Operatic Geographies

The Place of Opera and the Opera House

Suzanne Aspden

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226596013, 9780226595962
• eBook ISBN: 9780226596150
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: World History

Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house's physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination.

Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house's spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house's landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the "Old" world to the "New." One of the book's most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls' schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera's spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions. 
 

ONE

Introduction: Opera and the (Urban) Geography of Culture

Suzanne Aspden

Musicologists and cultural historians have long acknowledged opera and opera houses’ importance as forums for the performance of power, whether of the monarchy or the state.1 Indeed, recognizable through their grandiose architecture and use of symbolic locations, opera houses are still often lieux de mémoire, repositories of collective memory, specially situated within the urban environment.2 Yet this situatedness, and the way that opera and the opera house have interacted with and in the formation of their physical settings, has seldom been treated as a phenomenon worthy of examination in its own right. This is perhaps surprising, given the long-standing recognition of the theater’s potential: in his 1989 Places of Performance, Marvin Carlson declared that theater historians were now as likely to consider theater as “a sociocultural event” (in the vein of the then-burgeoning field of performance studies) as they were to examine it as the representation of a dramatic text, and as such he proposed studying “how places of performance generate social and cultural meanings of their own which in turn help to structure the meaning of the entire theatre experience.”3 Carlson (following Eric Buyssens) invoked a visit to the opera house, in particular, as “the richest object available for semiotic analysis,” not only for its multiple theatrical means, but for “how it fits into the social routine, where the opera house is located in the urban plan and how one arrives there, what preparations must be made for the operatic event.”4 Nonetheless, the opera house was not Carlson’s primary focus (though it provided abundant pickings in the examination of theater-as-monument).5 And while Anselm Gerhard’s pioneering 1992 study of the “urbanization” of French nineteenth-century grand opera also followed this line of thought in its introductory discussions of developments in the Parisian operatic environment,6 and the collection of essays on European concert venues, Éspaces et lieux de concert en Europe, 1700–1920: Architecture, musique, société (2008), has undertaken an examination of concert venues similar to Carlson’s in approach,7 few others have considered the ways in which opera’s physical situation relates to and engages with the development of its social, cultural, and political functions, despite the attention that has been paid, in numerous studies, to the representation of urban, civic, or national life (or “place,” more broadly) on the stage.

Yet since, as Carlson pointed out, theaters have been one of the most persistent features of the urban landscape, considering their place, agency, and representational mode helps uncover the “shifting meanings in the urban text,”8 as well as in the nature of opera as a genre. We are thus enabled to see beyond the opera house as a mere receptacle for operatic events and appreciate it as a participant in negotiations of (urban) territory. Not only have opera and its urban environment developed side by side throughout the genre’s four-hundred-year history, but the notion and performance of place (as itself an often-contested expression and experience of power) is as vitally important to opera as this most prestigious of art forms has been to the development of a sense of civic and national identity. This volume of essays thus sets about exploring something of that ever-changing relationship, from the peripatetic and contingent nature of late seventeenth-century opera and its venues, to the establishment of opera houses as defining civic spaces in their own right in the eighteenth century, to the opera house (and operagoing) as a cultural commodity and a source of regional, national, and international territorial definition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the challenges and disillusionments attending on that success and diffusion of the operatic (and opera-house) ideal in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In exploring the opera house’s potential meanings, cultural geography offers a valuable framework, its consideration of the ways in which the social and the spatial intertwine offering at least as much to opera as to other cultural forms. It is a field that has long engaged in the study of human interaction with (and formation of) the landscape—typically, in the earlier twentieth century, at a regional scale, focused on rural “field” sites. Since then, cultural geography has become increasingly concerned with problematizing the conceptual and historical separation of the human and the environmental, the natural and the cultural, productively calling into question “culture,” “landscape,” and “nature” as discrete concepts.9 As Barney Warf explains in his introduction to The Spatial Turn (2009), “Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen.”10 Recognition of these and other interdependencies has prompted considerable expansion within the field of cultural geography, such that it now seems almost all-encompassing; indeed, the editors of the 2003 Handbook of Cultural Geography describe it simply as “a series of intellectual—and, at core, politicized—engagements with the world.”11 Correspondingly, those (including musicologists) who have traditionally sought to understand the cultural “how and why” are coming to realize the importance of the “where,” finding that (as with cultural studies more generally) seemingly normative or abstract patterns and principles make better sense when viewed in relation to their physical environments. In particular, understanding music through seeking to explore its place in its physical setting has brought insights into Western art music as diverse as Notre Dame organum and the twentieth-century symphony, as well as into contemporary popular music and world musics (the traditional stomping ground of geographers interested in music), providing one very concrete means of contextualization for a discipline still disentangling itself from the reification of score as work.12 Indeed, for fields such as medieval chant and nonliturgical song (where the work concept has had less hold), reconceptualization of music around ideas of space and place has generated rich insights, and in the process regenerated interest in the repertoire itself.13 Similarly, for opera, a genre still more dependent on a sense of place and the temporal inhabiting of space for staking its claim to status and potential meaning, a cultural-geographical approach offers an illuminating and fruitful set of perspectives. Although other—particularly French—studies have touched on aspects of the relationship between traditional human geography and opera, there is still much to explore, particularly in light of the expansion of cultural geography.14

