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     BOOK REVIEW
   
Francesca Vella. Networking Operatic Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 256 pp. ISBN 9780226815701.

        

    Luca Battioni
        *
    
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (Fall 2022), pp. 149–59, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2022 Luca Battioni. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss19974.




    Francesca Vella’s groundbreaking debut monograph    Networking Operatic Italy will certainly not go unnoticed across a
    wide spectrum of disciplines such as opera studies, reception, and
    performance studies. The author’s refreshing outlook and compelling prose
    contribute to making the text a must-read for any serious investigation of
    nineteenth-century Italian culture.



    The question of mobility lies at the core of this book, and in particular
    the question of how movement came to play a role in articulating national
    discourses in nineteenth-century Italy within the context of opera. On the
    one hand, Vella’s intervention points to the long-standing culture of
    approaching Italian opera exclusively through the rigid wide-angle lens of
    national discourses—an approach that ultimately erased identity pluralism
    and flattened dynamics of urban exchange and mobility. On the other hand,
    she touches upon the limitations of the “local” approach that looks at
    localisms as discrete entities completely disconnected from a broader
    national framework. In response to these restricting routes, Vella proposes
    an alternative way that focuses on “how key aspects of an Italian
macro-identity were articulated through opera, both Italian and foreign,    in between distinct locations: liminal spaces that in turn
    transformed operatic ideas and aesthetics” (4). In other terms, by
    deflecting both a circular determinism—whereby operatic forms and national
    forces mutually inform each other—and a narrowed focus on cities as
    “discrete operatic milieus” (2), Vella argues that discourses of
    identity-making were articulated in the liminal spaces, physical and/or
    imaginary, that operatic forms generated between locations.



    Of note, this newly “liminal space” paradigm, very cogently articulated in
    the introduction, does not consistently bring the promised results in the
    body of the text and risks reinforcing the very local-national dualism that
    it is trying to overcome. For instance, the author argues that operatic
    relocations between cities are “a type of material interaction that
    challenges the notion that the peninsula’s urban centers altogether
    resisted the nation’s unifying impulses after 1861” (111). Yet, a few pages
    later she points to the export of “local” products to other cities as
    battles for cultural supremacy, whose goal was far from any idea of
    national unity. The relocation of Wagner’s Lohengrin from Bologna
    to Florence actually guaranteed a new power position for Bologna, while for
    Florence “the whole trading operation risked undermining the prestige of a
    city that had itself once been preeminent in promoting “‘modern’ music”
    (114). Perhaps a better way to reconcile the local and national dichotomy
    might be to rethink how this complex web of power relations informed or
    resisted nationalist discourses. Furthermore, the presence of non-Italian
    opera—for instance, Meyerbeer and the Parisian grand opéra
    —significantly complicates the picture. It is important to question what
    role this presence played for or against the Italian nation-building
    process, and in what forms was Italian opera resistant to this process.



    In the book’s introductory lines, the author positions her work within the
    field both by separating it from a series of methodological frameworks that
    have crystallized in the study of Italian opera and by setting forth its
    continuity with the new scholarly trends in opera studies. She then
    introduces the reader to the themes that will counterpoint the whole text.
    Unlike traditional introductions, Vella does not unfold the synopsis of
    each chapter in an orderly and mechanical fashion. Instead, in the
    introduction, the selected five case studies dialectically interface with
    the author’s narrative, creating an interesting holistic continuum.
    Furthermore, Vella defines plainly the terms that are key to her study. For
    instance, in her discourse, she reconfigures “mobility” not only as “vast,
    fast, and spectacular movements” (3) but as those inconspicuous movements
    and mechanisms involving both cultural and material artifacts. She
    clarifies that “media” in her study includes “transportation and
    communication technologies,” as well as “newspapers, wind bands, and the
    human voice” (6–7). Furthermore, she posits the terms “Italy” and “Italian”
    “not as expressions of an existing political reality but as references to
    shared cultural markers” (5). Ultimately, she situates her work in
    conversation with a broader framework of studies and against a tendency in
    Italian studies of considering the Italian case as distinctive and unique.



