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Books by Francesca Vella
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo123170426.html, 2021
Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas t... more Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts.
In "Networking Operatic Italy", Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.
Academic articles by Francesca Vella
https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2021.1999724, 2022
Within the early twentieth-century Italian radiophonic imagination, opera occupied a complex posi... more Within the early twentieth-century Italian radiophonic imagination, opera occupied a complex position. The overriding ‘voice’ of Italy and its radio empire under Fascism, opera supported the new technology as a political and cultural tool, even as it challenged it as a geographical and perceptual fantasy. This article has two aims. First, drawing on materials from 1920s and ‘30s radio magazines, it sketches a history of early radio listening that restores vision and touch to a more central position than they have had in previous scholarly accounts. Second, it investigates radio and the Italian operatic voice as two mutually broadcasting technologies, ones whose critical co-construction was more than an accident of the fraught political moment. Contemporary definitions of radio as bel canto and of bel canto as radiophonic rested on a subtler, conceptual alignment between the two media, each of which foregrounded a tension between sound and meaning and implied the radial dissemination of voice ‘out’ in all directions. This article thus seeks to answer two questions. Did opera, a fundamentally audiovisual genre, become invariably ‘sonified’ through radiophonic transmission? And what happened when that old broadcasting technology, the Italian voice, met the new communications medium?
On November 1, 1871, _Lohengrin_—the first of Wagner’s works to be staged in Italy—premiered amid... more On November 1, 1871, _Lohengrin_—the first of Wagner’s works to be staged in Italy—premiered amid much local buzz at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale. Five weeks later, the entire production was exported to Florence’s Teatro Pagliano. Cast, chorus, orchestra, staff, sets, costumes, and stage machinery were all relocated by train, an undertaking that required the transportation of between 300 and 400 people. In this article I examine this pioneering operatic translocation—to my knowledge the first of its kind in Italy and, possibly, in Europe—in relation both to the institutional quagmires it created and to the broader context of railway travel.
I argue that “mobilizing” the 1871 _Lohengrin_, by resituating it within a less stationary framework than the one in which it has traditionally been set by scholars (i.e., late-nineteenth-century Bologna), allows us to recover an as-yet-unexplored form of operatic interplay between late-nineteenth-century Italian cities: a type of material interaction that is often lost to modern scholarly accounts, which emphasize networks of discourse and local resistance to the nation’s unifying impulses after 1861. I also suggest that the _Lohengrin_ transfer anticipated trends that would take root in subsequent years (during the 1870s and 1880s), when full-blown opera productions started to go more regularly on the move. After pursuing _Lohengrin_’s relocation, I thus turn to a number of these later transfers, reading them alongside and via the technological apparatus of the railway. Referred to by Italian contemporaries as _trasferimenti_ or _trasporti di spettacolo_, these early mobile productions lay bare conflicting attitudes to movements that held varied aesthetic, political, and technological implications. Besides revealing key tensions between mobility and immobility, as well as oldness and newness, railway operatic mobility during this period lends itself to probing questions of mediation: questions that underlay both the changing status of opera at the _fine secolo_, and notions of sound reproduction that were emerging around the same time.
Voice has a long history in modern Western culture as a transparent signifier of subjectivity and... more Voice has a long history in modern Western culture as a transparent signifier of subjectivity and presence. This ideology of immediacy has meant exploration of singing voices as mediated has mostly been confined to classic technological turns marked by specific sound devices. This article examines voice in connection with the mid-nineteenth-century soprano Jenny Lind and the broader London context of contemporary Lind mania. Mediation lends itself to canvassing questions at the crossroads of voice and celebrity studies, for the invocation of a linear, unmediated communication between particular individuals and their audiences lies at the heart of modern celebrity culture’s apparatus. The tension between voice and technē, presence and absence, evinced by printed and visual materials suggests mediation was key to the perceptual and ideological system surrounding Lind’s voice. Attending to voice within a more porous, relational framework can help us move away from a concern with individuality and authenticity, and listen to a rich tapestry of human and material encounters.
