When opera met the city: emerging intersections between culture and people in urban transformation

The paper analyses the relationship between opera theatres and the urban environment. While it is rather commonly acknowledged that cities are transforming, what is less frequently discussed upon is the twofold pace at which they are changing: on the one hand, interactions, mediations and contaminations between individuals and groups bear witness to a new fluidity in the social fabric; on the other hand, cities are still being structured in a post-industrial fashion: the productive centre is refurbished with services which the peripheral branches of the cities invariably, progressively lose. This is all the more true for culture, still anchored to a highbrow-lowbrow dichotomy in its urban diffusion reflecting the hierarchy of the city. Opera theatres, in particular, respond to an out-dated paradigm of isolated centrality, never meeting the cultural itineraries of its potential audience. In the first section, a theoretical framework is provided: the city’s non-response to the changes of society is matched with the atrophied rigidity of opera theatres, whose relationship with the city remains unchanged since its Golden Age, where it responded to a precise physical and social hierarchy. New urban patterns and new audience desires correspond to a new urban map of culture, which opera does not meet, and to new languages, which opera does not develop. The second section further inspects this gap, and analyses opera theatres’ present approach to urban and social transformation. Uncritical reproduction of the repertoire is sided by innovating attempts such as “special effect” productions and ephemeral flash-mobs: neither of them produces critical mass nor an emotional adhesion in the contemporary audience. Starting from some virtuous examples, the third section explores the potential for innovation of opera theatres from a twofold perspective: the audience’s cultural itinerary in the city is reached through decentralisation and diversification of channels, while a fertile hybridization of languages empowers opera’s ability to meet and enable social innovation effectively.