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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2021
In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a concert addressed to 2,292 plants, one in each seat of a red velvet-lined auditorium at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. These hand-selected plants are the leafy audience at a performance of Puccini's ‘Crisantemi’ string quartet, conducted in honour of healthcare workers amid lockdown measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. Once the usual announcements about silencing cell phones have been made, the camera closes in on four musicians as each bows to the verdant audience and takes a seat. When the music starts, our view advances from behind the musicians into the opera house: the camera scans the initial rows of the orchestra stalls, then moves into the boxes and balconies. In each successive section of the theatre we see the avatars chosen to listen in place of us. Our representatives are docile and beatific – Puccini seems to soothe them. For a moment the wondrous intrusion of the outside world indoors even starts to seem natural, as if the auditorium can hold the whole world within it, as if there is no outside to this windowless world.
1 For a recent take on darkness within theatres, see Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago, 2016).
2 On ideas about performance venues, ventilation and ‘rarified’ air, see above all James Q. Davies, Creatures of the Air, 1817–1913 (Chicago, forthcoming).
3 These are, reputedly, the words of former Tory MP Sir George Young.
4 For recent work that discusses the complexities of walls, see for instance Thomas Oles, Walls: Enclosures and Ethics in the Modern Landscape (Chicago, 2014) and Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson, eds., Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh, 2020).
5 da Costa Meyer, Esther, ‘Architectural History in the Anthropocene: Towards Methodology’, The Journal of Architecture 21/8 (2016), 1206Google Scholar.
6 On the teatro all'italiana as a building type, see in particular Georges Banu, Le rouge et or: Une poétique du théâtre à l'italienne (Paris, 1989). On the precipitous replication of the teatro all'italiana, above all in the nineteenth century, see Fabrizio Cruciani, Lo spazio del teatro (Rome, 1997), in particular the chapter ‘Il teatro che abbiamo in mente’, 11–45, and Carlotta Sorba, Teatri: l'Italia del melodramma nell'età del Risorgimento (Bologna, 2001), in particular the section ‘La diffusione della sala all'italiana’, 56–61.
7 This description was by a visiting Frenchman, Jacques de Chassebras de Cremailles, and dates from 1683. See ‘Relation des opera representez à Venise pendant le Carnaval de l'année 1683’, Mercure gallant (March 1683), 202–3.
8 Discussions about this opera house are too numerous to list, but for a much-read account of this theatre, see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991), in particular the chapter ‘Da rappresentare in musica: The Rise of Commercial Opera’, 66–110. The sketch is held at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
9 In this instance Johnson smoothes over important confusions in the literature, as when he establishes a new date range for Bezzi's sketch of 1691–5 based on his examination of contemporary events. He also renders these theatres in three-dimensional digital reconstruction. These are all welcome additions, even if it is at times unclear to the non-architect how Johnson moves from two to three dimensions (217–22 and 300n52).
10 For the fullest account of these theatres, see Johnson, Eugene J., ‘The Short, Lascivious Lives of Two Venetian Theaters, 1580–85’, Renaissance Quarterly 55/3 (2002), 936–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 George C. Izenour, Theater Technology (New York, 1988), 3.
12 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934), 3.
13 Joseph L. Clarke, ‘The Architectural Discourse of Reverberation, 1750–1900’ (PhD diss., Yale University, 2014), 155–205. Leo Beranek has analysed the cause of this reverberative acoustic. See Leo Beranek, Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architecture (New York, 2011), 231–6.
14 The Venetian Council of Ten ordered their demolition in 1585 (Johnson, 120).
15 ‘[Acoustically] good and bad halls exist in every age, and good and bad halls have probably been built in every period. It is more than likely that the old halls that are still standing are among the best that were built. Very few halls that compared badly with their contemporaries are still with us. In fact, poor halls are often destroyed or replaced before they are 50 years old, as Boston's most recent Opera House (1909–1958) and New York's Italian Opera House (1833–1839) remind us. On the other hand, heroic measures are often taken to preserve good halls.’ See Leo L. Beranek, Music, Acoustics and Architecture (New York, 1962), 11.
16 See Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘What Buildings Do’, Theory and Society 31 (2002), 35.
17 Aspden identifies this as a guiding maxim of the book when she cites the words of geographers Barney Warf and Santa Arias: ‘geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen’ (3). Also see Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York, 2009), 1.
18 In this sense, the book continues the work begun in Anselm Gerhard's The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago, 1998).
19 Per the formulation of Henri Lefebvre. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), 38.
20 See also Zipp, Samuel, ‘The Battle of Lincoln Square: Neighborhood Culture and the Rise of Resistance to Urban Renewal’, Planning Perspectives 24/4 (2009), 409–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 See, for instance, Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago, 2014).
22 There are nonetheless exceptions to this, not least Michael Burden's fine discussion of London's King's Theatre in his chapter, ‘London's Opera House in the Urban Landscape’.
23 Thus, as Jonathan Sterne points out, that old philosophical quandary about a tree falling in the forest is resolved. In the absence of someone within earshot, it makes no sound. See Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, 2003), 10–12.
24 For lively takes on this hermeneutic bent, see Best, Stephen and Marcus, Sharon, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108/1 (2009), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Felski, Rita, ‘“Context Stinks!’”, New Literary History 42/4 (2011), 573–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Love, Heather, ‘Close but not Deep: Literary Ethnics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History 41/2 (2010), 371–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 The words are Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's, used to summarise the core thesis of Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, 1984). Cited in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA, 2004), 66.
26 See, for instance, Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, eds., Handbook of Cultural Geography (London, 2003).
27 I borrow this incisive formulation and the conceptual framework for this paragraph from Kyle Devine's important work on the shellac trade. See Kyle Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (Cambridge, 2019), 79.