Flora Willson

Review: Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy, by Alessandra Campana

Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy , by Alessandra Campana. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xvi, 206 pp. Alessandra Campana launches her energetic, sometimes dense, always thought-provoking Opera and Modern Spectatorship with a disarmingly short statement: “This book claims that opera participated in the making of a modern public in post-unification Italy” (p. xiii). This is bracingly forthright intellectual ambition, and more follows: “the goal of these pages is to provide an alternative historical account of the aesthetics of opera, one that considers operas construction of a mode of spectating” (p. xiii). On the following page, Campana clarifies that her book is “also about how Italian opera in the last decades of the nineteenth century shaped and responded to the necessities and anxieties of modernity”; she adds that it attempts to “attend to the specificity of Italian culture at this time” (p. xiv). I am not convinced that these statements provide an accurate sense of what Opera and Modern Spectatorship does best or where its value lies. But I have quoted them here because the expectations and queries they give rise to resonate throughout the book. Take the ambivalence about agency, for instance: who or what, one might ask, were the actual participants in this abstracted “making” of a modern public? Or, with “opera” subsequently identified as an active agent in the creation of a “mode of spectating,” to what extent is this new mode of spectating coterminous with the aforementioned new …