Since its origin opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once
theaters specifically for opera were established that connection was expressed in the design
and situation of the buildings themselves as much as through the content of operatic works.
Yet the importance of the opera house's physical situation and the ways in which opera and the
opera house have shaped each other have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination.
Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house's spatial production. Looking at
opera through the lens of cultural geography this anthology rethinks the opera house's
landscape not as a static backdrop but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this
anthology consider moments across the history of the genre and across a range of geographical
contexts--from the urban to the suburban to the rural and from the Old world to the New. One
of the book's most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its
environments--that is both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible
more peripheral spaces from girls' schools in late seventeenth-century England to the
temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta to rural
open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies
powerfully illustrate how opera's spatial production informs the historical development of its
social cultural and political functions.
