Opera, Vienna, and Cultural Exchange: In Conversation with Dr. Claudio Vellutini
In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Claudio Vellutini, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia School of Music, about opera in Vienna and the cultural exchanges that shaped one of Europe’s most influential musical centres.
CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour
Recorded live on June 21, 2026
You can listen to the episode on CiTR.
The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM in Vancouver and at citr.ca.
Drawing on his recent chapter in Vienna: A Musical History and his book Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon, Claudio traces the development of opera in Vienna from the seventeenth century to the present day. We discuss the arrival of Italian opera at the Habsburg court, the role of theatres and institutions in shaping Vienna’s musical identity, and why opera has remained such a powerful cultural force for more than four centuries.
Transcript
Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.
Farha:
Claudio, welcome to The Blue Hour.
Claudio:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Farha:
Now, before we go back in time to Vienna, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk about how opera is familiar to many of us in Vancouver. The Queen Elizabeth Theatre, for example, is a familiar place to host well-known operas that go back in time, like Carmen. I saw Carmen recently in Montreal.
So we are going to be talk about something that is still very much part of the cultural life of this city and of many cities around the world.
Claudio:
Absolutely, yes.
Farha:
Can you begin with telling us a little bit about the origins of opera?
Claudio:
The origins of opera are the object of much debate.
First of all, what is opera? Because that will help explain how opera was born.
Opera, in just three words, is a play in music, a sung play. And indeed, the word opera comes from ‘opera in musica’, which means a work, a staged work, fully sung.
Now, the idea of opera was born in Italy towards the end of the sixteenth century, in the 1500s, in Florence. It was born out of an intellectual experiment by a group of Florentine intellectuals interested in ancient Greek drama and in reviving forms of spectacles that would be comparable to ancient Greek drama.
Ancient Greek dramas are now known mostly as texts or spoken plays, but in fact, they were largely sung. There were the choruses, of course, but the main actors would also sing much of the play.
This was very well known to the intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence. They started wondering, well, how do we recreate this type of spectacle?
Of course, they wanted to create a type of spectacle that would speak to their audience, which was mostly a very elite audience. We’re talking about the very upper echelons of Florentine society at the time.
They created a new form of theatre that was fully sung with instrumental accompaniment. And they also invented a new style, which was called stile recitativo, a recitative style: a type of singing in which the contour of the melody would closely match the prosody of the text being sung.
Recitative would become one of the most influential inventions for opera because that style would influence the history of opera to this day.
Farha:
Right. How does it really develop? Because what I know about this period, is that it’s a very exciting time, late Renaissance — then there’s that wonderful word Baroque. A time, of what feels to me, when I think of sculptors like Bernini, that there’s a lot going on with art in general, supported by wealthy families like the Medicis… we’ll talk about others as well.
Can you bring us there?
Claudio:
First of all, let’s clarify that categories like Renaissance and Baroque, as chronological markers, are a little bit arbitrary. They are normally used retrospectively. People at the time didn’t think of themselves as, “Oh, I’m in the late Renaissance,” or “Oh, I’m in the Baroque.”
With this new genre, we are really at the cusp between what we consider the late Renaissance and what we consider the early Baroque.
The first operas for which we have the music were performed in 1600. It’s very easy to remember the date, and very easy to mark the anniversaries.
The first opera proper is a couple of years earlier, but we only have the text. We don’t really know how it sounded because the music hasn’t come down to us.
But 1600 is the first opera that we can recreate today because we have the music, we have the libretto, and we even have images of the original production. This opera was produced for a very special occasion.
It was produced for a very fancy wedding between a Medici woman, Marie de’ Medici, and no less than the King of France, Henry IV, who, as some of our audience members may know from French history, became king after a very tormented period.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that all operas worked like that. There are still many remnants of previous styles, like the madrigal style, in some of these very early operas, which were very much one-hit wonders.
These were spectacles that were put on for very special occasions, that cost a lot of money, and that were normally not revived.
These were shows that big, rich dynasties would put on to celebrate, to mark specific moments in their lives, and they had to be unique.
The beginning of opera is a little bit different from the repertoire opera that we know today. That started a little bit later, still in the 1600s, less than forty years later, when the first public theatre opened in Venice in 1637.
For some music historians, that’s the beginning of the history of opera as we know it today: a type of show that very much responds to the laws of the market. It needs to be attractive to an audience, it needs to be profitable, and it needs to respond to a certain industry.
Those first forty years of the history of opera are what make opera this transitional genre between the late Renaissance conception of art and the Baroque.
