Operatic Infrastructures by Flora Willson
An exploration of the fundamental relationship between opera and urban modernity in three iconic cities: London, Paris, and New York.
At the end of the nineteenth century, London, Paris, and New York were quintessential modern metropolises and vital centers for opera. In Operatic Infrastructures, Flora Willson examines opera’s roots in the material worlds of these cities. Reaching beyond histories of opera as spectacle, she investigates the physical underpinnings of opera at the century’s end as an inter-urban, multimedia network.
Operatic Infrastructures considers emergent technologies such as the telephone and the subway, but it also retrieves the hidden, forgotten, and otherwise effaced traces of systems such as storage facilities and colonial trade routes. It takes seriously the mundane aspects of materiality, from the blandest clichés of newspaper columns to the fine print of insurance certificates. In doing so, the book reveals just how far these interfaces with modern urban life reached into opera’s own systems of meaning-making and performance in the 1890s—making it impossible to demarcate neatly between “opera” and its “context.” Without such operatic infrastructures, Willson shows, there would be no opera at all.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226846835 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226846830 |
| Title | Operatic Infrastructures |
| Author | Flora Willson |
| Series | Opera Lab: Explorations In History Technology And Performance |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 2026-05-20 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |