Opera Meets New Media - Interview with Ellen Lockhart

The exhibition “Opera Meets New Media” presented by Bertelsmann was put together by an international team of curators comprised of Gabriele Dotto (principal curator), Christy Thomas Adams, and Ellen Lockhart. It tells the story of the extraordinary symbiosis of commercial activity and artistic creation already practiced by Puccini and his publisher, Casa Ricordi, in the last century. It traces the rapid rise of sound recordings and film as competitors for opera theaters and the traditional business of music publishers. Other topics include the new, modern, and efficient marketing strategies developed by Casa Ricordi to market its opera repertoire, the “branding” of the publishing house’s most successful composer and its globally expanding business. Exhibits and installations also tell of the challenges of the then new media for existing copyright law and the exploitation of performing rights. “Opera Meets New Media” was made possible by the extensive holdings of the Archivio Storico Ricordi, which belongs to Bertelsmann, with artifacts relating to Puccini’s operas published by Ricordi, supplemented by letters, business documents, composition registers, publications and many other contemporary testimonies.
Ellen Lockhart is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2011, followed by a postdoctoral position at Princeton University from 2011-2014. Lockhart has published widely in journals such as Representations, Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Cambridge Opera Journal. In 2017, she published Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770-1830 with University of California Press, which was funded by the AMS75 Book Grant Prize. She co-edited Sound Knowledge: Page 2 of 2 Music and Science in London, 1789-1851 with James Davies (UC Berkeley) and is currently co-editing La fanciulla del West for the Cambridge Opera Journal Critical Edition of the Operas of Puccini (Ricordi).