Nineteenth-century Italian opera scholars used to be the cool kids in town. During the 1990s, we swanned through annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, delighted that our field of study, long situated at the periphery of the discipline, was heading straight toward the centre. My decision to write a dissertation about Italian opera performers was not prompted by the siren song of potential trendiness; nevertheless, it was thrilling to be among the contributors to a collective effort that was perceived as being on the cutting edge, or at least as cutting edge as musicology could get at the time. It didn’t hurt either that this endeavour entailed touching down in Italy every now and again for some of the best parties (ahem, I mean, conferences) ever convened. I know I am idealising the past, but these thoughts came rushing back to me in a rosy hue a few months ago when a colleague approached me with this whopper: ‘Remember when nineteenth-century studies were hip? We’re the old-fashioned ones now.’ True, studies of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi and their contemporaries are no longer in the vanguard, but books by Emanuele Senici, Mary Ann Smart and Francesca Vella demonstrate that there is still a lot of life left in the world of nineteenth-century Italian opera studies. We’re still very cool.

A year after the premiere of the complete Ring cycle in Bayreuth in 1876, a concert-form ‘London Wagner Festival’ took place at the Royal Albert Hall, newly opened in South Kensington near the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Comprising lengthy excerpts from Wagner’s operas performed by a vast orchestra and star singers, this event was partly born out of financial necessity in the aftermath of the costly and extravagant staging of the Ring in Bayreuth. But Wagner’s London connections also reveal the significance of Victorian industry and the built environment in disseminating his music dramas and shaping listening practices beyond Bayreuth. This article situates the London Wagner Festival in relation to the early history of the Royal Albert Hall, foregrounding the contributions and responses of Victorian architects, engineers, concert reformers and musical critics to the peculiarly modern phenomenon of the massive concert. By approaching the Albert Hall as a medium for the early dissemination of Wagner’s music dramas, I seek to make a broader case for the relevance of the nineteenth-century concert hall to histories of operatic performance and technological mediation.

Operetta, with its well-structured production systems, constituted a dynamic sphere of activity that stretched across Unified Italy. This activity was rarely acknowledged by the representatives of so-called ‘high culture’, even as it stimulated the growth of the social structures that would later give rise to cinema and other forms of mass entertainment. Though in recent years scholars have focused on the foreign influences on light music theatre in Italy in the years following Italian unification, little attention has been bestowed on Italian operetta. This article concentrates on the origins of this genre, offering a detailed analysis of the dialect theatre tradition from which the first French-style operetta productions in Italy emerged. Specifically, I examine the urban contexts of Milan and above all Rome, a city of crucial importance in the diffusion of operetta in dialect, whose highly local (even parochial) connotations would exert a significant influence on the formal, social and cultural evolution of operetta right up to the turn of the century.

Slightly over a decade ago, as part of a special issue of this journal devoted to twentieth-century Italian opera, I published an article that began by asking ‘What happened to verismo?’1 The answer, somewhat in the manner of its time, involved apparitions, ghostly echoes and the uncanny magic of wireless technology. This current issue of the Cambridge Opera Journal – which, needless to say, focuses on repertoire undiscussed and largely unknown back in 2012 – provides a rather different response to the question, suggesting that, in the years around the First World War, the aggressive materiality of operatic realism instead gave way to the even more visceral and immediate pleasures of Italian operetta. As Marco Ladd and Ditlev Rindom observe in their introduction, the leading lights of the verismo movement all went on to embrace the new genre: Pietro Mascagni with Sì (1919), a work that in fact begins with a distinctly un-uncanny chorus of telegraph operators; Umberto Giordano with Giove a Pompei (1921); and above all Ruggero Leoncavallo, author of Prestami tua moglie (1916) and A chi la giarrettiera? (1919), as well as many other less-memorably titled entertainments for audiences in Italy, New York and London. The Sonzogno publishing house followed its operatic concorso of 1888, which famously introduced Cavalleria rusticana to the world, with a similarly conceived operetta contest in 1913. In this context, Giacomo Puccini’s embrace of ‘Silver Age’ conventions in La rondine (1917), a work whose generic fuzziness has long puzzled listeners, may seem less an outlier than an acknowledgement of larger shifts in taste and value.2

This article explores the importance of the Casa Sonzogno publishing house for the Italian operetta market from the second half of the nineteenth century until the eve of the First World War, including its offshoot company Casa musicale Lorenzo Sonzogno. The article focuses particularly on Casa Sonzogno’s policies of importation, translation and intermedial adaptation of foreign (mainly French) light music-theatre works, especially in the context of the wider social, economic and technological environment of Milan at the turn of the twentieth century, and considers Sonzogno’s concorsi for young composers. The article then addresses the experimental activities of the Casa musicale Lorenzo Sonzogno (1909–15), notably across opera, operetta and cinema. Casa Sonzogno’s centrality to the establishment of an Italian operetta market, I argue, both highlights the crucial role of publishers in the Italian operetta industry, and offers an alternative theatrical history to familiar narratives focused on Casa Ricordi and Italian opera.

