Description
As a performer, opera conductor and composer, Giovanni Bottesini was a key figure in the nineteenth-century traveling Italian opera performing circuit. His career is exemplary of the transnational entanglements of musical culture in a century that brought highly accelerated land and sea travel. Bottesini’s engagements, performances, and show how music culture became increasingly global. These endeavours were not only intertwined with developments in public transportation, but also deeply embedded in global and economic power structures brought about by coloniality and hegemonic European culture. This study session sketches a collaborative research project on a global history of 19th century Western art music as embodied, and disseminated, by Bottesini.
The first paper gives a brief presentation of our joint project and introduces Bottesini’s musical activities, focusing on the “Mediterranean” stages in his life, namely his engagement in Barcelona at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Regionalisms, nationalisms and exoticisms were also present in Bottesini’s compositional oeuvre, appearing in pieces like the orchestral ‘Saludo a España’, the string quartet ‘El Catalán’ and the orchestral composition ‘Notti Arabe’, consisting of ‘Nilo’ and ‘Il Deserto’. The paper intends to show how cross-national connections and historical entanglements going beyond the Mediterranean also emerged in Bottesini’s through the distribution and commodification of operatic italian music.
The second paper focuses on Bottesini’s time in Egypt, as an orchestra director and conductor of the premiere of Verd’s Aida, during the celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal. The Canal, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, opened in 1869, accelerating international trade and deeply changing the connection between worlds, bypassing the sea route around Africa and linking Europe and Asia. The opening festivities culminated in the foundation of the Khedive Opera House by Shah Ismail Pasha, and in the première of Aida in Cairo in 1871, both led by Bottesini. The time in Cairo would become the longest engagement of Bottesini’s career, ending only when the Theatre was forced to stop its activities. This paper examines autological and heterological influences on Bottesini’s work as a conductor and composer in Egypt.
The last paper utilizes Bottesini as a case study, examining the presence and influence of traveling Italian opera companies in the Americas, most specifically in cities like Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. According to Matteo Paoletti, the success of Italian opera in the Americas was not only a byproduct of the expansion of the business model beyond the Mediterranean, but also a consequence of the Italian diaspora in the second half of the nineteenth century, which created audiences for the genre in the global South. This paper examines how, on the one hand, Italian opera was perceived as a symbol of modernity in the Americas; on the other hand, this global music business had to adapt to new localities and audiences. By examining newspaper critique of Bottesini’s performances, this paper discusses how Italian opera became a transnational genre in the Americas, not only influencing local music making, but also influenced by local conditions.
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