Farha:
What’s very interesting to me is that before we arrive in Vienna, we move from Florence to Mantua. Mantua is still some distance away — roughly 700 kilometres from Vienna, but it has its own ruling family, one that was also wealthy and, if I’m not mistaken, deeply involved in the patronage of the arts.
And this happens not much later in time, which brings us quite close to Vienna. But it is really through some Italians — and through two women in fact, the two Eleonoras, the elder and the younger, — that opera begins to flow beyond Florence. Let’s go there.
Claudio:
First of all, yes: Mantua. This big wedding in Florence became a model for dynasties to shape their prestige.
The ruling dynasty of Mantua was one such dynasty: the Gonzaga family. That’s the name of the ruling dynasty at the time.
Francesco Gonzaga was an art lover, so he immediately caught the potential of this new genre for projecting the prestige of his own dynasty and of his own rulership.
He sponsored some of the first opera productions in Mantua, including probably the first masterpiece in the history of opera, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which we are going to listen to at the Chan Centre at the end of July.
There will be two performances of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the first big hit in the history of opera. This was 1607, so only a couple of years after these first productions.
Farha:
The theatre, the space itself. That is, in and of itself, the architectural side of opera.
Claudio:
Absolutely.
Farha:
We still need to talk about these two women. As we were saying before we went on air, women from this period, during the 1600s, can sometimes get lost to history. Over time, they disappear a little, and we have to unearth them a little.
Claudio:
The first one, Eleonora the Elder, was the daughter of Monteverdi’s patron, the duke who commissioned these first few operas in Mantua.
Again, these little dynasties tried to make it work by marrying their daughters to the big powers. Pretty much as the Medici married their daughters to the King of France, the Gonzaga started marrying their daughters to the Habsburg family, the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire at the time. It was not yet the Austrian Empire.
Farha:
They were Catholic, of course.
Claudio:
Yes.
That’s how Eleonora, like pretty much all these daughters of major rulers, had an impeccable education.
Part of the duties of these female sovereigns, the wives of rulers, was precisely to dictate the taste of the court where they would marry.
That’s precisely what she did.
She brought with her from Mantua plenty of musicians, composers, poets, and visual artists, and contributed to turning Vienna, which at the time was a pretty small city and had only very recently been chosen as the capital of this very complicated political body called the Holy Roman Empire, into this amazing late Renaissance city, very much shaping the way Vienna looks today.
Some of the most ancient buildings in Vienna, the early Baroque ones, are very much the result of this Italian influx that came first with Eleonora the Elder and then, a couple of decades later, with her great-niece, Eleonora the Younger, who remained in Vienna for many decades.
Eleonora the Younger, even more than Eleonora the Elder, made it possible for Vienna to become one of the major centres for opera outside Italy at the end of the seventeenth century.
Farha:
Now we’re in Vienna. We’ve finally got there.
Now, the earliest documented operatic performance is somewhere in the 1620s. Is that right?
Claudio:
Yes, exactly.
Farha:
Tell us about that and what these performances would have looked and sounded like.
Claudio:
We don’t know. That’s the thing.
Because when Eleonora came to Vienna, there was really no major space for opera.
As I said, she very much dictated the new cultural fashions there. And with her, she brought to Vienna this new type of singing play.
At first, the spectacles that she put on were relatively small. They were performed a little bit everywhere in the imperial palace, wherever there was space available.
It’s only thanks to her that there was a multipurpose hall in the imperial palace. She really insisted that it be turned into a proper venue, not quite a proper theatre, but a venue where both spoken plays and sung plays, operas, could be performed.
The documentation for these performances is still relatively scant. We shouldn’t expect these very first spectacles to be particularly lavish in terms of stage scenery and so on, mostly because some of these shows were performed for a restricted group of people.
These were not public performances.
In Vienna, that happened a little bit later.
It happened with one of the emperors who was a big opera lover, Leopold I, who was a very important emperor in Austrian history. He himself was so fond of this genre that he composed many operas.
This guy was Eleonora the Younger’s stepson. In a way, she influenced his taste. But it’s only with him that this opulence associated with opera became a trademark of Baroque opera in Vienna.
Farha:
You did say something very important, because opera doesn’t enter the public sphere in Vienna until later, but it does eventually.
Claudio:
It does.
Farha:
But why don’t we back up a little bit? What’s very interesting to me — and I believe this is part of your research, and even suggested by the title of your book, Entangled Histories — is this idea of crossing borders, right?
We have the Habsburg Empire. We have Italy, which, as you said, was ruled as a number of very different states. Even Spain becomes part of this story as well.
