Operatic Infrastructures

Materiality and Meaning in 1890s London, Paris, and New York

By: Flora Willson

Write A Review

Hardcover | 26 June 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.29 x 1.52 x 0.25

Hardcover

$127.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $31.94 with

Ships in 15 to 25 business days

An exploration of the fundamental relationship between opera and urban modernity in three iconic cities: London, Paris, and New York.

At the end of the nineteenth century, London, Paris, and New York were quintessential modern metropolises and vital centers for opera. In Operatic Infrastructures, Flora Willson examines opera's intimate entanglements with the material worlds of these cities to locate the physical roots of long-accepted ideas about the art form.

Reaching beyond histories of opera as spectacle, this book investigates the material underpinnings of opera's existence at the century's end: as an inter-urban, multimedia network. Operatic Infrastructures considers emergent technologies such as the telephone and the subway, but it also retrieves the hidden, forgotten, and otherwise effaced traces of systems such as storage facilities and colonial trade routes. It takes seriously the mundane aspects of materiality, from the blandest clich©s of newspaper columns to the fine print of insurance certificates. In doing so, the book reveals just how far these interfaces with modern urban life reached into opera's own systems of meaning-making and performance in the 1890sâ"making it impossible to demarcate neatly between "opera" and its so-called "context." Without such operatic infrastructures, Willson shows, there would be no opera at all.

Shipping

	Standard Shipping	Express Shipping
Metro postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Regional postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Rural postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95

How to return your order

At Booktopia, we offer hassle-free returns in accordance with our returns policy. If you wish to return an item, please get in touch with Booktopia Customer Care.

Additional postage charges may be applicable.