While cultural geography in general provides a useful mode through which to approach opera, recent developments within the field hold particular relevance. Most importantly, for a genre often explicitly concerned with the expression of power relations, the cultural and spatial turns that have characterized developments in the social sciences and the humanities over the past twenty years or so have also encouraged the emergence of what in the 1990s became known as a “new” cultural geography, one committed to taking account of the political and the economic, the expression of power, and the function of physical environments as “texts” in its analyses.15 Opera historians are no strangers, of course, to consideration of politics, economics, and power relations in their studies of opera companies and opera houses (whether these studies chime with the “new” musicology or not);16 indeed, given the manifold contingencies of this expensive, multidisciplinary art form, political and economic interests are generally acknowledged as crucial to the genre’s long-term viability. However, the interconnectedness of these issues with topographical or spatial concerns has rarely been considered—and yet the growing interest in music’s (or, more broadly, sound’s) relationship to space, while largely focused on modern experience, has obvious relevance for opera, as a genre traditionally associated with the political elite. As Jacques Attali pointed out in his influential book Noise (1985), music’s capacity to connect the seat of power with its subjects—and, one might add, to perform that connection as itself a cultural expression—makes it “an attribute of power” and a means to “creation or consolidation of a community.”17 Thus sound’s inherent capacity to travel (which made it integral to communicative and imaginative structures long before the technology of the printing press gave a presumed preeminence to the visual) is as evident in studies of medieval and early modern soundscapes as it is in those of contemporary popular culture, and demonstrates the centrality of music to the projection and negotiation of meaning within geographical as well as temporal space.18 Exponents of opera certainly recognized its potential for such negotiations, associating the performance of the genre—even before construction of specific houses for it—with the centers of power.19 So, as Warf’s observation regarding the relation between geography and social politics suggests, the spatial turn is relevant to opera both with regard to the physical situation of an opera house and in examining opera’s expression onstage.20 Indeed, while the political slant to the new cultural geography might go hand in hand with the perception of opera and the opera house as forms of social and topographical texts, to be read for their expression of power, opera’s phenomenological distinctiveness and visceral presence in performance mean the mode is also primed for analysis in terms of so-called nonrepresentational (or “more-than-representational”) geography, which is grounded in the affective and the quotidian and in less hierarchical assessments of meaning.21

Recent work has certainly made clear cultural geography’s potential for opera, although studies have tended thus far to focus on particular composers and/or works, exploring concepts of “landscape”—and, at times, connections to urban geography—expressed in opera: for example, Emanuele Senici’s Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (2005);22 Daniel M. Grimley’s “Carl Nielsen’s Carnival: Time, Space and the Politics of Identity in Maskarade” (2010);23 Christopher Morris on the alpine landscape and German modernist composers in Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema (2012);24 and Arman Schwartz on Puccini’s use of sonic realism in Puccini’s Soundscapes: Realism and Modernity in Italian Opera (2016).25 David Charlton considers the aesthetics of landscape projected in late eighteenth-century opéra comique, in “Hearing through the Eye in Eighteenth-Century French Opera” (2014).26 For these and other studies, “landscape” is primarily considered in terms of what we would call the “natural” environment, and valued for its metaphorical and symbolic functions within musicodramatic structures.

This volume—which had its origins in a 2014 conference in Oxford—takes a broader purview than that of most other studies of opera and geography. The aim of the volume as a whole is to offer a set of perspectives on the changing and often contested sociopolitical meaning and configuration of opera’s physical context throughout the genre’s history—in particular, examining the opera house’s evolving place in its (largely urban) environment, from the seventeenth century to the present day. So Rebekah Ahrendt and Amanda Eubanks Winkler show that the establishment of opera in the Netherlands and England in the late seventeenth century was linked both to civic infrastructural growth and regulation, and to emerging discourses around opera’s place in the urban economy, framed by concerns educational (Eubanks Winkler) and legal (Ahrendt). Their studies demonstrate equally the local contingency of early operatic development and the degree to which our artistic narratives of the genre are dependent on sociocultural and geographic circumstance: England’s thriving suburban education market provided both impetus and financial security not otherwise available for English operatic ventures, perhaps helping to explain its distinctive style, while the Netherlands’ geographical location encouraged a sophisticated system of peripatetic operatic circulation, contributing to a defining feature of the genre in the international movement of performers and repertoire. By the eighteenth century there was growing awareness of the opera house’s potential to manifest and broadcast civic ambition, as essays by Michael Burden and Margaret R. Butler on late eighteenth-century London and Turin show. Butler demonstrates the care with which eighteenth-century Turinese impresarios engineered entertainment to construct their city’s greater glory and restrict what they saw as less prestigious forms, showing how the opera house (like the later concert hall) served to mark out territory—to aestheticize the city in structural terms and thereby affirm elite control of the civic environment. In the case of London, on the other hand, Burden proposes that the everyday commercial demands of this, Europe’s largest and most modern of cities, often thwarted civic aspiration in practical terms, no matter how clearly and ambitiously it was expressed.

The situation of the opera house in Europe’s civic landscapes in the nineteenth century invoked both unabashed commercialism and a heightened (and commercially exploited) self-awareness, as is shown by Susan Rutherford’s essay on the problematic touristic portrayal of Venice and Jonathan Hicks’s on the insertion of Don Giovanni into the ebullient original “Tom and Jerry” craze in perpetuum mobile London. Whether in London or Venice, it seems, the weight of historical and cultural expectation framed narratives around the opera house much as they framed operatic narratives themselves—indeed, in this period, when the opera houses are well established, it is the stories told about opera and its locations that most emphatically enhance its edifice.

The sophisticated web of national, regional, and local self-definition and promotion that underpinned such narratives extended still further in the nineteenth century, of course: opera was part of an international cosmopolitan culture that, while centered on Europe, saw both colonial “outpost” and European center enhanced by the connections forged between them and the stories told about them, as Charlotte Bentley, Benjamin Walton, and Roberto Diaz show in essays on New Orleans, Calcutta, and Buenos Aires, respectively. The cachet of opera’s Eurocentric and elitist associations made it attractive even in countries where the difficulties of its multimedia representation should have precluded it, helping to explain the attractions of operatic concert programs in factional Shanghai, and of touring opera round the “all-red” British colonies, as Yvonne Liao and Kerry Murphy show respectively. In fact, these difficulties were part of opera’s appeal—a way of indicating that New Orleans, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Melbourne, and Shanghai had “arrived” economically as much as culturally in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The association of opera with power seemingly also made it an ideal means to project colonial or European might beyond the Old World—opera in India, the Americas, Asia, and the antipodes, whether in custom-built houses or nonspecialist theaters, could, through its attendant social rituals as well as its music, create a penumbra of exclusivity that appeared to reinforce social hierarchies just as effectively as military muscle might do. But, as all of these essays demonstrate in different ways, the compromises and contingencies of opera’s adaptation to new environments inevitably called into question European hegemony, destabilizing narratives of cultural superiority. Indeed, because of their association with the performance of power, touring artists and operas often found themselves at the center of shifting and competing projections of imperialism and regionalism. Taken together, these essays suggest that, in its representational and performed complexity, colonial opera has the potential to add vitally to cultural geography’s ever-shifting understanding of negotiations of power and meaning in colonial spaces.

The destabilization of opera’s status was felt in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries too. The genre’s populist potential in this period—which was perhaps the inevitable corollary of its place, geographically and ideologically, as a fulcrum of national (and nationalist) life—prompted growing concern about and interest in its function within the (variously defined) popular urban environment, as Peter Franklin shows for fin-de-siècle Vienna. Perhaps responding to such concerns, some early twentieth-century operatic endeavors sought to break opera’s association with the city altogether, offering a new idealization and (in some senses) sanitization of the genre, whether in the French towns of the Midi that Katharine Ellis explores or in the English countryside and country-house ventures of Glastonbury and Glyndebourne that I examine in my chapter. The imbrication of opera and consumerism was not to be abandoned, however, and as Klaus van den Berg and Roberto Ignacio Díaz show (as much as Ellis and I do), the new opera houses of the twentieth century have all, in various ways, embraced the staging of operagoing as itself an act to be consumed. That the edifice of the opera house remains an important marker of opera’s politicocultural status is demonstrated in the care taken over the design (always freighted with meaning) of modern opera houses, as well as those of the past—demonstrated by the Bastille Opéra in Paris and the Winspear Opera House in Dallas (van den Berg), as much as by the Teatro Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1   Introduction: Opera and the (Urban) Geography of Culture
• 2   The Legal Spaces of Opera in The Hague
• 3   Opera at School: Mapping the Cultural Geography of Schoolgirl Performance
• 4   London’s Opera House in the Urban Landscape
• 5   Opera and the Carnival Entertainment Package in Eighteenth-Century Turin
• 6   Cockney Masquerades: Tom and Jerry and Don Giovanni in 1820s London
• 7   The City Onstage: Re-Presenting Venice in Italian Opera
• 8   Between the Frontier and the French Quarter: Operatic Travel Writing and Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
• 9   L’italiana in Calcutta
• 10   Thomas Quinlan (1881–1951) and His “All-Red” Opera Tours, 1912 and 1913
• 11   Empires in Rivalry: Opera Concerts and Foreign Territoriality in Shanghai, 1930–1945
• 12   “Come to the Mirror!” Phantoms of the Opera—Staging the City
• 13   Open-Air Opera and Southern French Difference at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• 14   Pastoral Retreats: Playing at Arcadia in Modern Britain
• 15   The Opera House as Urban Exhibition Space
• 16   Underground in Buenos Aires: A Chamber Opera at the Teatro Colón
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Notes
• Index