‘Opera as Institution’ was an international conference organized jointly by the Universities of Graz and Salzburg, held in Graz. The conference venue – the restored baroque palace of Meerscheinschlössl at Mozartgasse 3 – was an absolutely delightful if acoustically challenged venue. Built, rebuilt and rebuilt again, with the gardens subdivided in 1843 and with a sanatorium on the premises for the mentally ill and morphine addicts, it finally became an educational institution in 1914, only narrowly to escape demolition in the 1960s.
The aim of the conference was to gather a group of musicologists whose research focuses on the role of institutions in the history of European opera from the eighteenth century to the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth. The emphasis was on the notion of international engagement – that is, to understand these institutions as part of a transnational operatic network, rather than to look at them in isolation. The topic of the conference, skilfully developed by Daniel Brandenburg and Ingeborg Zechner from the University of Salzburg, and Cristina Scuderi and Michael Walter from the University of Graz, had the specific aim of including a wide range of countries and institutions.
The session topics demonstrate the breadth of the contributions: ‘18th-Century Italian Opera: Mobility and Institutions’; ‘18th/19th-Century French Opera: Singers and Institutions’; ‘18th-Century Italian Opera: Networks and Libretti’; ‘19th-Century Opera Beyond’; and ‘19th-Century Opera: Aristocratic vs. Private’. Conceptually and theoretically there were few surprises, but by returning to the subjects in the context of a specific consideration of institutions, many new lines of enquiry were thrown up, and this was a great way to take stock of each subject. The heartening thing about the event as a whole was the extent to which studying institutions is now de rigueur; the days of reluctant engagement are well and truly over.
For the eighteenth-century scholar there was much to enjoy, with papers on London, Vienna, Paris, Naples and St Petersburg, with themes of cosmopolitanism, sopranos, impresarios, politics and freemasonry, to name but a few of the cities and subjects discussed. Richard Erkens (Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom) dealt with the complex networks – and performers’ conditions – found described in the papers of the Florentine impresario Luca Casimiro degli Albizzi for the booking of singers for Russian opera in the age of Empress Anna Ivanovna. And once those singers were booked, their lives could be far from easy; a paper by Suzanne Aspden (University of Oxford) gave some insights into what ‘free movement’ actually meant to visitors in a xenophobic Britain. Franco Piperno (Università di Roma La Sapienza) moved the discussion to Italy, and to the 1780s Neapolitan introduction of the ‘azione sacra per musica’, which he showed was driven by the affiliation of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples to freemasonry. His discussion offered some context for how Masonic ideology might be interpreted. But best of all was the window opened by Daniel Brandenburg (Universität Salzburg) in his paper on the Pirker correspondence, consisting of exchanges between the husband-and-wife team Franz and Marianne; what we heard only scratched the surface of what is a remarkable body of source material. This was a notable piece of archival exploration for which all scholars of eighteenth-century opera should be thankful; the correspondence will, it is be hoped, soon be available.
Perhaps the most riveting and entertaining session of all was that labelled slightly cryptically ‘19th-century Opera Beyond’. Perhaps the title was incomplete, but ‘beyond’ in this context proved to be ‘places beyond the usual countries where opera might be found’. There were three papers: ‘Olomouc's “Half-Year” Provincial Theatre and Its Repertoire’ (Lenka Křupková and Jiří Kopecký, Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci), which examined the vicissitudes experienced by the autumn-to-Easter season of the opera in Olomouc in the Czech Republic; ‘An Opera for Everyone? The Royal Opera in Stockholm during the 19th Century’ (Karin Hallgren, Linnéuniversitetet, Växjö), which began with a discussion of the establishment by Gustav III of the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1771; and ‘Operatic Production Systems in Eastern Adriatic Theaters during the Late Habsburg Empire: Impresari and Networks’ (Cristina Scuderi, Universität Graz), which took the ‘long nineteenth century’ to heart with its date span of 1861 to 1918, and presented the results of archival work from the coast of Istria and Dalmatia including Rijeka, Dubrovnik, Zadar, Šibenik and Split. All three addressed material that was familiar in its structure, but which opened up neglected networks and suggested new ideas.
To finish off the programme, the conference was led on a tour of a working institution, the Oper Graz. Like most European cities, Graz has had opera performance since the seventeenth century, originally in a questionable venue: a converted coach house. Opera eventually moved to the 1776 Schauspielhaus Graz, then to the Thalia-Theater, adapted in 1864 from an old circus hall, and then to the current 1899 theatre, which staged Wagner's Lohengrin as its first opera. Some years ago the building was sensitively but thoroughly overhauled, a process that modernized all aspects of staging but left the interior almost unchanged; those participants who attended Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia that evening were able to judge the results of these developments for themselves. The performance was an excellent, sociable end to the conference, but it was also a product of a working institution, the likes of which lay at the heart of the conference.
