Gli spazi della Musica, vol. 15 (2026)
Guest Editors: William Everett, Elena Olivia
Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, operetta exerted a strong impact on the forms of artistic production and consumption in numerous European and non-European cities, contributing to the development of the mass entertainment industry. Rooted in popular urban performance cultures, and in constant dialogue with the operatic tradition, operetta occupies a liminal position, at the crossroads between popular music and so-called art music. This position long excluded it from the canon of music historiography, reducing it to a mere social or cultural phenomenon.
In recent years, however, operetta has increasingly been reinterpreted as a complex phenomenon. Its hybrid nature has in fact emerged as its most productive trait, the key to its extraordinary capacity to adapt to different cultural and geographical contexts. Translations, rewritings, and adaptations, together with an extensive production network, made operetta a dynamic and fluid genre, capable of foreshadowing organizational and productive models that would find full development in the twentieth-century cultural industry.
This special issue aims to examine operetta as a performative system in motion, focusing on the processes of mobility, adaptation, and remediation that ensured its diffusion on a global scale. The objective is to investigate operetta as a space of intersection among performance practices, production infrastructures, related national styles (for example zarzuela, opérette, and Savoy opera), and different reception environments. The volume intends to draw on research perspectives that take into account not only musicological disciplines, but also performance studies, media studies, and cultural studies. Publication is scheduled for the end of 2026.
Possible, though not exclusive, research topics include:
- Translational and transcultural processes: practices of adaptation, rewriting, and recontextualization of the repertory in national and transnational settings.
- Geography and dynamics of mobility: circulation of works, movement of companies and artists between centres and peripheries, along transnational routes.
- Production infrastructures: networks, circuits, performance spaces, organizational and managerial models.
- Genre permeability and transmediality: dialogues with other musical and entertainment genres, and processes of migration into other media (for example recordings, domestic music-making, and cinema).
Guidelines for submitting proposals
The deadline for the submission of articles is 29 May 2026. Contributions in Italian and English will be accepted.
Articles must comply with the editorial guidelines available on the journal’s website and must be no fewer than 4,000 and no more than 12,000 words in length. Contributions must be accompanied by an abstract (in Italian or English) of 300 words, to be sent to: glispazidellamusica.studium@unito.it. Please include the wording “Operetta 2026” in the subject line of the email.
Contributions will be subject to a double-blind peer-review process. Authors will be informed of the outcome of the evaluation by 15 August 2026.
