NORDCORP. Opera on the Move: Transnational Practises and Touring Artists in the Long 19th Century Norden

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The long 19th century was the Golden Age of opera all over Europe. Besides being entertainment opera became an important politico-cultural tool used for criticizing the social order and creating appropriate national pasts, presents and futures in European countries. Re-creating European opera tradition in the Nordic context meant manifold adaptations in the language, vocal and orchestral resources and theatrical technology. In this project we explore the transfer of opera in the Nordic countries as a pr ocess of creating and re-creating cultural differences via means particular to opera. The transfer of operas is not regarded as a matter of a simple adaptation of a decontextualized "work" but rather as a complex process where the relation between opera a nd a modernizing and urbanizing society, opera and the nation, inseparable from a particular social, political and cultural context, is accentuated. For the research at hand, this means a focus on opera as performance and practice, and the operatic work a s actualised by living persons, subjects of their own art. Singers, Kapellmeisters and other opera professionals are of particular interest. The individual research topics enhance the cross-Nordic comparison. The transnational history forms the theoretic al foundation for the whole project and its individual part projects. This entails that we take a distance from a methodological nationalism as well as nationalistic historiography. In addition, this project draws methodological support from microhistoric al approach, life-writing and performance studies of opera. The purpose of the project is to enhance new understanding of opera as a cultural practice within the Nordic countries in the 19th Century. To claim that opera took part in the construction of national identities is merely stating the obvious but what this project seeks to address is how this was done in practice in different Nordic countries, with varying conditions for performing opera.