Operatic Geographies
The Place of Opera and the Opera House
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
1 Introduction: Opera and the (Urban) Geography of Culture
Suzanne Aspden
2 The Legal Spaces of Opera in The Hague
Rebekah Ahrendt
3 Opera at School: Mapping the Cultural Geography of Schoolgirl Performance
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
4 London’s Opera House in the Urban Landscape
Michael Burden
5 Opera and the Carnival Entertainment Package in Eighteenth-Century Turin
Margaret Butler
6 Cockney Masquerades: Tom and Jerry and Don Giovanni in 1820s London
Jonathan Hicks
7 The City Onstage: Re-Presenting Venice in Italian Opera
Susan Rutherford
8 Between the Frontier and the French Quarter: Operatic Travel Writing and Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
Charlotte Bentley
9 L’italiana in Calcutta
Benjamin Walton
10 Thomas Quinlan (1881–1951) and His “All-Red” Opera Tours, 1912 and 1913
Kerry Murphy
11 Empires in Rivalry: Opera Concerts and Foreign Territoriality in Shanghai, 1930–1945
Yvonne Liao
12 “Come to the Mirror!” Phantoms of the Opera—Staging the City
Peter Franklin
13 Open-Air Opera and Southern French Difference at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Katharine Ellis
14 Pastoral Retreats: Playing at Arcadia in Modern Britain
Suzanne Aspden
15 The Opera House as Urban Exhibition Space
Klaus van den Berg
16 Underground in Buenos Aires: A Chamber Opera at the Teatro Colón
Roberto Ignacio Díaz
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Notes
Index
Suzanne Aspden
2 The Legal Spaces of Opera in The Hague
Rebekah Ahrendt
3 Opera at School: Mapping the Cultural Geography of Schoolgirl Performance
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
4 London’s Opera House in the Urban Landscape
Michael Burden
5 Opera and the Carnival Entertainment Package in Eighteenth-Century Turin
Margaret Butler
6 Cockney Masquerades: Tom and Jerry and Don Giovanni in 1820s London
Jonathan Hicks
7 The City Onstage: Re-Presenting Venice in Italian Opera
Susan Rutherford
8 Between the Frontier and the French Quarter: Operatic Travel Writing and Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
Charlotte Bentley
9 L’italiana in Calcutta
Benjamin Walton
10 Thomas Quinlan (1881–1951) and His “All-Red” Opera Tours, 1912 and 1913
Kerry Murphy
11 Empires in Rivalry: Opera Concerts and Foreign Territoriality in Shanghai, 1930–1945
Yvonne Liao
12 “Come to the Mirror!” Phantoms of the Opera—Staging the City
Peter Franklin
13 Open-Air Opera and Southern French Difference at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Katharine Ellis
14 Pastoral Retreats: Playing at Arcadia in Modern Britain
Suzanne Aspden
15 The Opera House as Urban Exhibition Space
Klaus van den Berg
16 Underground in Buenos Aires: A Chamber Opera at the Teatro Colón
Roberto Ignacio Díaz
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Notes
Index
Review Quotes
Pierpaolo Polzonetti, author of Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution
“This volume goes beyond the old and prevalent Marxian interpretation of the place of the opera house as an expression of centralized power, instead exploring the more nuanced possibility of a network of competing powers at play. Original and thought-provoking, these essays offer a multitude of new and fresh perspectives on the ‘situatedness’ of opera.”
Journal of Historical Geography
"Operatic Geographies is a rich, diverse and thought-provoking collection of essays from which geographers will learn a great deal. Above all, perhaps, the essays produced by Aspden's contributors raise a question as to why historical geographers concerned with spaces of knowledge have tended to restrict their interest over the past few decades to spaces of scientific knowledge, production and reception. If the focus has been on labs and museums, on the ship and the scientific instrument, perhaps there are also narratives that deserve to be written about the theatre and the concert hall, about the travelling player and the musical instrument. These essays about the spaces of opera show us that many spaces of knowledge and culture would benefit from a more geographically-sensitive analysis."
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