Tutti i saggi pubblicati in questo volume sono stati sottoposti a processo di double blind peer-r... more Tutti i saggi pubblicati in questo volume sono stati sottoposti a processo di double blind peer-review Redazione Alessandro Turba Impaginazione Davide Stefani Tipografi a Mattioli 1885 S.p.A. (Fidenza) Distribuzione Casalini Libri Via Benedetto da Majano 3 -50014 Fiesole (fi) Via Faentina 169/15 -50014 Caldine, Fiesole (fi) info@casalini.it orders@casalini.it Mattioli 1885 S.r.l. Strada della Lodesana, 649/sx -43036 Fidenza (pr) tel. 0524 530383 -fax 0524 82537 distribuzione@mattioli1885.com L'Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani si dichiara a disposizione degli aventi diritto che non sia stato possibile contattare © 2014 istituto nazionale di studi verdiani Strada M. Melloni, 1/b i-43121 Parma tel e fax 0521/285273
When Verdi's Don Carlo made its debut at La Scala in March 1868, it was hardly the latest operati... more When Verdi's Don Carlo made its debut at La Scala in March 1868, it was hardly the latest operatic news; since its 1867 premiere at the Paris Opéra, it had been widely performed and written about. One aspect of the debates in the Milanese and the Italian press, however, deserves special attention: the depiction of the opera as a 'monument'. Although the work's astonishing length (compared to that of most of Verdi's previous operas) and the composer's increasing prestige as a national figure might both have been reasons for this impression of monumentality, there were clearly others. The article explores some of these reasons in relation to post-Unification urban renewal, the increasing success of la musica dell'avvenire and the beginning of a slow rediscovery of 'ancient' musical works. It argues that Don Carlo was thought of as a monument primarily because it was perceived as standing between the past and the future, and as such was the epitome of contemporary attitudes towards these temporal categories.
Reviews by Francesca Vella
IN the epilogue to Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Pet... more IN the epilogue to Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters sketches a picture of human interactions at once reassuring and ethically exacting. While a number of the once habitual media practices that he describes are swiftly becoming anachronistic (such as 'twist[ing] a radio dial or rustl[ing] a newspaper'), his overarching argument continues to hold significance. 1 Peters's 1999 volume examines shifting understandings of communication at the intersection of social thought, philosophy, science, religion and psychoanalysis in the so-called West, particularly during the modern age. In the final chapter, he argues that the central problem with the process of communication, both face to face and over long distances, lies not so much in the interferences that media might cause to message delivery. Rather, the infinite gaps and malfunctions and short circuits in human interactions should be blamed on our inability to acknowledge our irreducible alterity. 'The problem of communication is not language's slipperiness, it is the unfixable difference between the self and the other,' as Peters puts it. 2 In other words, successful exchange requires constant coordination, the subtle readjustment of one's strategy and position to the necessities of the other. One needs to give up fidelity to his or her 'truth' for co-creation of 'a dance in which we sometimes touch'. 3 To approach communication from this angle is to downplay its modern, transmissionorientated understandingthe idea of media as 'message-bearing institutions'and to return to an older understanding of the term: communication as what begets belonging, what enables community and communion. 4 In his latest book, Peters eschews what he describes as a relatively recent, predominantly twentieth-century understanding of media as distributors of content and information, in favour of a more basic understanding of media as environments and infrastructures that sustain life. On the various meanings of 'communication', see Peters, Speaking into the Air, 6-10.
Conference Papers & Talks by Francesca Vella
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo123170426.html, 2021
Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas t... more Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts.