    Although in a footnote Vella mentions the resonance of Bruno Latour’s work
    in her approach to material and human actors, perhaps for the economy of
    this review it is worthwhile to recall here the relevance of actor-network
    theory (ANT), as a good deal of this book bears such theoretical
    framework’s watermark. In broad terms, ANT challenges the notion of society
    as a pre-fixed entity wherein non-social actors are embedded and framed.
    Rather, in the words of Latour society should be decoded as “one of the
many connecting elements circulating inside tiny conduits.”     [1]
    Thus, material elements as well as nonhumans agents contribute to the
    assemblage of any given actuality as much as human factors. Following this
    reasoning, opera is both diluted in and produced by all the ingredients
    accounted for by Vella’s monograph —from Meyerbeer’s operas to marching
    bands, single operatic numbers, replicas, Adelina Patti’s voice,
    technological devices, and railways. Furthermore, from an ANT point of
    view, an interesting question here is not so much whether opera in
    nineteenth-century Italy has to be understood locally, nationally, or
    globally, but how and the extent to which opera mobilized and was moved
    from one locale to another locale across shifting networks of human and
    nonhuman factors. By broadening the framework, ANT theory might help us to
    better understand the politics of nineteenth-century European culture with
    its local and national rivalries as well as forms of “transnational
cosmopolitanism” .    [2] In
    addition to this, Vella’s book echoes and elaborates the sonic implications
    of the spatial turn in musicology and sound studies by leaning toward an
    understanding of sounds as socio-material assemblages “located
    simultaneously in the materials and practices of production, transmission
and reception (hearing and listening).[3]    



    In Chapter 1, Vella explores a wide range of mobilities intersecting with
    the city of Florence’s urban spaces in the 1850s. The Tuscan capital
    premiered the first Italian stagings of many of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s operas.
    As the author argues, over the course of an opera’s mobile life, the
    mapping of operatic objects (designed for a specific city or theater) onto
    the locality of a different place exposed tensions and sites of resistance.
    Far from being passive reconstitutions of the Parisian model, the
    Florentine replicas of Meyerbeer’s operas set in motion a complex set of
    technological and cultural negotiations. In other words, in the grand
    opéra-centric system, operatic mobilities gave agency to peripheral
    Florence, allowing the Tuscan city to constantly reposition itself into the
    European framework of urban modernity.



    For Vella, Meyerbeer’s operas contributed to setting in motion a paradigm
    shift from “an event-oriented operatic culture … to an understanding of
    operas as permanent works amenable to endless reproduction” (28). In other
    terms, operas became mobile objects that, in their journey across the
    globe, negotiate both their presence and their provenance locally. The
    complex social, political, and cultural imaginary that the object “opera”
    carried contributed to an incessant remapping of places within the virtual
    geography of the time. In light of the plurality of mobilities that
    revolved around opera productions, Vella reconsiders modern interpretations
    of Meyerbeer’s operatic cosmopolitanism, generally attributed to the
    composer by European critical discourses from the 1830s onwards. In Vella’s
    argument, this was neither the result of the projection of external values
    onto his works nor the outcome of the composer’s struggle to overcome
    cultural and aesthetic hierarchies. Rather, his cosmopolitanism was one of
    the many points of convergence for the various and multifaceted discourses
    that his operas circulated as commodities in a widespread interconnected
    global web.



    Furthermore, from this very first chapter Vella begins to shake the
    traditional reception theory’s tree. In fact, by departing from a
    constricted traditional view of newspapers as the site of critical
    responses by contemporary audiences, she argues that they “were central to
    the articulation of urban identities” (26), for the material assemblage on
    the page “encapsulated contemporary urban experience” and reflected “the
    fragmentation of city life” (26–27). Thus, musical criticism and newspapers
    not only played a crucial role in the cultural and political mediation
    process but, by placing opera within a broader web of physical and
    imaginary relationships, they also contributed to the networking of
    operatic objects across space and time.



    One of the high points of the monograph, Chapter 2 focuses on the
    circulation of a single operatic object—the marcia funebre from Errico
    Petrella’s opera Jone (1858). Although this opera has since
    disappeared from the operatic repertoire, in the second half of the
    nineteenth century Petrella’s funeral march was a truly popular hit. By
    retracing the circulation of the march, Vella unveils the intricated matrix
    of meanings and functions that its movements generated. Vella starts her
    analysis of the march from the original operatic context—Jone’s
    act 4, scene 1. On the stage, a marching band accompanies Glauco to his
    death. The ensemble begins its performance offstage, thus producing an
    aural cue that later gets transformed into a visual cue as the band bursts
    on the stage, manifesting its diegetic presence. Soon, the orchestra joins
    in and complicates the diegetic/non-diegetic dynamics at work by
    introducing “a stereophonic effect that momentarily unsettles the diegetic,
    monaural world woven by the band” (58). These musical movements in and out
    of both the narrative and the stage make Petrella’s march an operatic
    object already associated to notions of mobility and mourning from its very
    initial appearance.



