Jüdinnen in der frühen italienischen Frauenbewegung (1861–1945)

freedom of women – that were portrayed in Italian operas. The reactions of Stendhal and Mme. De Stael in these contexts are exemplary. The essays cover nineteenth receptions of Italian opera on at least three continents. Their broader aims are illustrated, for example, in Fernando Santos Berçot’s examination of the role played by the Italian Opera Company in Rio de Janeiro, which the author argues helped to establish Brazil as an independent nation-state because the ‘genre itself embodied the idea of European civilization’. Claudio Vellutini’s study of the presence of Gaetano Donizetti and of the impresario Bartolomeo Merelli at the Habsburg court in the middle of the nineteenth century also shows how italianità was not simply a matter of the ‘implantation’ of Italian culture in a foreign context, illustrating instead how it was subject to adaptation and transformation for specific purposes within new contexts. This is evident, too, in Andrew Holden’s interesting comments on the role played by religion in determining public approval of an opera during the nineteenth century in Italy, where the presence of the church and religious considerations determined success or failure – for example, Richard Wagner’s works had to wait until 1871 to be performed on the Italian stage. Similarly, Richard Erkens argues that the operas by Leoncavallo and Franchetti that drew on German myths were considered to be too far from the emotional ideals of the German audience. There are also two very interesting essays on the reception of Italian opera (and evidently of the culture as well) in India and Japan by Rashna Darius Nicholson and Michael Facius, respectively. In both cases, the role of impresarios proved to be fundamental for finding the right language and themes through which to export the culture of Mediterranean Europe into apparently different social contexts. In the closing essay, Benjamin Walton considers that ways in which the essays published in this volume and current literature serve to open new questions about the global and transnational roles of opera in the twenty-first century.