"Opera and the Politics of Empire in Habsburg Europe" investigates the societal role and political function of opera in the realms of the Habsburg Empire between the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of World War One (1814-1914). Taking into account Austria’s multinational concept of state, the project’s emphasis on musical exchanges between the Empire’s different crownlands, nationalities and religious communities challenges traditional narratives that have tended to highlight the role of opera as a tool of political nationalism. Instead, this project examines the extent to which the Empire supported opera (both the form and the repertoire) as a means to create cultural and intellectual connections between its different lands and peoples, as well as between its political centre and its many peripheries. Following a cross-disciplinary agenda, the project responds to two distinct fields of scholarship: the contextual analysis of opera production and its reception; and new trends in Habsburg history, which have moved away from a narrow focus on ethnic and linguistic conflict to examine the role of imperial identity, national hybridity, dynastic loyalty, and factors such as religion, class and gender that cut across national ideologies. Our project connects these two fields of scholarship by focussing on the role of opera in interactions between different levels of imperial, regional and local administration, and the public. It combines cultural and intellectual history to investigate five areas of opera production that deeply marked the monarchy's cultural life: the role of Italian opera in building cultural bridges across the Empire’s different crownlands and nationalities; the use of national vernaculars in opera production; the function of opera as a distinctive feature of dynastic representation; the idea of grand opéra as a genre for the representation of historical narratives that connect the monarchy to events elsewhere in Europe; and a focus on opera in the Empire’s Southern and Eastern peripheries, as a way of building cultural bridges with its political centre.
Our historical research is relevant to contemporary society, because it gives crucial impulses to the creative industries, which the project actively seeks and supports through direct collaboration with opera theatres and the media. In this context our work challenges conventional and pre-conceived ideas about music as being organised principally according to national categories. Showing how music, during the age of nationalism, served building bridges between national and religious communities critically addresses views of society that tend to reduce human beings to single and mutually exclusive identities rather than emphasising what different communities share.
The project's overall objective is to collect huge amounts of archival and bibliographic evidence from many different regions in Central- and Eastern Europe showing how opera worked in Habsburg Europe and throughout the nineteenth century. These materials will be analysed on the basis of our innovative and cross-disciplinary methodologies to then produce a new narrative about musical exchanges in nineteenth-century Europe and about the societal role and political function of opera during the age of nationalism, which also was an age of shared cultures and cosmopolitan values. In addition to outreach into and collaboration with the cultural industries and media, our main objective is to produce articles for academic journals, edited collections and a number of monographs that will change the ways scholars and their students in different disciplines have hitherto discussed opera in nineteenth-century Europe.
