The origins of the entertainment industry: the operetta in late nineteenth-century Italy

Abstract

How does a new successful musical genre impose itself, define its audiences and repertoires and eventually replace older genres? The essay examines the case of operetta from its French origins to the specific diffusion in the Italian entertainment system. Here the popularity of the ‘little opera’ coming from France and later from Vienna grew along with a new system of theaters, politeama and café chantants. They were run by a new generation of entrepreneurs and publishers such as Sonzogno, interested in diffuse new forms of musical leisure. The rising of the Italian operetta found strong resistance from the traditional opera world at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the distinction between artistic music and music as entertainment was being consolidated and we can find a sort of passing of the baton between opera and operetta as the major popular musical genre.