Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:05am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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The Opera Industry and Social Class Session Chair: James Steichen | |
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Bohemians in Coketown: La bohème and the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1897) University of Oxford Paris was the future once. Much of the enduring appeal of Puccini’s La bohème rests on the allure of its romanticized vision of the French capital and the lives of its charismatic young bohemians. Yet then as now, this was just one template for the modern city and a modern urban lifestyle, and its claim to modernity already had a retrospective, nostalgic aura. For a quite different model – and in some respects a more radical one – we might turn to Manchester, the city in which La bohème received its British premiere in 1897, in a production by the Carl Rosa Opera Company supervised by Puccini himself. A city of factories, not arcades, Manchester was associated more with conspicuous production than conspicuous consumption. Its citizens’ devotion to the profit motive, on the one hand, and civic responsibility, on the other, hardly suggested promising ground for a bohemian refusal of conventional modes of economic and social productivity. Foregrounding such disjunctions, this paper offers the first detailed investigation of the Manchester performance of La bohème. In so doing, it seeks to challenge an established tendency in Puccini studies to foreground capitalism and empire above all as ‘contexts’ for hermeneutic readings (particularly as regards exoticism in Madama Butterfly and Turandot). Retracing the material and institutional conditions behind the composer’s brief sojourn in Manchester, I argue that commerce, industry, and imperial power were also fundamentally constitutive of the performance and media environments in which his operas emerged and flourished. This perspective, in turn, underpins my analysis of the early British reception of La bohème. Exploring how quite un-bohemian audiences and critics responded both to the alternate vision of urban modernity staged in the work and its attendant style of operatic ‘realism’, I show how profoundly their engagements with culture were shaped by anxieties about social class: a fundamental but potentially unstable category for late nineteenth-century Mancunians, as they sought to secure their standing in the city and their city’s standing in the world. | |