Between October 1954 and May 1955 RAI, the Italian public broadcaster, transmitted its first operetta season on television, promoted by Radiocorriere, the RAI house weekly, in terms of ‘a world coming back’. Yet this comeback did not have the lasting impact that was evidently desired: Italian television would never again pay such close attention to operetta, and the 1954–5 ‘operetta season’ remains an intriguing one-off. This neglected encounter between mass media and music in twentieth-century Italy has rich historiographical potential, which the article explores. Among other issues, studying the 1954–5 RAI operetta season helps us better understand not only the deep connections between postwar Italian culture and its fascist past – still a contentious matter – but also the complex discursive, technological and affective interactions between a mass medium tirelessly promoted as new and a form of popular entertainment that was already perceived as hopelessly out of date.

The debut of a Japanese exhibit at the 1867 Exposition Universelle prompted a new enthusiasm for Japan (dubbed japonisme) that soon gripped artistic and literary circles in Paris. Camille Saint-Saëns's one-act opera La princesse jaune, which premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1872, emerged at the height of this fervour. At first glance, it might seem that La princesse jaune simply followed the trend. Yet, on closer examination it is possible to understand its story of an infatuated young artist as a playful, subversive commentary on japonisme. This article thus poses the question: How might we understand La princesse jaune as a parody? To answer this, I begin by considering its protagonist as a mockery of the elitist and exclusive japoniste subcultures that emerged in the wake of the Exposition. Borrowing from William Cheng's concept of ‘opera en abyme’, I then consider the opera's dream sequence, examining how its shifting diegesis highlights the fragile and ephemeral nature of the Orientalist dream. Ultimately, I argue that reading La princesse jaune as a parody allows us not only to reframe the work within Saint-Saëns's œuvre, but also to reassess its place within the wider contexts of nineteenth-century operatic Orientalism.

Is it surprising that three recent publications dealing with women in opera prominently refer to a book from 1979? Maybe not when this book is Catherine Clément's L'opéra ou la défaite des femmes (Opera, or the Undoing of Women, English translation by Betsy Wing, 1988). Clément's reading of women characters in the standard operatic repertoire from Mozart to Puccini quickly became a ‘classic’ within feminist opera studies and influenced much of the scholarly debate in the 1980s and 1990s. The monographs by Marcie Ray, Kimberly White and Monica A. Hershberger, all presenting results from their doctoral research and beyond, give revealing insights into where we stand today when dealing with women in opera. Several thematic and methodological approaches in all three books provide indications of the current issues of debate.

The story of soprano and opera impresaria Emma Carelli (1877–1928) has often been recounted as the tale of a successful prima donna who rather abruptly turned to opera management in order to assist her husband, Walter Mocchi, in his entrepreneurial ventures. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished primary sources – including Carelli's scrapbooks, critics’ reviews and a set of letters she wrote to the impresario, critic and agent Adolfo Re Riccardi – my article demonstrates that Carelli's choice was entirely self-motivated and the product of her unique set of individual attributes. The significance of Carelli's journey can best be understood by situating the singer and impresaria within her contemporary social landscape and by examining her personal story through the lens of women's history. Such a perspective unveils the strategies that she adopted to enact a stirring ideal of femininity in opposition to the values of the liberal state in early twentieth-century Italy.

This article reconsiders two of Rossini's exoticist farces, L'italiana in Algeri (1813) and Il turco in Italia (1814), in the light of recent theoretical studies in tourism. These operas appeared at the juncture between the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and nineteenth-century mass tourism, and they became implicated in multiple layers of tourist experience. Travellers from faraway countries went to see productions in Italy, yet the operas tell stories of journeys between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. These operas were an object of the tourist gaze even as they perpetuated that gaze through imaginary encounters with exotic others. In the article, I explain the role of Italian opera in tourism at the turn of the eighteenth century and suggest ways in which tourist theory might help us understand Stendhal's operatic encounters, which in turn form part of the documentary basis of my study. I conclude that Rossini and his librettists upended many of the established hierarchies of tourism in these works, offering a fascinating critique of the tourist gaze in the process.