On Monday, May 11, 2026, at 5:30 p.m., in the Bobi Bazlen Room of the C. Schmidl Civic Theatre Museum at Via G. Rossini 4, the "Schmidl Mondays" program will be dedicated to the presentation of the book "Entangled Histories. Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon" by music historian Claudio Vellutini (Oxford University Press). The book is a monograph on the role of opera in cultural exchanges between Austria and the Italian states in the first half of the 19th century.

The initiative is a collaboration between the Carlo Schmidl Civic Theatre Museum, the University of Trieste, and the Trieste Association of Friends of Opera Giulio Viozzi.

Historian Francesco Toncich (Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Trieste) will be present at the “Schmidl” Museum to discuss his book with Claudio Vellutini, who will also use musical examples to illustrate his book.

Through a rich collection of archival documents and printed materials, in "Entangled Histories" professor Claudio Vellutini shows how, during the first half of the 19th century, Italian opera helped redefine questions of collective identity in the Austrian Empire, serving as a testing ground for, among other things, theories of language and education, notions of homeland and citizenship, all artistic expressions, even new forms of management of economic and cultural capital and practices of collective memory. Highlighting the intertwining of Italian opera's aesthetics, its social function, and the ideology underlying its production system in diverse institutional and urban contexts, this book situates the musical theater genre at the crossroads of a broad set of political and cultural relations that for several decades linked Vienna and the major Italian operatic centers, contributing to a transnational historiography of this art form in the 19th century. Vellutini further argues that the new modes of production and dissemination of Italian opera between Vienna and the Italian peninsula contributed to official cultural policies aimed at promoting a supranational identity for the Austrian Empire—an identity that acknowledged, but ultimately transcended, cultural differences. As the state emerged victorious, yet utterly transformed, from over two decades of war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, opera—with its long tradition of impresarios, composers, librettists, and itinerant performers—became a crucial tool for bringing some of the Austrian Empire's diverse cultural traditions into fruitful dialogue.

Claudio Vellutini (born in Grosseto in 1983) teaches musicology at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), where he is an Assistant Professor. After studying musicology at the University of Pavia-Cremona, he earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago and taught at Indiana University in Bloomington. He was awarded an Ernst-Mach-Stipendium from the Austrian Austauschdienst and an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society. His publications include articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, and the Cambridge Opera Journal, as well as essays in various miscellanies. He collaborates with the most prestigious international opera festivals.

Admission is free, subject to availability.

Reservations are recommended (please include your name, surname, and telephone number) by email info@amiciliricaviozzi.it