In "Networking Operatic Italy", Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2021.1999724, 2022
Within the early twentieth-century Italian radiophonic imagination, opera occupied a complex posi... more Within the early twentieth-century Italian radiophonic imagination, opera occupied a complex position. The overriding ‘voice’ of Italy and its radio empire under Fascism, opera supported the new technology as a political and cultural tool, even as it challenged it as a geographical and perceptual fantasy. This article has two aims. First, drawing on materials from 1920s and ‘30s radio magazines, it sketches a history of early radio listening that restores vision and touch to a more central position than they have had in previous scholarly accounts. Second, it investigates radio and the Italian operatic voice as two mutually broadcasting technologies, ones whose critical co-construction was more than an accident of the fraught political moment. Contemporary definitions of radio as bel canto and of bel canto as radiophonic rested on a subtler, conceptual alignment between the two media, each of which foregrounded a tension between sound and meaning and implied the radial dissemination of voice ‘out’ in all directions. This article thus seeks to answer two questions. Did opera, a fundamentally audiovisual genre, become invariably ‘sonified’ through radiophonic transmission? And what happened when that old broadcasting technology, the Italian voice, met the new communications medium?
On November 1, 1871, _Lohengrin_—the first of Wagner’s works to be staged in Italy—premiered amid... more On November 1, 1871, _Lohengrin_—the first of Wagner’s works to be staged in Italy—premiered amid much local buzz at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale. Five weeks later, the entire production was exported to Florence’s Teatro Pagliano. Cast, chorus, orchestra, staff, sets, costumes, and stage machinery were all relocated by train, an undertaking that required the transportation of between 300 and 400 people. In this article I examine this pioneering operatic translocation—to my knowledge the first of its kind in Italy and, possibly, in Europe—in relation both to the institutional quagmires it created and to the broader context of railway travel.
I argue that “mobilizing” the 1871 _Lohengrin_, by resituating it within a less stationary framework than the one in which it has traditionally been set by scholars (i.e., late-nineteenth-century Bologna), allows us to recover an as-yet-unexplored form of operatic interplay between late-nineteenth-century Italian cities: a type of material interaction that is often lost to modern scholarly accounts, which emphasize networks of discourse and local resistance to the nation’s unifying impulses after 1861. I also suggest that the _Lohengrin_ transfer anticipated trends that would take root in subsequent years (during the 1870s and 1880s), when full-blown opera productions started to go more regularly on the move. After pursuing _Lohengrin_’s relocation, I thus turn to a number of these later transfers, reading them alongside and via the technological apparatus of the railway. Referred to by Italian contemporaries as _trasferimenti_ or _trasporti di spettacolo_, these early mobile productions lay bare conflicting attitudes to movements that held varied aesthetic, political, and technological implications. Besides revealing key tensions between mobility and immobility, as well as oldness and newness, railway operatic mobility during this period lends itself to probing questions of mediation: questions that underlay both the changing status of opera at the _fine secolo_, and notions of sound reproduction that were emerging around the same time.
Voice has a long history in modern Western culture as a transparent signifier of subjectivity and... more Voice has a long history in modern Western culture as a transparent signifier of subjectivity and presence. This ideology of immediacy has meant exploration of singing voices as mediated has mostly been confined to classic technological turns marked by specific sound devices. This article examines voice in connection with the mid-nineteenth-century soprano Jenny Lind and the broader London context of contemporary Lind mania. Mediation lends itself to canvassing questions at the crossroads of voice and celebrity studies, for the invocation of a linear, unmediated communication between particular individuals and their audiences lies at the heart of modern celebrity culture’s apparatus. The tension between voice and technē, presence and absence, evinced by printed and visual materials suggests mediation was key to the perceptual and ideological system surrounding Lind’s voice. Attending to voice within a more porous, relational framework can help us move away from a concern with individuality and authenticity, and listen to a rich tapestry of human and material encounters.
