When fire famously broke out on the Metropolitan Opera stage during a quiet Saturday morning in August 1892, the house’s partial destruction revealed more than the perceived social and cultural value of a lost opera season. The accidental blaze that rendered the space unusable to New York City’s moneyed elites also set in motion a chain of bureaucratic activities, documenting the quantified values of opera within the quotidian practices of period real-estate ventures. The genesis of the “Old Met” as the aspirational product of the city’s nouveau riche and the story of its nearly devastating fire in 1892 may be well-known among opera historians (and viewers of HBO’s The Gilded Age alike), but few recognize the hidden examples of urban operatic modernity made manifest in the infrastructural webs underpinning the eminent company’s operations. In overestimating the effectiveness of the building’s fire-prevention technologies and subsequently underestimating its insurance value against loss, the board of directors inadvertently “precipitated a collision between different ways of valuing opera: between the market rate for an opera house … and the cost of building it in the first place or of recreating it in the future” (94). Investors withdrew, management changed hands, audiences and chroniclers alike recalled the event’s significance for years to come, and the company’s material losses sparked considerations of opera’s perceived value(s)—material and immaterial—in light of contemporary risk-management strategies.

In Operatic Infrastructures: Materiality and Meaning in 1890s London, Paris, and New York, Flora Willson unpacks some examples of transatlantic, infrastructural “entanglements” that demonstrate opera’s “stickiness—its propensity to connect, its vital relationship with the supposedly nonoperatic” (8). To do this, she employs a wide array of sources. Advertisements, newspapers, financial ledgers, maps, storage records, insurance documents, telephone manuals and directories, and estate records account for only some of the materials utilized to assemble snapshots of operatic realities at local and international levels. Although not entirely situated in the Americas, the book nevertheless offers valuable insights into opera’s transatlantic networks, which tied U.S. operatic cultures to those around the world. As Willson makes clear, “the operatic landscape of the 1890s … was one characterized in print and performance alike by its explicit internationalism” (62). Operatic Infrastructures demonstrates related historical-analytical tools available to Americanist music historians interested in wider perspectives on “urban systems and life beyond the stage” (5) at home and abroad.

Willson takes a case-study approach to her subject matter, at times alternating between each of the urban centers involved in her study. Throughout, she nevertheless emphasizes commonalities and resonances between occurrences in each location, charting for readers a larger, transatlantic operatic network. Following introductory ruminations on space, place, materiality, and mobility as they relate to the recognition of infrastructural impacts on opera and operatic historiographies, Chapter 1 draws connections between opera and the connective powers of emerging technologies at the end of the nineteenth century. To do so, Willson looks to telephone lines, underground railroads, and investor networks as evidence of “the nature and impact of operatic connectedness in the century’s final decade” (28). The Metropolitan Opera’s emergence from the so-called “opera wars” becomes an opportunity to “recognize the radical interconnectedness” (46) of its influential industrialist founders as equally infrastructural as the “international techno-diplomacy” (39) of the Anglo-French telephone project or the shifting opinions about the impact of public transportation on urban operagoing life. Chapter 2 then turns to London specifically, revisiting the 1894 premieres of Verdi’s Falstaff and Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House as sites of manifold operatic materialities, locally and internationally. In what is perhaps the most richly layered chapter of the book, Willson weaves together various strands of opera’s “infrastructural strata” (53)—from the internationally aimed genesis of both works and the historiographical significance of the Verdi-Puccini succession to the well-oiled commercial machine of G. Ricordi & Co. and its proximity to a “transnational traffic in luxury commodities” (66) and to the physical remains of impresario Augustus Harris’s operatic scenery and properties.

In the final three chapters, Willson further explores the ephemerality of operatic materials and the ways in which surrounding infrastructures illuminate new meanings in the spaces left behind. As addressed above, Chapter 3 reexamines the Met fire of 1892 as a window onto local and transnational processes of prevention and risk management that link operatic production to contemporaneous technologies through “a pyrotechnical history of the art form” (88). Chapter 4 then assesses the infrastructural impact on operatic canon formation, again using fire as a catalyst for critical inquiry. In this case, the Paris Opéra’s 1894 warehouse fire provides the necessary tinder for effectively linking space, storage, preservation, and material loss to the declining influence of Meyerbeerian Grand Opera in production and print at century’s end. “The physical destruction of operatic matter drew attention to the repertorial status quo at the Opéra and offered an opportunity for discursive overhaul,” writes Willson (119), connecting the demands of the genre’s physical footprint to philosophical questions about its marginal status in the current repertory. The book closes with Chapter 5, which interrogates “the infrastructures that regulated how [Nellie] Melba’s voice was heard and that afforded the operatic culture in which she became a star” (159). By employing recent literature on racialized listening and vocal materialities in print, Willson treats the famed soprano—her biography and voice—as “a medium” (138) for understanding the ways that voice, race, coloniality, and internationality converged into contemporaneous perceptions of a bel canto ideal.

Of particular note across chapters is Willson’s propensity for rendering operatic materiality from what may otherwise be recognized as substantive absence—or, in a very literal sense, immateriality—as well as her interest in blurring the lines between historical events and nonevents. In doing so, Willson deftly reassembles thickly described accounts of opera’s corporeality from its remains and traces of its physical existence. Critical examinations of intangible elements of chance within the Metropolitan Opera’s partial destruction, the lack of sufficient box space that precipitated its creation in the first place, the “famed physical heft of Parisian grand opera” (113) as measured primarily by the consequences of its destruction, and even simply the sonic ephemerality of Melba’s noted voice all serve to leverage material absence as a framework for understanding infrastructural presence. This lies at the heart of Willson’s approach to operatic meaning making and does much to collapse artificial boundaries between the event of operatic production and the sometimes uneventful, everyday nature of its operations. The relationship between opera and infrastructure, after all, “is never one of ‘context’, if that word signals a kind of bolt-on to ‘opera’ for those keen to find out more about a given operatic time or place,” asserts Willson, adding instead that “without the infrastructures addressed here, there would be no opera” (10). What ultimately emerges from the remaining evidence of operatic spaces, places, and items is the notion that the very art form of opera itself “is fundamentally material stuff” (105).

All told, Operatic Infrastructures is a compelling, engaging, and noticeably readable appraisal of operatic enterprise at the end of the nineteenth century, and though international in scope, it offers scholars of opera histories in the Americas greater perspective on the art form’s relationships beyond borders. In Willson’s treatment of opera, even details of operatic realities situated physically in Paris and London—or, for that matter, the likes of Melbourne, Milan, and Bayreuth, as is also frequently the case throughout the chapters described above—are nevertheless “entangled” with the historical realities of production and reception in the United States. In many ways, Willson makes these transatlantic resonances apparent, and in other ways, readers will likely find opportunities to recognize their own connections between the locales involved. Readers of this Journal in particular may nevertheless also note the book’s rather limited geographic scope within the Americas. While multiple European urban centers make appearances as secondary or tertiary settings for Willson’s deliberations, New York City is almost entirely treated as a cosmopolitan island in the United States with seemingly more connections internationally than nationally. The point is well taken that, by closely examining the constructed nature of the three major cities explored here, we may better understand “the contingency and historicity of their status” (20), but far more could be said of the domestic infrastructures at work and relations to other American cities. How could the forces involved with the Met’s annual tours, for example, be re-read with Willson’s perspectives in mind? What material traces exist of the company’s once physical presence around the country? Perhaps more than a critique, however, such an observation points to the relevance and potential application of Willson’s approaches for opera in the Americas. “These operatic infrastructures are there whether or not we as scholars pay them any attention,” holds Willson (163), inviting the rest of us to have a look for ourselves.