Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon (New Cultural History of Music)

Through a wealth of archival documents and printed materials, Entangled Histories shows how, over the first half of the nineteenth century, opera helped redefine questions of collective identity in the Austrian empire, serving as a testing ground for, among others, theories of language and education, notions of fatherland and citizenship, artistic expressions of cultural hybridity, new forms of managing economic and cultural capital, and practices of collective memory.By emphasizing the entanglements between opera's aesthetics, its social function, and the ideology underpinning its system of production in different institutional and urban contexts, this book places opera at the intersection of a broad set of political and cultural relationships that for several decades connected Vienna and prominent Italian operatic centers, contributing to a transnational historiography of the art form in the nineteenth century.It also argues that new modes of production and dissemination of opera bet