Art, Business, Canon, and Opera: Two New Studies

Abstract

Social history has developed more slowly in studies of opera than in those on concert life. While political aspects of the opera world have come to attention, relatively little systematic investigation has been done on the social or economic frameworks surrounding opera houses. For that matter, the question has only recently been raised as to when canons arose in opera repertories (was it 1870? 1900? 1925?), a question that is as much social as it is musical. I am therefore delighted to encounter two works of systematic social analysis on nineteenth-century opera, one on Italy and the other on central Europe. Jutta Toelle, a musicologist at Humboldt University, Berlin, confronts the severe administrative crisis that Italian opera theaters encountered in the second half of the nineteenth century. First, the political and social upheaval following the revolution of 1848 disturbed opera life significantly, and then in 1868 the new national government abolished the extensive subsidies which most of the former states had traditionally granted opera. Individual cities were not ready to take up much of the burden of financial responsibility for opera until after the turn of the twentieth century. The impresario remained the central figure in efforts to find funds to pay the increasing cost of putting on either new or old productions. Toelle's volume is critically important in establishing in detail just how impresarios came to grips with the problems attending in different kinds of contexts, and how their work was fundamentally transformed by 1914. One values the care and the economy with which the book is put together and the argument developed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.