Leseprobe_Cadernos 3

INTRODUCTION
Iskrena Yordanova – Giuseppina Raggi – Maria Ida Biggi
This volume considers the spaces which hosted theatre and music performances
throughout the eighteenth century in their broadest sense. The focus on architectural
structures designed specifically for stage and music practices is deeply connected
to an in-depth process concerning more fluid and sometimes unusual locations,
yet of equal importance in understanding a theatrical world that is ever more
distant from our own time. To interpret the theatrical language of the century of
the Enlightenment is to understand the codes of the sophisticated civilization of
that age, which regarded theatre as one of the highest expressions of royal power
and of the different élites who embodied it.
This multifaceted dialogue led to the challenge to scholars launched in 2017
by the Divino Sospiro-CEMSP, which organised an international conference on
«Theater Spaces for Music in 18 th Century Europe» held in the National Palace of
Queluz, near Lisbon. This was a great occasion to promote a multidisciplinary
exchange, and a rare one indeed, as it presented many different approaches to the
topic, since the event gathered scholars from numerous and diverse scientific fields,
namely architects, musicologists, historians of art and of theatre, and experts on
early modern history. This third volume of the series Cadernos de Queluz contains
a selection of the papers presented at that conference, and opens with the essays
by the keynote speakers Maria Ida Biggi and Luis Soares Carneiro, two renowned
experts in the field of architecture and theatrical spaces.
The specificity and heterogeneity of theatre spaces is therefore the key to
analysing not only the history of eighteenth-century opera houses, but also the
dimensions of ephemeral and symbolic events, the breadth of perception and practices,
and the dynamics of diverse identities and social status. This multidisciplinary
approach allows the reader to find different orientations within the sections.
At the same time, the geographical range of the investigations contained in this
volume is remarkable, and serves as one of the numerous keys to exploring the
texts. Our journey through European theatre encompasses the entire continent,
from Portugal to Southern Italy (Sicily and Apulia) and Northern Italy (Turin,
Bergamo and Venice) through Naples and Tuscany, extending to Austria, France,
and England. In this reconstruction, theatre spaces in eighteenth-century Europe
present certain common features and themes, as revealed by the theatrical architecture
of the Galli Bibiena family and by the prevailing model of the “teatro
all’italiana”. Thanks to the circulation of artists and repertoires, it is possible to
compare how stage settings, occasional productions, and festive apparatuses were
achieved; yet they shared certain basic elements in projection and construction,
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