    Furthermore, Vella emphasizes that the very structure of the piece and its
    potential for endless repetition facilitated its migration from the opera
    house to public spaces and contributed to constructing Petrella’s march as
    a portable mechanical device. What makes Vella’s discussion even more
    compelling in this chapter is the linkage with wind bands outside the
    theatrical realm. The transposition of operatic music to popular forms of
    diffusion such as transcriptions, piano fantasias based on celebrated
    arias, barrel organs, and marching bands, guaranteed its capillary
distribution within the social tissue of the nation.    [4]
    Originally designed for a marching band on stage, Petrella’s march easily
    made its way into the repertoire and global circuit of wind band
    performances. Yet, Vella’s argument moves further and links civic wind
    bands to the military march as a technology of power used for disciplining
body and generating “muscular bonding” (9).    [5] In
    this vein, she argues that the spaces created by marching band performances
    of Petrella’s marcia funebre functioned as funeral entrainments—i.e., forms
    of biopolitical technology instilling a specific attitude in both
    performers and audiences (69):



    Weighty tread, minor mode, dotted rhythms, and other funeral march figures
    are not intended only, or even mainly, to signify particular situations.
    Their function is not primarily to evoke death and grief, or to depict the
    inner landscape of a mourning heart. Rather, it is to instill particular
    moral attitudes in and through the marching body. Funeral marches, which by
    the mid-nineteenth century no longer had military purposes alone, were in
    this sense less music to be “listened to” in a modern, attentive, bourgeois
    fashion, and more music to be “acted upon” through repeated physical
    behaviors.



    The wealth of the second chapter’s content does not end here. Vella
    positions Petrella’s march within the broader context of post-Unification
    Italy and points to a developing death culture that at the time “was
    thoroughly transformed under the influence of competing political, social,
    and religious agendas” (47). Petrella’s marcia funebre testifies to a
    transitional moment in the process of reimagining funeral rites within the
    framework of the new nation. Jone’s march got caught in this
    restructuring mechanism, repurposed and absorbed into a new “expanded
landscape of Italian death culture” where “a funeral march such as    Jone’s could elicit variegated affective responses, and could even
    become a trademark of ‘exotic’ Southern rituals” (72).



    In this context, I believe that this chapter could have benefited from a
    conversation with Antonio Gramsci’s idea of national-popular culture. The
    Italian philosopher argued that, unlike other countries, nineteenth-century
    Italy failed to produce a national-popular culture and that “in Italian
    popular culture music has to some extent substituted that artistic
expression which in other countries is provided by the popular novel”.    [6] If
    music, the universal language par excellence, became the expression of
    national-popular culture in Italy, for Gramsci this spoke of the failure of
    a class of organic intellectuals to create a true national-popular
    literature. However, when Vella argues that “Jone’s marcia funebre
    provided an ‘emotional arena’ in and through which different social groups
    could imagine themselves as parts of the same national body, even as they
    articulated independent responses to human mortality” (9), this does
    provide, to a certain extent, a counterexample to the Gramscian notion of
    music as an exclusively cosmopolitan phenomenon. As chapter 2 demonstrates,
    Petrella’s march, aside from its wide mass diffusion, created a
    national-popular space wherein individuals of any class reimagined their
    place in the newly unified state. In her cogent analysis in this chapter,
    Vella ultimately shows us that, when well situated, even an old-fashioned
    march such as Petrella’s can become a sophisticated object that reveals the
    hidden modernity of its time. As Vella puts it, “band performances
    understood as media for articulating collective grief on an everyday basis
    were symptoms of a new age” (47).



    Chapter 3 investigates the figure of opera soprano Adelina Patti. Born in
    Spain to Italian parents, Patti grew up in the United States where she
    debuted in 1859 before embarking on an international career as a global
    ambassador of bel canto. In this chapter, Vella shows that, because of the
    singer’s polyglot skills, Adelina Patti’s voice participated in multiple
    national communities and mobilized various political and national
    discourses—indeed, her voice could be localized both anywhere and nowhere.
    Furthermore, Vella argues that “Patti’s vocal organs were imagined as a
    proto-recording device” (9) that could absorb and impeccably reproduce
    different languages. The global mobility of such a multilingual speaking
    and singing machine—and, in general, the broader circulation of voices in
    the nineteenth century—contributed to raising concerns related to diction
and pronunciation as makers and markers of the so-called italianità.    [7]
    Like the other chapters concerned with the mobility of operatic objects and
    the way they both shaped and were shaped locally during their mobile
    trajectory, this section describes Patti’s voice as yet another object. Yet
    we should not forget that Patti was a subject whose voice was deeply
    attached to a body. An overly narrow focus on how different critics and
    listeners perceived Patti’s voice and articulated different national
    discourses, positions Patti exclusively as a singing machine, and from my
    viewpoint denies her acoustical agency. For example, looking at how she
    shaped discourses about herself and her transnational background through
    her multilingual talents might be further investigated.