Tutti i saggi pubblicati in questo volume sono stati sottoposti a processo di double blind peer-r... more Tutti i saggi pubblicati in questo volume sono stati sottoposti a processo di double blind peer-review Redazione Alessandro Turba Impaginazione Davide Stefani Tipografi a Mattioli 1885 S.p.A. (Fidenza) Distribuzione Casalini Libri Via Benedetto da Majano 3 -50014 Fiesole (fi) Via Faentina 169/15 -50014 Caldine, Fiesole (fi) info@casalini.it orders@casalini.it Mattioli 1885 S.r.l. Strada della Lodesana, 649/sx -43036 Fidenza (pr) tel. 0524 530383 -fax 0524 82537 distribuzione@mattioli1885.com L'Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani si dichiara a disposizione degli aventi diritto che non sia stato possibile contattare © 2014 istituto nazionale di studi verdiani Strada M. Melloni, 1/b i-43121 Parma tel e fax 0521/285273
When Verdi's Don Carlo made its debut at La Scala in March 1868, it was hardly the latest operati... more When Verdi's Don Carlo made its debut at La Scala in March 1868, it was hardly the latest operatic news; since its 1867 premiere at the Paris Opéra, it had been widely performed and written about. One aspect of the debates in the Milanese and the Italian press, however, deserves special attention: the depiction of the opera as a 'monument'. Although the work's astonishing length (compared to that of most of Verdi's previous operas) and the composer's increasing prestige as a national figure might both have been reasons for this impression of monumentality, there were clearly others. The article explores some of these reasons in relation to post-Unification urban renewal, the increasing success of la musica dell'avvenire and the beginning of a slow rediscovery of 'ancient' musical works. It argues that Don Carlo was thought of as a monument primarily because it was perceived as standing between the past and the future, and as such was the epitome of contemporary attitudes towards these temporal categories.
IN the epilogue to Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Pet... more IN the epilogue to Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters sketches a picture of human interactions at once reassuring and ethically exacting. While a number of the once habitual media practices that he describes are swiftly becoming anachronistic (such as 'twist[ing] a radio dial or rustl[ing] a newspaper'), his overarching argument continues to hold significance. 1 Peters's 1999 volume examines shifting understandings of communication at the intersection of social thought, philosophy, science, religion and psychoanalysis in the so-called West, particularly during the modern age. In the final chapter, he argues that the central problem with the process of communication, both face to face and over long distances, lies not so much in the interferences that media might cause to message delivery. Rather, the infinite gaps and malfunctions and short circuits in human interactions should be blamed on our inability to acknowledge our irreducible alterity. 'The problem of communication is not language's slipperiness, it is the unfixable difference between the self and the other,' as Peters puts it. 2 In other words, successful exchange requires constant coordination, the subtle readjustment of one's strategy and position to the necessities of the other. One needs to give up fidelity to his or her 'truth' for co-creation of 'a dance in which we sometimes touch'. 3 To approach communication from this angle is to downplay its modern, transmissionorientated understandingthe idea of media as 'message-bearing institutions'and to return to an older understanding of the term: communication as what begets belonging, what enables community and communion. 4 In his latest book, Peters eschews what he describes as a relatively recent, predominantly twentieth-century understanding of media as distributors of content and information, in favour of a more basic understanding of media as environments and infrastructures that sustain life. On the various meanings of 'communication', see Peters, Speaking into the Air, 6-10.
The early radio imagination was famously crammed with images and discourses that celebrated the c... more The early radio imagination was famously crammed with images and discourses that celebrated the collapse of space and time brought about by the new medium. Yet, if as a technology—and as a sonic fantasy—radio seemed to signify the “conquest of ubiquity” (Valéry) and “the overleaping of frontiers” (Arnheim), as a cultural practice it far from bypassed the question of place, and was remarkably multisensory. In this paper, I start retracing the interplay between radio and geography in Italy during the late 1920s and early 1930s by drawing on accounts, illustrations and advertisements from the contemporary press. My focus is on the ambivalent spatial and sensory imaginaries with which early radio experiences were associated. To such imaginaries, opera—arguably the overriding “voice” of Italy’s radio empire, and a key topic of debate in the Italian radio press—brought its own political and cultural baggage. Once remediated in the discursive context of broadcast technologies, that baggage in turns helps to highlight tensions between the abstract and the material, signals and objects, auditory specificity and sonic mobility, that lay at the core of both opera and the radio phenomenon.