Operatic Encounters in a Time of War

Absolute war, total war, world revolution: the nature and scale of the global conflicts that took place around 1800 have been explored (and contested) both at the time and ever since, and recent scholarship has begun to resituate the literary, visual, and theatrical art of the period within this landscape of perpetual conflict. Opera historians, though, have until recently largely steered clear of the operatic mediation of war beyond its most local manifestations. My article returns to the subject of opera and war, to reflect on how an expanded understanding of wartime, in reaching beyond the actual war event (Favret, 2010. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton University Press), can provide new insights into the recent scholarly work on opera’s transnational mobility (and malleability), its articulation of modernity and its framing of cross-cultural encounters.