s enduring structures of artistic authority and labor hierarchy in Milan were shaped as much by material practices as by musical ones.

Puccini’s meticulous attention to the visual dimensions of staging has long been recognised by scholars. His scores, libretti, staging manuals and prop tables collectively prescribe an astonishing array of stage objects: from coats and bonnets to fans, carts, lanterns, replica rifles, musical instruments and various pieces of furniture, each codified in remarkably exact ways. When examined through the static lens of drawings and prints, which obscure performative context, these items often resist easy classification as scenography, costume or stage property in the strictest sense, complicating the conventional distinctions used for the purposes of both production and interpretation (Margolies 2016). Furthermore, the categorical status of these objects becomes even more contested when we follow their trajectories beyond the stage. Once key artefacts leave the theatre for museum and exhibition cabinets, they acquire new meanings as components of cultural heritage.

Drawing on documents from the little-known yet historically pivotal archive of Milan’s Ditta Rancati (Italy’s leading prop-making workshop since the mid-1860s), as well as on letters and critical accounts from Puccini’s lifetime and beyond, this paper traces the histories of selected objects—from their initial conception and construction by designers and craftspeople, through their use in performance by singers and stagehands, to their afterlives in storage rooms, display spaces and auction houses. Rather than treating Puccini’s props solely as narrative structuring devices or social and cultural signifiers within the score (Groos 2021), as material tools that gain agency in performance (Sofer 2003), or as ‘things’ that resist narrative and symbolic function (Campana and Morris 2016), I emphasise their multiple lives as circulating artefacts that accumulate different functions and forms of value—cultural, economic and affective—as they traverse different contexts.

At the same time, I examine how manufacturing approaches to and critical understandings of props evolved in the mid-twentieth century, alongside the emergence of new professional roles within opera production. Ultimately, I argue that an ‘object biography’ of Puccini’s props can reveal collaborative practices that often remain invisible in final productions and that have so far failed to find a place in operatic histories.

On February 24, 1925, a blurb in the newspaper Comœdia announced an upcoming lecture at the Théâtre de La Madeleine, adding that the afternoon would conclude with a guided visit of the theater’s backstage area. This behind-the-scenes visit was the first of many offered to the Parisian public in the 1920s and 30s. Over the next decade, backstage tours of popular and elite theaters were organized by educational societies and by impresarios at the Folies-Bergère and Casino de Paris. These tours democratized access to the backstage area, marking a shift not only in who was allowed behind the scenes but also how the public conceived of this space. For nearly a century, backstage access had largely been the unique right of elite male patrons of the Opéra, who made beelines to the foyer de la danse where ballerinas were waiting. During the interwar period, however, these new tours reconfigured the backstage area not as an exclusive salon but as a place of education where the public could witness the embodied knowledge of a technician and experience firsthand the materiality of the theater.

In this paper, I track changes in perception of the backstage area, focusing on the important role of music halls in reversing the traditional model of display and concealment. While the allure of the Opéra relied partly on the promise of erotic titillation behind the scenes, female bodies were extravagantly displayed on stage at the music halls. What remained concealed was the machinery and technical labor on which revues relied, and it was these hidden mechanisms of illusion that now seemed to entice audiences backstage. Drawing on newspaper articles and bulletins published by educational societies, and on work by scholars such as Martine Kahane, Claire Paolacci, and Nathalie Coutelet, I will consider the reciprocal dynamics of exposure and concealment that sit at the heart of theatrical illusion.