Conference Agenda

Iceland’s critical strategic location in the North Atlantic made it an important ally of the United States during the Cold War. Yet the population of the country, which had only recently gained independence from Denmark, was divided on the issue of NATO membership and the presence of US troops, as stipulated in a 1951 bilateral agreement. This, in turn, led US authorities to sponsor performances there by artists who would demonstrate American culture at its best, including orchestras, chamber musicians, soloists, and composers (including pianist Ann Schein, the LaSalle Quartet, and new symphonic works by Henry Cowell and Cecil Effinger). The USSR, on the other hand, cultivated a strong relationship with the cultural association MÍR in Reykjavík, dispatching artists such as Mstislav Rostropovich and Tatjana Nikolaeva to concertize widely in Iceland.

All of this greatly enhanced the local music scene in a country where the serious cultivation of classical music had only begun a few decades earlier. The programming, which often included modernist works that had never been heard there before, proved particularly stimulating to a generation of young local composers. The struggle for political power on the musical scene was felt even at the country’s major institutions, such as the local symphony orchestra, where conductors from the Eastern and Western Blocs competed for the role of chief conductor.

The musical propaganda of the Cold War superpowers in Iceland, and its connection to local political developments, has not been studied fully until now. Drawing on local sources such as newspaper reports and archival documents, as well as documents in US archives and the recent work of musicologists Emily Abrams Ansari and Danielle Fosler-Lussier, I will explore how one of the most recent classical music cultures in Europe was transformed through “soft power” Cold War propaganda, with profound short- and long-term effects on the local music scene.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italian opera occupied a central place in U.S. musical life, extending well beyond the opera house through domestic music-making, band concerts, civic celebrations, and other forms of public entertainment. Indeed, as scholars have shown, most Americans encountered opera in mediated form (Preston), while the growing association of foreign-language opera with white urban elites in the late nineteenth century transformed its cultural and social meanings (Bentley).

Within this broader context, this paper argues that Italian opera fulfilled a dual function for Italian immigrants: on the one hand, it served as a form of cultural and political mediation in relations with American society; on the other, it acted as a symbol of national belonging. Drawing on scholarship on the role of bands and immigrant bandleaders in nineteenth-century American musical life (Bornemann, Camus, Greene, Martin), as well as on Italian-language newspapers and archival materials from the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, I offer the first account of the cultural and political significance that Italian opera acquired within Italian immigrant communities.

The paper is organized into three sections. The first examines the presence of Italian opera in the repertories of major Italian-born bandleaders active in the United States, including Francis Maria Scala, Francesco Fanciulli, Alberto Maria Cappa, and Alessandro Liberati. The second compares these repertories with the musical programs performed at events organized by Italian communities between the 1860s and the end of the century, highlighting continuities and divergences in the selection of operas and individual excerpts, as well as the distinct meanings they assumed in different social, political, and cultural settings. The third focuses on the chorus “O Signore, dal tetto natio” from Verdi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata. By analyzing the relationship between text, music, and performance context, I show how this chorus could assume different meanings for different audiences, functioning simultaneously as a marker of collective identity within Italian communities and as a public vehicle for the cultural and political representation of Italy.

On 15 November 1805 the author and salonnière Caroline Pichler (1769–1843) answered a knock on her front door at Alstergasse 90. In the main entryway of her Viennese home, Pichler felt an involuntary shiver convulse through her body as she greeted two French officers and their accompanying servants. Just two days prior, the Pichlers and other residents of the Austrian capital had been informed that they would be forced to house enemy soldiers during the sixty-two-day French occupation of Vienna. In her memoirs, Caroline Pichler vividly describes the “humiliating” experience of billeting soldiers during both the 1805 and 1809 French occupations. Her recollections reveal that the Pichler household shared not only meals and domestic labor with their quartered soldiers, but also conversations and musical performances at Caroline’s regular music salon gatherings.

Historians (Princi 2020; Pröve 1995) have described the occupied home as a “contact site” between military and civilian life; however, the nuanced interactions that transpired within these contact sites have remained underexplored. In this paper, I examine the encounters between billeted soldiers and Pichler’s regular music salon attendees to demonstrate how Pichler’s music salon expanded the contact site of the billeted home to also include the semi-private salon. As a result, French soldiers encountered not only members of Pichler’s billeted household, but also members of her salon circle—many of whom held strong anti-French sentiments. Despite the deep political and national divides that characterized these encounters, Pichler’s prioritization of sociability through intellectual conversation and musical performances made such exchanges possible. In particular, I consider how Pichler’s combination organ-piano facilitated these exchanges, serving as a physical and aural contact site where political and national divides could be bridged. Thus, this case study offers a glimpse into the complex, layered relationships that occurred between wealthy, German-speaking residents of Vienna and their billeted French soldiers during the 1805 and 1809 occupations. Moreover, this paper demonstrates how sociability and musical performances in the salon could expand the scope of such encounters and foster positive cross-national exchanges across enemy lines.