But you have definitely found that Italian opera, Italian culture, and even Italian architecture begin to seep into these Viennese cultural spaces. And Vienna embraces this in many ways.
Vienna is starting to transform, in part, through the arrival of many of these Italians.
Claudio:
Yes, and it transforms even more starting in the eighteenth century. Up to this point, the relationship between Vienna and Italy is mostly dynastic. But starting in the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs expand their state into Italy.
Starting in the early eighteenth century, Sicily first, then Naples and Milan become part of the Habsburg hereditary lands.
So the Habsburgs basically become the sovereigns of these states. Italy becomes part of the Habsburg domains, and therefore Italian culture becomes even more ingrained within Habsburg ideology, and even more part of the cultural landscape of Vienna, which is the capital of the Habsburg domains.
And this would continue all the way to basically the end of the nineteenth century because, especially as we get more into the period of my book, which is the early nineteenth century, the Habsburg influence over Italy grows more and more.
Up to a point where, really after the Napoleonic Wars, the Austrians control directly or indirectly basically pretty much all of Italy except for the Papal States. Although, because the Habsburgs are Catholic, the relationship with the Pope is generally decent enough. Not always the most peaceful, but, you know.
And the House of Savoy are the only ones that actually do not like the Habsburgs, with consequences that would later lead to a major clash in the nineteenth century, as you probably know.
So we arrive at this point where this dynastic relationship that we discussed since the early seventeenth century really then turns into a major political domination of Austria over Italy, all the way to basically — depending on which parts of Italy you are looking at — let’s say between the 1860s and the 1870s.
So Italy is a big part of Austrian history, in a way.
And part of the idea behind the book, the idea of entangled history, is that we are really accustomed to thinking so much in national terms. Italy is one thing and Austria is another, and then we completely obliterate these symbiotic relationships that have existed for so many centuries.
So part of what I try to do in this book is to re-evaluate these connections and these cross-histories, these entangled histories that are so interconnected that severing them means basically completely losing a big chunk of the picture.
Farha:
One sort of concrete example is the language, Italian. So Italian, in many instances, even over the centuries, is still very much part of opera, even though German does come in, and even when French operas become of interest, they may come into Vienna.
But it’s interesting that even in tumultuous times, there was still this feeling that opera, in many cases, should be sung in Italian, and that was embraced by the Viennese people.
Claudio:
Absolutely. I mean, until the mid-eighteenth century in Vienna, opera was only sung in Italian, except in popular theatres, where you would have opera parodies and some productions of opera translated into German, though very few.
But it’s only starting in the mid-eighteenth century, then, that opera became more multilingual.
But because opera is so ingrained in court culture, Italian was one of the major languages spoken at court. The emperors at the time did not speak German. German was for the people, for the commoners.
The emperors spoke either Italian or French — actually French mostly because it was the lingua franca of the time — but Italian was spoken a lot in Vienna.
One of the duties of an emperor was to be able to speak the several languages of his domain. An emperor like Leopold I would speak French, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bohemian. They were really trained to have this flexibility in multiple languages.
And Italian was a big part of it. There was a large Italian community in Vienna, and we tend to forget that, but it was significant.
For me, it was quite interesting as a student to go to Vienna and realize that there are still many people who speak Italian there. Even today, German speakers who speak German as a first language often learn Italian.
Farha:
Interesting.
Claudio:
Because it’s still part of the local culture.
Farha:
Now, when does opera becomes public, when the interest emerges in creating venues for the public to enjoy what we still enjoy today?
Claudio:
Right. So we have to agree a little bit on what we mean by public, because the operas performed for the Florentine wedding in 1600, in a way, even if these were not events that were open to the general audience, were meant to be public in the sense that they were meant to be known outside the elite circles of the court.
That’s why, for instance, the score was printed and circulated. There was an urge for this kind of show show, for this production, to be memorialized. So in a way, it was public. Not in the way that we think of it today.
In a more, as I said, contemporary way, opera became public in Venice, which was a republic, not by chance, right? It was not a monarchy.
It became public in Venice in 1637. That’s the date when the first public opera house opened, which meant that from that time on, in Venice, whoever had the money to pay for a ticket could go and enjoy an opera, which was not the case, of course, for these previous court operas. Unless you were invited, you could not see them.
So, for many decades, these two systems coexisted, right?
It was only starting from the — at least in Austria, in Vienna, in particular, going back to Vienna — it was only in the eighteenth century that the court opened its own opera house to the public.
There was another theatre that was run by the city that offered operas in translation, as I mentioned, and that was a private theatre, so it was run for profit, and therefore whoever wanted to go and watch a show, as long as they had the money to buy a ticket, could go.
