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Naples suffered a significant loss of political and economic power following Italian unification, a decline seemingly echoed by the collapse of its opera buffa tradition. Yet Naples played a central role in generating an Italian operetta tradition across entertainment venues both old and new, with canzone napoletana becoming a key feature of operettas composed (and performed) across Italy. This article explores the crucial contribution of Naples and the Neapolitan song tradition to the development of Italian operetta, focusing particularly on composer Mario Costa. Neapolitan operetta, I argue, reveals the complex interplay between regional, national and international practices and discourses in constructions of ‘native’ Italian operetta, while exposing the generic and aesthetic ambiguity of Italian operetta within shifting hierarchies and changing repertoires c.1900. At the same time, the study of key figures such as Costa can revise and reorientate musical narratives of Liberal Italy that have typically focused on opera, the Giovane Scuola and the North.

Received wisdom has it that the Marxist intellectual and political theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote little about music. Nevertheless, scattered across his Quarderni del carcere (1929–35) are a small number of trenchant comments on Italian opera, which Gramsci probed for its role in creating the civil society of a unified Italian state – a state whose failures led to the rise of the Fascist regime that kept him imprisoned for the last decade of his life.1 In Mary Ann Smart’s words, ‘Gramsci saw the popularity of opera in Italy as both a substitute for and an impediment to the development of his preferred vehicle for Romantic sentiment, a popular literature that demanded a solitary and reflective mode of consumption diametrically opposed to the experience of the opera house.’2 Opera’s melodramatic excess partly accounted for what Gramsci saw as the Risorgimento’s failure to be a truly popular movement in Italy; from an infirmity on the aesthetic plane sprang many of the irresolvable cultural and political schisms that beset unified Italy.

‘Spain is different’, the Spanish tourist board famously declared in the 1960s as part of its strategy to attract mass tourism to the country. The campaign played a key role in opening up Spain's economy during the later years of Franco's regime – the so-called apertura – following two decades of autarchic rule that had left the country geopolitically isolated. As the slogan suggested, however, exoticism was a key part of Spain's nation-branding. Ideas of Spanish difference were now marketed for their tourist appeal, with images of gypsies and flamenco joined by sizzling beaches and ice-cold sangria.

This article examines the relationship between Milan's 1906 Exposition and a celebrated revival of Verdi's La traviata (1853). An event of national and international importance, the Exposition was notable for its focus on Italy's global presence, and in particular Italy's relationship with Latin America. The Traviata production, meanwhile, comprised the first Italian staging of Verdi's opera in period costume, performed at La Scala by a quintessentially modern, celebrity ensemble to mark the Exposition's opening. This article explores the parallels between the Exposition and the production, to investigate the complex, shifting position of Milan (and Italy) within the transatlantic cultural and operatic networks of the time; and more broadly, to examine the role of operatic staging in shaping understandings of global space within the mobile operatic canon of the early twentieth century.

Geraldine Farrar's performances in Ruggero Leoncavallo's Zazà (1900) at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1920s were widely acclaimed as an unexpected triumph for the soprano. This article examines Farrar's Zazà in the context of New York's post-war operatic crisis, the concurrent emergence of Hollywood cinema and Farrar's own highly prominent movements between operatic and cinematic media throughout the 1910s. While Leoncavallo's opera raised a number of pressing difficulties for New York critics, Farrar's critical and popular success in Zazà points to new understandings of operatic performance at the dawn of the cinematic age.

‘If there’s a musician fashionable in all five continents of the world, capable of gaining the approval of each and every theatre audience, it is precisely Puccini’, declared Fausto Torrefranca in his notorious 1912 monograph-cum-character-assassination Giacomo Puccini and International Opera. 1 For Torrefranca, such popularity was merely a symptom of Puccini’s superficiality and degeneracy: ‘Puccini’s artistic passivity, his indolent domestic character, his intellectual mediocrity are all most readily revealed to us when we consider this: he is not a true composer, but only a composer of operas’. In recent years, a number of scholars have nonetheless sought to challenge Puccini’s reputation as a reactionary figure, while also uncovering the origins of Puccini’s negative reception within contemporary debates in Italy and abroad. 2 Giacomo Puccini and his World gathers together several of the authors of these interventions, in what constitutes a long-overdue re-assessment of Puccini’s cultural and aesthetic contexts. Here these consist of a selection of extracts from Torrefranca’s book (translated by Delia Casadei), early reviews from the Italian and German press exploring the phenomenon of ‘verismo’ opera (translated by Arman Schwartz and Elaine Fitz Gibbon), extracts from letters by Puccini to his interpreters (translated by Senici), and a group of excerpts from Albert Carré’s staging manual for the 1906 production of Madama Butterfly (1904) in Paris, which would become the standard version of Puccini’s much-revised score (translated by Steven Huebner). Groos’s exploration of what he terms the ‘complex and even contradictory historical discourses in which [the opera] is imbricated’ (p. 81) thus offers a refreshingly nuanced account of Butterfly’s position within orientalism, while also suggesting reasons for the opera’s continued popularity in varied geographical contexts.