Opera Down the Line - Flora Willson (King's College London)

Abstract:This is a talk about cultural connectedness in the 1890s. More than a century before what media scholar José van Dijck identifies as our own “culture of connectivity”, urban life in the West was closely entangled with infrastructural networks: of transit, media and communication. Those networks characterise “modernity” in the West in countless cultural histories. My focus, however, is on opera—an artform that rarely features in those histories. At the same time, such “offstage” phenomena have rarely been granted more than a cameo in opera history. The result of these disconnects is a cultural history inattentive to sound and its meanings; and an understanding of opera that has long overlooked the material, infrastructural foundations of the artform’s epistemologies.

I’ll present two case studies, rooted in two connected cities. First, I’ll examine the Théâtrophone—one of the world’s first electrical broadcasting networks, established in 1889—and its imbrication of operatic performance within Paris’s urban fabric. Second, I’ll turn to New York to trace the connections latent in the Metropolitan Opera’s elite social network and to scrutinise the changing position of the Met on Manhattan’s urban grid. In both cases, I want to address the ways in which any operatic connectivity also entails friction, that productive, problematic co-mingling of possibility and restriction that anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “the grip of the encounter”. I’ll argue that it is precisely in such frictions that opera’s meaningful purchase on urban life might be felt most strongly.

Biography:

Flora Willson is a Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, where her research focuses mainly on opera’s places in 19th-century urban history and culture. She has published in journals including 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters and Opera Quarterly and in numerous edited collections, including the award-winning Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (edited by Gavin Williams). Flora edited the critical edition of Donizetti’s 1840 grand opera Les Martyrs (Ricordi, 2015) and is currently completing a book about opera and infrastructure in 1890s London, Paris and New York. Flora is also a freelance writer and broadcaster about classical music. She appears regularly on BBC Radio 3, is the presenter of a new opera series currently on the Royal Opera House’s streaming platform and writes about classical music for publications including the Guardian, Opera magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.