Operatic production system in Eastern Adriatic Theatres - seminar, University of Ljubljana

This research aims to track the presence and role of Italian opera within the theaters that overlook the coast of present Croatia in the age immediately following the unification of Italy - until the end of the First World War. From Rijeka to Dubrovnik, through Zadar, Šibenik and Split, the archival material collected so far allows us to reconstruct the circuits of the major opera companies, the relationships between impresari and theatrical directions, identifying contacts that publishers and their representatives from Milan, Rome and Venice had with the area of the coast. Most of the documents found are written in Italian: in fact, since the beginning of the Napoleonic domination, Italian was established as the official language for the territory under consideration. Its presence then will fade, due to the policy of "de-Italianisation" of Istria and Dalmatia, promoted since 1866 by Emperor Franz Joseph. How far did this politics affect the musical culture related to opera? How did the Austro-Hungarian administration intervene in censorship operations? The progressive Germanization and Slavicization of the area, pursued with the clear intention to remove the intellectual dominance of Venice, did not stop impresari in hiring Italian opera companies for one or more seasons. The companies came from the hinterland, while the musicians were for the most part local. Can we speak of "cultural resistance" of Italian opera in the territories taken into consideration? With the end of the Nineteenth Century, Italian opera began a slow and gradual coexistence with other forms and genres (Croatian opera, operetta, etc.). Representations, more and more often in Italian and Croatian - as in the emblematic case of the Theatre Mazzoleni in Sibenik - were a reflection of a process of mix between different cultures, at the crossroads of the Slavic, Germanic and Roman world.