This talk takes as its starting point a plan drawn up in 1889 for a local Parisian broadcasting system for opera, as a means to think about particular forms of operatic connectedness at the end of the nineteenth century. I’ll examine ways in which opera - as text and act, embodied by its producers and consumers, manifested in its ideologies, discourses, conventions, and rooted in objects (musical and otherwise) - was linked to, embedded in, and often enabled by numerous material networks

Flora Willson is a Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, where her teaching and research focuses on nineteenth-century music and urban history. She has published in journals including Cambridge Opera Journal, 19th-Century Music, Opera Quarterly and Music & Letters as well as in various essay collections. She is currently writing a book about operatic networks in Paris, London and New York during the 1890s.