Mapping Artistic Networks: Eighteenth-Century Italian Theatre and Opera across Europe Tatiana Korneeva

Eighteenth-century Italian opera as a phenomenon of European scale is the main subject of this volume. The European success of Italian opera is due to the importance of authors such as Pietro Metastasio and Carlo Goldoni, to the wide circulation of the Italian language as a communication tool within the European aristocracy, and to the itinerant careers of many artists (singers and composers above all) born in Italy. Certainly, the phenomenon in general is well known to musicology: this is demonstrated by the extensive bibliography cited in each of this book’s chapters. From this literature two earlier collections are crucial to this one: Melania Bucciarelli’s Italian Opera and European Theatre 1680–1720: Plots, Performers, Dramaturgies (Turnhout, 2000) and the volumes of Italian Opera in Central Europe edited by Bucciarelli, Reinhard Strohm, and Norbert Dubowy (Berlin, 2006–8). This collection of essays, however, has the merit of communicating significant shifts in perspective, with precious insights into operatic production in geographical areas less explored by music scholars. The articles are based on papers presented in April 2019 at a conference held at the Freie Universität Berlin. An extensive introduction by Tatiana Korneeva (‘Italian Theatre Reverberated’) opens the volume, identifying themes and aims that thread through the individual contributions. One shared aim is to interrogate the canon of operatic works/composers, and to consider how Italian performing artists and theatre personnel could be agents crucial to cultural transfer and exchange. This means approaching Italian opera from a transnational perspective, studying artists’ ‘trajectories, their relations … their personal and professional networks, as well as particular modes of adaptation and assimilation of art works in changing contexts’.