| Summary: | After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, arts and culture played an important role in the construction of an official dynastic Austrian imperial identity that characterized itself as supranational, embracing but ultimately transcending national differences. The Viennese Court steered this process through the strategic planning of cultural policies aimed to foster the perception of a united, imperial "imagined community." I call this planning "cultural engineering."
My dissertation examines the role of Italian opera performances in Vienna within official Habsburg imperial ideology and politics during the first half of the 19th century. Viennese operatic life was profoundly informed by this program, with Italian opera held up as one legitimate cultural expression of the multinational population of the Empire. Yet, as national ideals proliferated throughout the territories of the Habsburg crown, the genre became the political target of supporters of German nationalism, who emphasized instead the German roots of the Austrian Empire. Italian opera thus became an expedient instrument in the Court's attempt to contain the emergence of centrifugal national claims that could subvert and shatter the foundations of the Empire.
After a discussion of historiographical interpretations of early nineteenth-century Austria and of Viennese musical life in this period, five chapters interrogate the nature and fallout of cultural policies set in motion at the time by situating an extensive array of archival sources within different historiographical and theoretical frames: the politics of theatre administration, vernacular modernism, transnationalism and cultural networks, opera and the politics of cosmopolitanism, performance and memorial culture. Together, they provide a contribution to the historiography of the cross-cultural relations between the Italian States and Austria in the early nineteenth century.
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