Mapping Artistic Networks: Eighteenth-Century Italian Theatre and Opera Across Europe

Mapping Italian Theatre provides a new critical overview of the circulation of the Italian theatre and opera across Europe in the eighteenth century. Performed as an extension of imperial celebrations, coronations, weddings, and masquerades, Italian theatre and opera provided scripts for the representation of political power and became an expressive metonym for the Bourbon monarchs, Austrian Habsburgs, Saxon electors in Poland, Prussian rulers and Russian emperors. They employed theatre as a political tool that magnified their victories and fashioned their courts as theatre and made theatre part of their courts. From Munich to Vienna, from Madrid to St Petersburg, from Dresden to Stockholm, there was seldom a court that did not employ Italian-born artists, musicians, singers, and theatre engineers. The volume furnishes valuable information and substantive new analysis on both Italian plays and operas performed throughout various European courts and the mobility of theatre professionals. The essays critically assess how the italianita, the notion we use in the sense of the image of otherness that Europeans wished to assimilate and musical style, were defined but also challenged through the productions of Italian theatre and opera abroad and their encounters with national traditions.The collection aims to contribute to a broader discussion of cultural transfer and transmission of artistic practices in music and theatre, and migrations of artists and texts across the continent, while also exploring for the first time the East of Europe.