Opera and the Built Environment

by Laura Vasilyeva

Overview

The first book to examine the classic Italian opera house in a global context.
 
In Opera and the Built Environment, music scholar Laura Vasilyeva considers the remarkable mass construction of opera houses around the world since the 1800s and the no-less-remarkable bids to standardize the architectural features of their interiors across this vast theatrical infrastructure. Now known as the teatro all’italiana, this style of architecture—made most famous by Milan’s Teatro alla Scala—is characterized by auditoria with tiers of stacked boxes and a dominant red hue.
 
With attention to the sensuous dimensions of their auditoria, from their surfaces to their atmospheres to their acoustics and thresholds, Vasilyeva reveals the calculated reasons these theaters took on the form they did. The result is a book that reveals unknown associations between the Italian opera house and matters of environmental destruction, empire, and belonging, showing us new and unexpected patterns in how opera connects to the world we know.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226844459
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/19/2025
Series:	Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192

About the Author

Laura Vasilyeva is associate professor of musicology at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in a range of journals, from the Cambridge Opera Journal to The Opera Quarterly. This is her first book.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables

1. Architecture
Divisive Architecture
Distributed Architecture
Blueprint
2. Surfaces
(Chromo)phobia
Red
Sur-Face
Erasure
3. Atmosphere
Ransacked Earth
Pure Air
Dirty Opera
Escapist Fantasies
4. Acoustics
Orchestra Chamber
Calibrating Acoustics
Protected Space
Acoustic Signatures
Pure Sound?
5. Thresholds
Ethics of Boundaries
Colonial Metal
Cellular Expansion

Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

In prose as glittering and multifaceted as the theaters she studies, Vasilyeva invites us on a fascinating journey through the bedrock of operatic culture. Opera and the Built Environment reveals the forgotten histories that continue to shape our experience as spectators and demonstrates how much meaning inheres in stone and silk. This is musicology by way of W. G. Sebald, and the teatro all’italiana will never look the same again.

University of Notre Dame Arman Schwartz

Engagingly written and compellingly argued, Opera and the Built Environment opens our senses to key architectural features that became common to the operatic experience in the later nineteenth century. From red interiors to sunken pits and from air circulation to steel frames, Vasilyeva reveals the complex cultural, material, scientific, and sociopolitical factors involved in the standardization of nineteenth-century Italian theaters. Opera and the Built Environment is an essential, fascinating read.

Yale University Gundula Kreuzer

To understand opera we need to understand opera houses: this is the deceptively simple premise of Opera and the Built Environment. In Vasilyeva’s hands, however, it is an idea made foundational, as the classic tiered design of the operatic theater is revealed as a place of thresholds and surfaces, materials and atmospheres. Within its spaces, the operatic canon looks and sounds different, too, in the inseparability of the repertoire from the buildings in which it has for so long been performed. Across each chapter, we encounter the opera house transfigured, and by the end of this remarkable book the history of opera itself has been subtly reshaped.

University of Cambridge Benjamin Walton