The Italian Opera Singers in Mozart's Vienna by Dorothea Link (review)

Abstract

and telegraphy). In fact, possibly the most fascinating aspect of the volume consists in its pairing of opera and material culture studies (and the work of William Brown in particular [“Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22]). Material and musical objects, Vella seems to suggest, are what make opera and the practices and discourses surrounding it ultimately possible, and one can learn a great deal of information about the culture of any given time by studying the precarious connections that such objects (fail to) establish with each other. Even more intriguingly, Vella applies this object-oriented approach to her own writing, as she borrows from mobility and media studies to “network” the research materials presented in the volume with each other. But herein lies the book’s main flaw: networks by themselves do not necessarily make for compelling arguments. The virtuosic interdisciplinary connections that animate the book often proceed by analogy or chronological proximity rather than by evidence. As such, they obfuscate rather than serve Vella’s claims, and the absence of a conclusion in the book does not help the reader to recapitulate the book’s main contributions. Furthermore, Vella’s tendency to avoid discussing the implications of what she analyzes beyond the specific case at hand frequently frustrates the reader’s hard-won appreciation of the intellectual tours de force proposed in the book. Take, for instance, the volume’s final chapter. After observing a possible similarity between telegraphy and stage communication in Aida—an interpretation which, lacking any concrete evidence, appears to be as good as many possible others—Vella discusses topics as disparate as the introduction of the telegraph in Italy, the opening of the Suez Canal, older communication media (including carrier pigeons!), and the synchronization of time in nineteenth-century Italy, only to conclude in the very final lines of the chapter that “the simultaneity underlying the opera’s composition, performance and reception . . . failed, in the long term, to produce transformative cultural realities” (p. 167). Therefore, Networking Operatic Italy is notable not so much for the incisiveness of its main arguments as for the originality of its method, whose ramifications directly connect opera studies with the philosophy of history. As she advances a notion of networking intended as “both a historical and historiographical action (or set of actions)” (p. 13), Vella reminds us that the (music) historian’s work, far from being impartial, cannot but rely on biased, culturally determined practices of selection and recombination of ideas and archival evidence (the historian’s “objects”). What remains to be done, Vella concludes, is to “shake loose some of their (and our) most self-conscious motives” (p. 15) lurking behind past historiographical myths, while also being mindful of the networks that we, whether as actors in the present or interpreters of the past, are unwittingly yet relentlessly weaving.