But the court did not open its opera house to a general audience, to a paying audience, until the 1740s. And that happened mostly because the empress at the time, Maria Theresa —
Farha:
Going to another woman, a very powerful woman in this case.
Claudio:
Yes, but in this case, unlike the two Eleonoras, who didn’t have much political power, Maria Theresa had real power.
And those wars are precisely what led her to open her opera house to a general audience.
The court had to spend so much money on war that it could not afford to sustain the court cultural life that had existed before.
The only way for her to keep producing operas, which was a marker of the prestige of the dynasty, was to make money from it.
She had to find an impresario, a manager, a businessman, who would run the opera house on behalf of the court and make a profit from it.
They had to open the opera house to a general audience, a paying public. They had to make a business out of it.
Farha:
I think it’s time to give listeners a bit of a visual sense of some of these spaces. For those of us who have been lucky enough to go to places like La Scala in Milan or Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, we know that opera is also tied to this very rich architecture.
And as you mentioned, there are many Italian names, and many people, involved in bringing this institution together. It seems to me like a whole ecosystem. It’s more than the music. It’s more than the writers of the opera.
Claudio:
It’s a total artwork.
For these shows to be put on at the level at which they were supposed to be performed at the time, they required an ad hoc space.
Architecture also comes in as part of the equation.
It’s not just the music, it’s not just the text, it’s not just the scenery, the visual element, but also the architectural space.
Architecture is really part of it.
Farha:
I still feel that that exists.
Claudio:
Yes, and we go back to the question you asked me at the beginning: what is opera?
Because, as I mentioned earlier, yes, opera is a play that is thoroughly sung, but today we also have other types of plays that are thoroughly sung that are not operas. For instance, musicals, which in a way are themselves a kind of reimagining of opera in the twentieth century.
But there is a major difference: opera is not mic’d, and musicals are mic’d.
Farha:
That’s exactly it.
Claudio:
The architecture of an opera house today still remains all of a piece with the fact that the human voice in the space needs to be projected without technological tools that would help it be heard at the back.
Even today, contemporary opera houses are conceived in a way that allows the person sitting at the very back of the opera house to hear the person singing their lungs out 250 metres away.
This has remained crucial for the architecture of an opera house.
Farha:
Now, when you think of all of the operas you’ve studied — and in your chapter, you mention many — there are also the French operas that come into Vienna as well.
When you think of that, what led you down this path of opera? And what brought you to wanting to understand opera in Vienna?
Claudio:
This has been a long story, as you would say.
I became an opera scholar through a slightly tortuous, but not so tortuous, path, because very early on I realized I was interested in opera.
But originally I studied violin. I started studying music through the violin when I was nine, and I discovered opera a couple of years later, when I was about eleven.
My parents took me. I was already very fond of classical music. I loved Mozart. There was a summer festival not far from where I lived offering Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
After that, I got more and more interested in this genre.
But for me, it was clear from the beginning that I did not want to sing, because I was already going through a rigorous conservatory training, and there was no way I was going to do this again from scratch.
One instrument is enough. I’m not going to learn how to sing properly.
As I went to high school, I became very interested in how humanities disciplines work together. For me, it was frustrating that music was not there, because it was very important that music be part of this interdisciplinary dialogue I was experiencing in high school between literature, philosophy, history, history of art — and music wasn’t there.
I then discovered musicology.
Then I immediately said, now I can work on opera! I can do this interdisciplinary work that I love so much, and I can do it in opera.
After my first term in college, I came back home and told my mom, I know what I want to do. I want to become a musicologist, and I want to become an opera scholar.
I was nineteen.
Farha:
Wow. Now, can you define what a musicologist is?
Claudio:
So, at UBC, I would say that musicology is kind of a synonym for music historian.
In the larger academic world, it’s not quite like that. Music history is part of musicology, but it does not really define musicology at large.
Musicology is basically an approach to music that tries to understand music in verbal ways.
So a musicologist is someone who uses words to explain music.
So it’s the discipline that studies the discourse on music, the words that we use to conceptualize music through words rather than through sounds.
Farha:
And do you need to be a trained musician to be a musicologist?
Claudio:
That’s a good question.
It doesn’t hurt to be a trained musician. It is not strictly necessary.
I have some colleagues — not here at UBC, but elsewhere — who came to musicology through other routes, not necessarily through performance.
Of course, being able to read music is kind of necessary.
Farha:
We still didn’t get to why Vienna. Did you answer that?
Claudio:
Oh, why Vienna? I did not answer why Vienna. You’re right.
