For the British, ‘Europe’ in general and continental Romanticism in particular approached an enigma. This chapter examines how British intellectuals and artists perceived and engaged with continental aspects of the literature, music, and visual arts in this period. It focuses on lesser-known examples, which includes the specificity of German Gothicism and De Quincey’s fictitious biographical essay The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, but also Thomas L. Peacock’s critiquing of this English preoccupation with German thought. This chapter asks whether, in aesthetic terms, British engagements with ‘Europe’ cannot but ‘romanticize’ the continent, thus maintaining a paradoxical attitude of ‘remote proximity’, which might also apply to subsequent eras.

As an academic and writer in England, W. G. Sebald’s intellectual baggage was distinctly German with only a small minority of texts explicitly devoted to Anglophone literature. Yet, the atmosphere that permeated his essayistic narratives was distinctly English. In that sense, Sebald occupied a literary space in the in-between, oscillating between times past and times present. This article examines in three steps Sebald’s approach to this space in terms of thematic scope, style and perspectives that characterized his German wanderings in England. It assesses the interplay of memory and imagination in this creative process firmly located in this space of overlapping concerns, mainly rooted in the experience of exile, both real and, in his own case, simulated.

The decades between unification and World War I saw opera in Italy absorb multiple literary and musical influences from beyond the Alps, including exoticism and naturalism and, successively, the operas of Meyerbeer and Wagner. For the generation of the giovane scuola this was often characterised as a crisis of national musical style and identity, strongly linked to the post-Risorgimento imperative to create a compelling civic and political culture for the new nation. The religious question, and the battle between the Church and state, posed a further set of questions in developing this national identity, which can be traced through opera's engagement with foreign influences. Examining new Italian operas ranging from Franchetti's Asrael to Puccini's Tosca, this chapter will suggest that librettists and composers approaching religious themes were keenly aware of the need to create a vocabulary of religious images and sounds which the predominantly Catholic audiences across Italy could recognise, even when adopting ideas from French or German literary and musical models. Ultimately, this period was crowned with the arrival of Parsifal on Italian stages, when Catholic readings of Wagner's symbology and echoes of Palestrina promoted a particularly Italian interpretation of the opera’s meaning and musical language.

The chapter examines Alberto Franchetti’s Germania, written primarily for the Italian opera market and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1902); and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty, and premiered at the Berlin court opera in 1904. Starting with a brief summary of the two operas’ origins and plots, the chapter illustrates how in both cases operatic italianità was used to represent German national myths. Conventional concepts of operatic italianità were challenged through musical references to German folk songs. German critics employed generic meanings of italianità to articulate their disdain at these 'foreign' depictions of national identity, claiming an exclusive right for German composers to write on patriotic topics. As a consequence, productions of Franchetti’s and Leoncavallo’s works in Imperial Germany provoked some of the most hostile reactions ever articulated against Italian composers during the years before World War I. Furthermore, the defamation of Leoncavallo included a barely concealed criticism of the emperor himself.

In the two decades between the first staging of Gluck’s Orfeo in 1903 and the end of Asakusa Opera in the great fire of 1923, musical theatre in Japan saw a rapid process of adoption and transformation. But despite the well-known role of Italian choreographer Giovanni Vittorio Rosi in the training and performance of Western opera at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo, the association between opera and Italy that was so prominent in other parts of the world never quite took hold. The chapter interrogates the limits of the appeal of italianitá in the history of transnational operatic encounters. These limits are in part rooted in the general difficulties of transplanting a composite cultural form to a foreign setting and its hybridisation with local cultural practices. The chapter discusses the nation-building goals of the Meiji government and the translation of librettos, the Wagnerian moment among Japanese artists and intellectuals and the general conditions of cultural exchange in Meiji Japan and their effects on perceptions of Italianness.

The chapter explores the role of Italian opera in the Brazilian Amazon during the Belle Époque and its effects on national and transnational identities. It focuses on the region’s most famous opera house – the Teatro Amazonas – and on the successes and misfortunes of the travelling companies that performed there between 1897 and 1907. The chapter probes the extent to which the opera house was considered a means of engaging with a ‘global fantasy of civilisation’, foregrounding the effects that local tropical diseases had on opera production and on global perceptions of the region during a period of keen interest in its commercial exploration. The shift from the Italian to the French repertoire at the start of the twentieth century sheds new light on Amazonian understandings of different notions of italianità, of Europe and of civilisation.

The Epilogue revisits the concepts of italianità and operatic italianità within the changing context of the historiography on Italian opera and opera in Italy. Looking back at the volume as a whole, it compares how its authors frame the multifaceted idea of Italian opera within the increasingly globalised world of the nineteenth century. Viewed through the prism of italianità, Italian opera frequently takes the form of a nostalgic fantasy for something already lost, or something imagined elsewhere. Such an elsewhere might be Italy itself, idealised as pastoral idyll or land of song. Just as often, though, it is conceived more broadly, mediated via local traditions or conditions or via another place, whether Paris, Vienna or Cuba. Alternatively, it can be dispersed more widely still, across the expanding global network of opera houses performing Italian opera at the time: in the words of an Ecuadorian critic quoted in one of the chapters, ‘we can feel, for a night, as if we were in Lima, or Janeiro, or Paris, London, Madrid or Milan’.

The introduction examines the concept of italianità within its historical and cross-disciplinary context. Since the eighteenth century, music and especially opera have frequently been used as signifiers of national identity. Rousseau’s writings, and the responses they received, were particularly influential in associating music with national styles, reflecting linguistic conditions as well as the development of musical and operatic genres. These ideas resonated in debates on music, but also in travel writing and political thought, as exemplified in the works of de Staël, Stendhal and Goethe, but also Byron and Dickens. During the nineteenth century, often narrowly described as an age of nationalism, drawing connections between music and national character assumed a new dimension in political and aesthetic debates, partly due to the idea of reading opera as a contribution to processes of political emancipation. Especially in the non-European world, ideas about music were negotiated in relation to colonial and postcolonial experiences. But they also contributed to new notions of cosmopolitanism and a universal sense of belonging. The extent to which opera was intended to take a position within the political battles of national movements and global conflicts remains a matter of debate among opera scholars and historians.

In the mid-nineteenth century, touring minstrel and Italian operatic troupes reached Bombay’s shores, exposing its residents to the delights of European and American popular tunes and burlesque Italian opera. Although reformists initially struggled to convince locals to patronise this strange warbling, opera gradually became a marker of high culture in the subcontinent. This transition was the result of the adoption of the term ‘opera’ by Parsi theatre, India’s most widespread, commercial, ‘modern’ dramatic form. The chapter traces Parsi theatre's role in the creation of a modern South Asian aural culture during the second half of the nineteenth century through the indigenisation of Italian opera. It delineates how the locus for Hindustani music shifted, from the courts of Awadh to the proscenium theatres of Asia, and how an Indian brand of opera that combined European melodies with Hindustani music became a staple not only of the theatre but also of the cinematic medium that followed.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans’ reputation at home and abroad was for French opera. Performances of opéra comique appeared on the city’s stages in the last decade of the eighteenth century; from the 1830s, grand opéra became a mainstay of the repertoire at the francophone Théâtre d’Orléans, whose resident company was recruited annually from Europe. ‘Rossini fever’ seems largely to have bypassed New Orleans, and the relatively few performances of Italian operas that the city did have in the first three decades of the century were always in French (or sometimes English) translation and often heavily adapted. Between 1837 and 1842, however, English-born impresario James Caldwell arranged several short seasons of Italian opera in an attempt to lure novelty-loving audiences to his St Charles Theatre. Although there were already numerous troupes performing opera in Italian further north in the United States, the troupes Caldwell engaged came to New Orleans from the south, from Cuba, where they were contracted to Havana’s theatres. This chapter focuses on the seasons given by these troupes, exploring the discussions that took place about the relative merits of French and Italian comedy, and the exchange of performers and materials between the permanent French troupe and the visiting Italians. When the Théâtre d’Orléans troupe was invited to visit Havana the press expressed concerns that Cuba was ‘uncivilised’ and unhygienic, and that news of a tour there would ultimately prevent New Orleans from recruiting high-quality performers for its own francophone troupe.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

Despite a mixed critical reception after Carmen’s American premiere in New York City on 23 October 1878, the opera quickly became a mainstay of the repertoire in the United States. American reviewers described Carmen as wicked yet compellingly seductive, Micaëla as a paragon of virtue and Don José as a stereotypically violent but manly Spaniard. They framed the opera as a cautionary tale of the dire consequences when women abandoned their traditional social roles. A close reading of the performing materials rented to American opera companies in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the Tams-Witmark Company reveals a performance tradition for Carmen which responded to and exaggerated the early critical reactions towards the main characters. Opera troupes used a combination of carefully placed cuts and stage pantomimes to perform an interpretation of the work that subtly tailored Bizet’s music to the American audience, which intensified Carmen’s vicious tendencies, highlighted Micaëla’s femininity and amplified Don José’s masculinity. The modifications to Carmen offer a case study that illustrates American operatic performance practices and illuminates issues of adaptation and cultural transfer in the transatlantic journey of European music to the United States.

This paper investigates the significance of philosophical themes to Ennius’ representation of Roman history in the Annals. In particular, it focuses on two recurring motifs in Ennius’ literary production – namely, the Empedoclean doctrine of the four elements and the destiny of souls after death – and interprets them as ways to speak about historical change and cultural transfer. Ultimately, I aim to show that the narrative of the Annals was articulated into multiple reading levels, and that the embedding of philosophy in historical epic stressed the role of political communities as links between the human and the divine sphere.

This introduction serves as an overview of the development of operetta and points to the neglect of operetta by many scholars of music and theatre. The editors begin by defining this genre, which is multi-faceted and often difficult to categorize. The introduction sets the stage for the following chapters by guiding the reader towards the important landmarks in the historical developments of operetta, such as those that occurred in France, Austria and London, and, in the twentieth century, in Berlin. In doing so, it also comments on notable composers and works. It concludes with some reflections on operetta reception in the twenty-first century.

It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.

This chapter investigates the various ways in which operettas were changed as they transferred from one social-cultural context to another. It was never a case of merely translating the German book and lyrics; it was necessary to capture the cultural meanings and emotional nuances that resist direct translation, enabling them to be recognized in a new context. The remapping of a scene onto a locally known place that would conjure up similar associations to those that were culturally familiar to the former audience was part of transcreation. It was an important means of reproducing similar pleasure and understanding. Sometimes a new version departed radically from its German stage version, but the fact that such adaptations usually affected only the scenes and dialogue indicates the lack of any sense of perplexity about musical style. The chapter includes a comparative study of The Merry Widow and the French play of 1861 on which it was based, and the considers the notion of an English language operetta production ‘improving’ on a previous Continental European production.