MOPRITALY · Materialities of Operatic Performance in Risorgimento Italy

MOPRITALY examines the wide range of new theatrical practices shaping Italian opera in the period 1815-1861: from stage technologies and stage manuals, to transformed architectural spaces, to newly powerful voices and orchestras. Italian opera at this time has long been studied in relation to the political upheavals surrounding Italian unification. MOPRITALY instead offers a new history of modern operatic performance, highlighting Italian opera's role in shaping wider experiences of modernity within Italy and abroad. In so doing, the project develops a more sophisticated framework for exploring the relationships between opera, aesthetics and politics, and defines a new role for Italian opera in narratives of modern European and Western history, by interrogating opera's relationship with broader social, cultural and technological developments. MOPRITALY achieves these objectives by concentrating on Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence and Milan - key centres of theatrical innovation - and drawing upon a wide range of archival sources: from operatic scores and libretti, staging manuals, acting guides, singing treatises, press reviews and letters, to institutional records, political tracts, scientific and medical treatises, and memoirs of the spoken theatre. The project will be carried out at La Sapienza (Rome), an outstanding international centre for musicology and ideally placed for archival work throughout Italy. MOPRITALY will be supervised by Professor Emanuele Senici, a renowned expert on nineteenth-century Italian opera, and it includes a six-month placement at the Archivio Storico Ricordi (housed at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense) that will support implementation of earlier research findings. MOPRITALY will overall transform my research skills and professional network, putting me in a strong position to secure permanent academic employment and creating deeply connected links between a range of international institutions, both academic and non-academic.