2960 Broadway, 622 Dodge Hall, New York, NY 10027
Colloquium: Wednesday, November 5, 2025, at 11:30am, 622 Dodge Hall
Francesco Milella González Luna (Complutense University of Madrid)
"Opera, Empire, and Modernity: The Italian Stage in Colonial and Postcolonial Mexico"
Abstract: Modern historiography situates the rise of the modern world in the years between 1770 and 1830: the global spread of the Enlightenment, the Atlantic revolutions of the United States of America, France and Haiti contributed significantly to unite entire continents under a similar idea of modernity. Italian opera played a significant role in this process: being one of the most successful forms of entertainment in Enlightened Europe, it soon travelled across the Atlantic Ocean first as a tangible byword of modernity and a laboratory for social interaction and cultural exchange between European and non-European societies.
As one of the main colonies of the Spanish empire, Mexico became a critical arena for the reception and production of Italian opera outside Europe. Even though it relied on a solid urban structure able to accommodate cultural products coming from Europe, its cultural frameworks, largely influenced by Madrid and its culture, turned this encounter into an unsettling process which continued even the crisis of the Spanish empire. From the early arrival of Cimarosa’s and Paisiello’s operas in the late 1790s until the problematic debut of Manuel García with Rossini in the late 1820s, the operatic stage acted not only as a conveyor of new values and habits: it also functioned as powerful mirror on which Mexican elites processed their difference from the rest of the Western world and projected their yearning for modernity and desire to be part of a larger cosmopolitan discourse amid the Spanish Empire’s decline.
Bio: Francesco Milella González Luna is Assistant Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research focuses on musical networks across the Atlantic between 1750 and 1830, with particular emphasis on cultural transfers surrounding opera between Mexico and Europe. He obtained his Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Milan and, in 2018, joined the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge as a doctoral researcher with a project examining the presence of Manuel García in Mexico (1826–1828). In 2023, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Irish Research Council to pursue a project on opera and modernity in the final years of the Spanish Empire at the Department of Music, University College Dublin.
His research has been published by Cambridge University Press, Routledge, University of California Press, and Hollitzer, among others. He has received several prestigious international academic awards, including the IMS Outstanding Dissertation Award (2024), the Tesi Rossiniane Prize from the Fondazione Rossini (Pesaro), and first prize in the Otto Mayer-Serra Competition (University of California – Riverside) for the best musicological work on Latin America. He regularly collaborates with academic institutions, festivals, and symphony orchestras across Europe and Latin America as a musicologist and music critic.
