Studying Italian opera and theatre of the eighteenth century in its various European traditions and artistic transformations is a timeless musicological classic. It was, however, only in the 1990s and 2000s that – influenced by political upheavals and the fall of the Berlin Wall – new collaborations between scholars from the eastern and western parts of Europe arose and researchers became more aware of each other’s work on respective regions, cities, courts, composers and genres. A significant example of this exchange was the series Italian Opera in Central Europe, edited by Melania Bucciarelli, Norbert Dubowy and Reinhard Strohm, with three volumes published between 2006 and 2008 (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag). When the editor of the present volume, Tatiana Korneeva, states in her introduction that ‘scholars who interrogate and revise theatre and music-historical narratives have so far found national frameworks and nation-centred thinking difficult to resist’ (13), the point she is making is that academia has not come very far in recent decades. Mapping Artistic Networks contributes to an approach that has only lately become more actively pursued when networks, mobility, circulation and mapping emerged as key concepts for understanding practices of eighteenth-century Italian theatre and opera in Europe more widely. This volume aims straight at the heart of these questions by investigating ‘the complex network that promoted the circulation of artistic practices, ideas, and cultural artefacts across national borders’ (12). It offers eleven contributions in three sections labelled ‘Itinerant Italians’, ‘Russian Italians’ and ‘Translational Encounters’. The case studies in each section approach the topic from different angles, focusing on singers, singer families, impresarios, stage designers and other important agents of opera and theatre.

The section ‘Itinerant Italians’ starts with a contribution by Melania Bucciarelli on the castrato singer Francesco Bernardi (Senesino), whom she categorizes as a case of ‘circular’ mobility. Although he spent most of his professional life outside Italy (mostly in London), Senesino kept close ties with his native land, to which he returned at the age of fifty. His case shows how professional singers built a personal network to launch and advance their careers, and how this network predominantly consisted of other Italians living abroad. By quoting extensively from the diaries of Antonio Cocchi, a Florentine physician staying in London, Bucciarelli identifies a circle of Italians around the operisti in London that gathered regularly and formed a ‘non-institutionalized system of social support’ (35). To have such documents that throw light specifically on the personal networks of eighteenth-century opera singers is quite rare. A second contribution in the first section, by Gesa zur Nieden, starts with another of these documents: a request that Stuttgart court singer Giuseppe Cosimi made in an attempt to reunite his family by securing his wife Violante Masi (a singer then engaged at the Munich court) a position in Stuttgart. Zur Nieden then follows the Masi family of singers (sisters, brothers and cousins), who were active between the 1750s and 1770s in several European cities. Lacking other direct evidence about the how the Masi family networks operated, the author decides to track down their career paths and repertoire to show how they were important agents of transfer between opera seria and opera buffa. The other two chapters in this section each take a city as their starting-point and go on to examine how networks of Italian opera were established in each location. Marc Nubio provides an overview of the different operatic enterprises in Prague, from the first venture of impresario Antonio Denzio in the 1720s to that of Domenico Guardasoni, which lasted until 1806. Nubio explains how these enterprises were quite different with regard to their networks and artistic exchanges, whether with Italy – as singers travelled back and forth, for example – or with performance venues close by, such as the theatres in Dresden and Leipzig that were often visited by the same opera troupes. Regarding Warsaw, Anna Parkitna identifies in her contribution completely different networks from the time when King Poniatowski installed Italian opera in the new public theatre in 1765. She argues that Warsaw’s ties to Vienna were of particular importance not only for the engagement of singers, but also for those composers, performers and other opera personnel who often travelled from Vienna to St Petersburg via Warsaw, leaving many traces on the operatic landscape of the city.

The second section of the volume is entirely dedicated to Italian opera and theatre in Russia. Tatiana Korneeva meticulously details how Empress Anna Ioannovna built an Italian opera ensemble by sending agents to Italy to recruit singers. Domenico Dreyer is employed as a case study to show that these agents used their personal networks and at the same time also those of already recruited singers, thus creating a certain snowball effect. The singers who were engaged were themselves important facilitators of musical material and had a significant influence on operatic repertoire in Russia. Korneeva finally explains the difficulties of adapting Italian opera for a Russian audience, particularly with regard to translation. How Italian artists abroad assembled certain teams that shaped aesthetic products in their new place of work is also the topic of Nadezhda Chamina’s contribution. She investigates the graphic works of the architect Giacomo Quarenghi, who arrived at the Russian court in 1780 and recruited collaborators from Italy. His neoclassical and pre-romantic aesthetic ideals strongly influenced the Italian scenographers and decorators working with him at the court. Anna Korndorf continues the discussion of stage design by having a closer look at the first Russian epic drama with music, Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega (The Early Reign of Oleg; 1790), considering the influence of the Italian opera-seria tradition at court on the iconography of the drama. Whereas Catherine II was interested in reconstructing the Russian and Byzantine Middle Ages as precisely as possible, Korndorf is able to demonstrate that images of Roman antiquity in stage design were in fact inspired by opera-seria conventions. The last chapter in this section takes quite a different approach to the volume’s topic by exploring the alliance between Emperor Paul I and the Order of Malta, via the performance of Giuseppe Sarti’s Andromeda on the occasion of Paul I’s installation as Grand Master of the Order in 1798. Bella Brover-Lubovsky argues that Paul I’s intentions were highly (geo)political and that within the symbolic programme of the ceremony the newly commissioned opera seria played a key role. The topic of networks is hereby expanded to the phenomenon of building political ties by enacting them symbolically on stage within the spectacle of Italian opera.

The section ‘Translational Encounters’ comprises three contributions focusing on quite diverse topics. That from Piermario Vescovo is closest to the general outline of the volume and deals with Goldoni’s plays in, and for, Dresden. A philological in-depth analysis of several sources sheds light on the Dresden settings that seem to represent an important missing link between improvised stage and book versions of Goldoni’s theatrical works. Javier Gutiérrez Carou presents a vast amount of statistical data on the librettos of Pietro Metastasio (in particular Semiramide) in original versions as opposed to how the poet adapted them for performances in Madrid. He argues that the Madrid versions, while considerably reduced, still preserve the proportions of Metastasio’s original ones. Massimo Ciavolella gives an overview of Giacomo Casanova as an author and translator-adaptor of plays with only loose ties to the topic of the volume (for example, that Casanova adapted Louis de Cahusac’s Zoroastre for the Italian theatre in Dresden).

Mapping Artistic Networks provides a considerable amount of new and interesting information about the interconnectedness of Italian opera and theatre in eighteenth-century Europe, representing a valuable contribution to the current stream of network studies in this area. It is strongest where the specific connections emerge vividly through detailed studies and impressive source material. What is more, the volume itself has an explicit networking character. It not only brings together researchers from a wide array of countries and research traditions, but it also ensures that their research does not remain isolated. All contributions are published in, or translated into, English, and every quotation is provided both in the original language and in English translation. Building these bridges – and therefore contributing to a deeper understanding of how Italian opera and theatre functioned in Europe – will prove even more important in the future.