    As briefly addressed at the beginning of this review, in chapter 4 Vella
    recounts the unprecedented mobilization of Wagner’s Lohengrin from
    the city of Bologna to Florence. Drawing on Axel Körner’s work on the
cultural politics of post-Unification nationalism in Italy,    [8] the
    author points out that such extraordinary operatic transfer from the
    progressive center of Bologna to the Tuscan city exposed a complex network
    of power relations between Italian localities. This meant that cultural and
    political tensions were continuously negotiated and remapped. Furthermore,
    Vella points to a new conceptualization of opera whereby railways not only
    guaranteed the mobility of operatic productions but were incorporated into
    “opera’s basic infrastructure” (126). In other words, she argues that
    operatic discourse expanded to include external technologies.
    Interestingly, she follows this thread up to the introduction of the
    Fascist thespian cars, where the mobilization of the spectacle was
    separated from the operatic performance and became in itself a spectacle
    that pointed to the modernity and efficiency of the regime. In the last
    section of this fourth chapter, the author briefly returns to the theme of
    death culture and public rituals. First, she points out that operatic
    translocations expose “the paradox that an act aimed at preserving and
    transplanting authenticity ultimately required ‘deadness’: a disassembling
    and recombining of the opera production’s various component parts” (129).
    Second, similar to her analysis of operatic discourse, she emphasizes the
    late nineteenth-century incorporation of railway stations into the
    performance of public rituals, including the movement of mortal remains
    from one city to another. In other words, the author alludes to a clear
    tension at work in these railway spaces between mobility and
    immobility—between life and death—that intersects with the mechanized
    technologies transporting body remains or disassembled operatic objects to
    be staged either in opera productions or in funerary rituals.



    The concluding chapter is arguably the coup de théâtre of the entire
    monograph. In this section, Vella measures her analysis of operatic objects
against the yardstick of one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most studied operas:    Aida (1871). In these pages, the author lays out a groundbreaking
    methodological framework that is worth emphasizing in this review. Vella
    opens the final chapter with an analysis of the famous “Guerra! Guerra!”
    moment in Aida’s act 1, scene 5. The author reads this operatic
    micro-segment as a telegraphic communication event wherein “the repetitions
    of ‘Guerra!’ and ‘Radamès!’ by the chorus in Aida are configured
    as relays, with the two words transmitted like electric signals” (141–42).
    This wireless telegraphic diffusion of sounds on stage is also linked to
    the creation of a community—that of the Egyptians sharing their fear about
    the imminent Ethiopian invasion.



    Discussing Aida today means coming to grips with Edward Said’s
famous essay from his seminal book Culture and Imperialism,    [9]
    which has indelibly marked the reception of Verdi’s opera by orienting its
    analysis towards imperialist and Orientalist frameworks. To complement this
    reading, instead of interpreting Aida as a “proto-recording device
    that stored and reproduced its Orientalist ‘origin’” (143), in her
    analysis, Vella situates Verdi’s opera “as both a work and an event,
    against a backdrop of Italian and international experiences of
    long-distance communication and temporality prompted by contemporary media”
    (143). In other terms, despite being aware that her interpretative gesture
    might momentarily divert the object Aida from the
    imperialist/Orientalist logic, the author tries to make space for a
    repositioning, at the level of both composition and meaning, of Verdi’s
    opera within the technological context of the time.



    And here, on the one hand, Vella distances herself from what she terms the
    “deterministic shadow,” (143)—that is, the tendency to revert to
    technological determinism as the matrix through which artistic developments
    are understood; on the other hand, she acknowledges a certain degree of
    historical accuracy to such a technology-driven approach. Thus, she is
    trying to reconcile these two strains into one methodological
outlook/framework. To put it differently, the author is not asserting that    Aida is determined by the new nineteenth-century technologies, but
    that the work itself came into being as an object profoundly shaped by
    discourses that mobilized ideas across a wide range of fields.



    For Vella, electric communication in the nineteenth century existed “at the
    midpoint between an idea and a technology” (144). While in the previous
    chapters she has focused on the articulation of Italianness in the space
    produced by movement in between distinct locations, here once again it is
    in the liminal space between ideas and technology that works of art are
    articulated and come into being. To the author, this middle space is where
    scientific and cultural images proliferate, intersect with each other, and
    finally coalesce into various formats. This space works in such a holistic
    fashion that it would be “almost inappropriate for the historian to
    disentangle different domains of contemporary experience, given that the
    analogical mindset was what defined the age” (144). Although her analysis
    is restricted to a very short fragment of Aida, Vella constructs a
    compelling methodological scaffolding for investigating musical objects. In
    her specific case study, she overcomes the traditional view that looks at
    the object Aida exclusively as a reflection of the politics of its
    time and thinks of Aida as a device that responded to the
    nineteenth-century technological mindset and, when performed, echoed
    telegraphic communications on and off the stage. Finally, the author brings
    us back to the idea that technology not only affected how opera circulated
    and was performed on a global scale but also how this technology was
    incorporated into the very nature of operatic compositions. As trains and
    notions around mobility occupied the space of operatic thinking, in this
    final chapter Vella links Verdi’s search for simultaneity to a novel
    understanding of time in the opera production system, which ultimately led
    to a “newly networked sense of Italian operatic experience” (166).



    To conclude this review, I want to circle back to the book’s Introduction,
    where the author offers a critique of reception studies that provides the
    broader methodological framework for the five case studies discussed in the
    text. As Vella recounts, the advent of the telegraph ushered in a new model
    of communication, whereby the transfer of meaning became independent of
    physical transportation. Such a schism between producer and receiver
    reverberates in the way reception theory analyzes opera, that is by
    separating the text from its context and understanding these two as
    independent entities. This tendency, coupled with an inherent ineffability
    of the musical text, has contributed to placing the object “opera” in the
    background in favor of an emphasis on the receivers—for example,
    contemporaneous press materials or the personal accounts of people who
    attended the opera. The author’s critical operation for this book is
    twofold: first, to bring the musical text back to the center of historical
    investigation and, second, to complicate the notion of media understood as
“message-bearing institutions”.    [10]
    Thus, reception theory is only one of the tools in the arsenal of a wider
    methodological system that, by looking at “how opera (was) networked across
    space and time,” (13) opens up a whole range of new perspectives for
    (re)studying operatic cultures.



    

    

    
        
            *
This review grew out of the course            Introduction to Italian Studies taught by Suzanne
            Stewart-Steinberg at Brown University. I am deeply grateful to her
            for the careful reading and the great advice, while the views
            expressed in the article are my own. Thank you also to Anne Kerkian
            for the invaluable help in the editing process.
        

    

    
        
            
                [1]
            
             Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to
            Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4–5.
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
             The reference is to Axel Körner, “From Hindustan to Brabant:
            Meyerbeer’s L’africana and Municipal Cosmopolitanism in
            Post-Unification Italy,” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 1 (2017):
            74–93.
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
             George Revill, “Vocalic Space: Socio-Materiality and Sonic
            Spatiality,” in The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial
            Turn between Disciplines, ed. Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch
            (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 43–62, at 58.
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
             See for example Antonio Carlini, ed., Fuori dal teatro. Modi e
            percorsi della divulgazione di Verdi (Venice: Marsilio, 2015).
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
             Vella’s reference is to William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in
            Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
            University Press, 1995), chap. 1.
        

    

    
        
            
                [6]
            
             Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David
            Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower
            (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 378.
        

    

    
        
            
                [7]
            
             Recent opera studies scholarship has scrutinized the notion of
            italianità (Italianness) under transnational and global lenses,
            revealing how nineteenth-century material culture and technological
            discourses, as well as transnational consumption and circulation of
            opera, endlessly reconfigured notions of operatic italianità both
            on the peninsula and abroad. From this new understanding, operatic
            italianità challenges nationally-bound interpretations of opera and
            becomes an analytical tool for a critical interrogation of opera’s
            fluid transformations across time and space. See Axel Körner and
            Paulo M. Kühl, Italian Opera in Global and Transnational
            Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
        

    

    
        
            
                [8]
            
             Axel Körner, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From
            Unification to Fascism (New York: Routledge, 2009).
        

    

    
        
            
                [9]
            
             Edward W. Said, “The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida,” in Culture and
            Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 111–31.
        

    

    
        
            
                [10]
            
             John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of
            Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015),
            2.
        

    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    




                

                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
