Opera and the Built Environment - (Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performa) by Laura Vasilyeva (Paperback)

About the Book

"In the nineteenth century alone, thousands of architectural spaces were built around the world in the style known as teatro all'italiana. These venues were built to accommodate a host of entertainments, but one above all else: opera. In Opera and the Built Environment, Laura Vasilyeva guides us to a deeper understanding of opera by embracing the material conditions within which sound is created. Beginning from the premise that we cannot adequately contemplate or comprehend opera detached from its architectural settings, Opera and the Built Environment offers an account of opera that is informed by architecture and the built environments in which operas were heard during the genre's heyday in the nineteenth century and beyond. Orienting us to theater's architectural elements-their surfaces, their atmosphere, their acoustics, their thresholds-as experiential categories, Vasilyeva shows how opera houses induce a sense of aesthetic wonder and sensuous pleasure continuous with the dramas that unfolds within them. In Vasilyeva's analysis, at a fundamental level opera and the built environment in which we experience it cannot be separated. In other words, when we listen to opera we also listen to the entwined histories of music and architecture. Connecting the dots between when and where construction materials are excavated, to how the theaters are constructed and then utilized, to the environmental toll of their continual emissions, Opera and the Built Environment shows us new and unexpected patterns in how opera connects to the world we know"--

Book Synopsis

The first book to examine the classic Italian opera house in a global context.

In Opera and the Built Environment, music scholar Laura Vasilyeva considers the remarkable mass construction of opera houses around the world since the 1800s and the no-less-remarkable bids to standardize the architectural features of their interiors across this vast theatrical infrastructure. Now known as the teatro all'italiana, this style of architecture--made most famous by Milan's Teatro alla Scala--is characterized by auditoria with tiers of stacked boxes and a dominant red hue.

With attention to the sensuous dimensions of their auditoria, from their surfaces to their atmospheres to their acoustics and thresholds, Vasilyeva reveals the calculated reasons these theaters took on the form they did. The result is a book that reveals unknown associations between the Italian opera house and matters of environmental destruction, empire, and belonging, showing us new and unexpected patterns in how opera connects to the world we know.

Review Quotes

"Engagingly written and compellingly argued, Opera and the Built Environment opens our senses to key architectural features that became common to the operatic experience in the later nineteenth century. From red interiors to sunken pits and from air circulation to steel frames, Vasilyeva reveals the complex cultural, material, scientific, and sociopolitical factors involved in the standardization of nineteenth-century Italian theaters. Opera and the Built Environment is an essential, fascinating read."-- "Gundula Kreuzer, Yale University"

"In prose as glittering and multifaceted as the theaters she studies, Vasilyeva invites us on a fascinating journey through the bedrock of operatic culture. Opera and the Built Environment reveals the forgotten histories that continue to shape our experience as spectators and demonstrates how much meaning inheres in stone and silk. This is musicology by way of W. G. Sebald, and the teatro all'italiana will never look the same again."-- "Arman Schwartz, University of Notre Dame"

"To understand opera we need to understand opera houses: this is the deceptively simple premise of Opera and the Built Environment. In Vasilyeva's hands, however, it is an idea made foundational, as the classic tiered design of the operatic theater is revealed as a place of thresholds and surfaces, materials and atmospheres. Within its spaces, the operatic canon looks and sounds different, too, in the inseparability of the repertoire from the buildings in which it has for so long been performed. Across each chapter, we encounter the opera house transfigured, and by the end of this remarkable book the history of opera itself has been subtly reshaped."-- "Benjamin Walton, University of Cambridge"

About the Author

Laura Vasilyeva is associate professor of musicology at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in a range of journals, from the Cambridge Opera Journal to The Opera Quarterly. This is her first book.