So when I was in college, I wanted to work on specific opera composers, one in particular to whom I dedicate a chapter in the book, who became — and is still — a major figure in the book. But at the time I really wanted to focus on him and not on Vienna: Gaetano Donizetti, a pretty important opera composer of the early nineteenth century.
Some of his operas are still among the most widely performed works, like Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale, L’elisir d’amore, The Elixir of Love, and so on and so forth.
So Donizetti spent a few years in Vienna as a court composer, the last Italian court composer working in Vienna, actually.
And so when the time came for me to write my master’s thesis, I decided to go to Vienna to study his works there.
And that opened a kind of line of work, basically, when I was there.
And the book actually, in a way, is the result of some of the questions that I address in it. They came out of that very, very, very early work of mine on Donizetti.
I started wondering: why was Donizetti here? Why was it important for Vienna’s court in the mid-nineteenth century to have an Italian opera composer?
I was still thinking a little bit in those nationalistic terms that then, of course, I deconstruct in the book, but those questions became the triggering factor for writing this book.
And basically, the answer was: you should stop thinking in national terms. And hence the book.
Farha:
And it’s also interesting, when you said that when you were a child, you had this love of Mozart.
But you also say, at least in this one chapter, that Mozart sometimes gets a lot of fame in this period of Austrian music, but at the same time, you make the case for so many of these Italian composers.
Claudio:
Yeah.
I mean, when we look at the eighteenth century in particular, what it means to be Italian or German is something very different from what it would mean later in the nineteenth century, when these cultural categories became political categories, right?
At the time, Mozart, yes, considered himself German, although he was from Salzburg, which was not Germany.
He considered himself German because he was German-speaking, but he grew up basically learning Italian. Actually, his Italian was very solid.
He travelled to Italy to complete his musical education, and he wrote many of his operas — most of his operas, actually — in Italian.
So Mozart is a really good example of these entanglements, cultural entanglements, because in a way he belonged to this very inter-culturally interconnected and linguistically mixed-up world.
By the nineteenth century — and I talk a little bit about Mozart’s operas in early nineteenth-century Milan — things got complicated because during the Napoleonic Wars, those more nationally oriented ways of thinking started consolidating, started becoming part of the ways in which people at the time thought of culture.
So there was a big debate, actually, about whether Mozart was German.
And the Milanese were like, well, his operas are in Italian, so they belong to us.
But Milan was part of the Austrian Empire, so who is us and who is them?
So this is why really getting away a little bit from that very, very hard and binary way of thinking is important in these cases because, especially for culture and cultural products that circulate, they don’t work.
They really prevent us from seeing the larger picture.
Farha:
Such a wonderful conversation. Can I give you the last word?
Claudio:
Absolutely.
There was so much to talk about, but I think you covered a lot.
Is there something else you want to share?
I would just, again, invite whoever is listening to us to go and enjoy some opera, because especially if you’ve never been to an opera, it’s quite special.
I would really recommend it.
It’s an overwhelming experience. You get immersed in sounds and visuals, and you’re just enveloped by sounds and voices and instruments. And you get to see shows and acting that are very different from what we are normally accustomed to, even when going to a regular play, because, of course, the timing of the music works a little bit differently than the timing of speech, and so the acting needs to be adapted accordingly.
And it’s quite a unique experience. It really makes you look at the world in a different way.
And especially in opera, of course, one of the most amazing things about opera, and also one of the most musically satisfying, are arias: moments in which characters open themselves, their interiority, to the audience.
And they can be a very deep and satisfying experience because you get to understand a lot about your own feelings too, just by listening to the ways in which these characters express feelings that you, perhaps can't rationalize into words.
And that happens through music and through song.
Farha:
That’s so beautiful.
I think I will say one more thing. One thing about going to opera that makes me feel there is a universality to it is that it doesn’t matter whether you understand the language being sung, whether it’s French or Italian.
Of course, in today’s world we’re very lucky. We can read along. We can read the subtitles.
But you are still immersed in a language that you may not know or understand, but nevertheless, you still feel that raw power.
I think that’s a wonderful way for us to step into what we feel, a feeling that is beyond language.
Claudio:
Yes. It’s very human.
That’s also why, to go back to one of the things that you mentioned earlier, opera is still with us: because it speaks to us, even if they were written centuries ago.
Farha:
Exactly.
Claudio:
Because those feelings haven’t changed. The ways in which we feel haven’t really changed.
Farha:
Thank you so much for coming in today on a Sunday.
Claudio:
Thank you again.
To learn more about Claudio Vellutini’s book, visit Oxford University Press: Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon