Small Places, Operatic Issues: Opera and Its Peripheral Worlds

Lia Lola V. Kotnik

mar 2019 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Acerca de este libro electrónico

This book details original case studies that represent five different social positions or characterisations of opera: namely, opera as social showcase from Bayreuth (1748), social distinction from Ljubljana (1887), social conflict from Brno (1920), social status from Mantua (1999) and social manifest from Belgrade (2005). These positions, which indicate opera’s social diversity in local, regional, provincial, and peripheral terms, as well as its social mutuality in international, transnational, global, or metropolitan terms, generally promote the idea of opera as a social venue, cultural practice, theatrical scene, lyrical site, musical place, artistic experience, or transgenerational phenomenon through which people not only produce and consume the art of music, theatre, and spectacle, but also show off their lifestyle as well as economic, social, cultural and symbolic determination, identification, and structuration. The selected case studies of peripheral opera worlds are different in terms of the chosen places, times, and problems they tackle, but they all have something meaningful in common. They convincingly address the idea that opera peripheries produce compellingly powerful meanings and messages of their different social worlds. Through its analysis, this book creates a fruitful interpretative encounter of the academic domains of opera studies, historical sociology, cultural sociology and social and cultural anthropology.

Acerca del autor

Vlado Kotnik is an opera researcher, social anthropologist, sociologist, philosopher, specialist of media studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Primorska, Slovenia. Their publications include Medijske etnografije: K antropološki imaginaciji medijev in komuniciranja [Media Ethnographies: Towards an Anthropological Imagination of the Media and Communication] (2018); Opera as Anthropology: Anthropologists in Lyrical Settings (2016); Homo academicus in mediji: Bourdieujevske meditacije [Homo Academicus and the Media: Bourdieusian Meditations] (2016); Operno občinstvo v Ljubljani: Vzpon in padec neke urbane socializacije v letih 1660–2010 [Opera Audiences in Ljubljana: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Socialisation, 1660–2010] (2012); and Opera, Power and Ideology: Anthropological Study of a National Art in Slovenia (2010).