Title: Building Verdi’s American Home: Sarasota Opera and the Invention of a Portable Italy

Abstract: This talk situates the Sarasota Opera’s Verdi Cycle (1989-2016) within the historical context of Sarasota’s material and imagined relationship to Italy and the Mediterranean, sources of cultural capital associated with aristocratic history, artistic prestige, and touristic charisma. The Italophilic objects, styles, and ideas transposed to Sarasota were strategically framed by boosters as engines of the city’s evolution from fishing village to a destination for wealthy elites. Protagonists include the circus magnate, real estate developer, and art collector John Ringling; the museum director Chick Austin, who transported an entire eighteenth-century theater interior to Sarasota, and A. B. Edwards, whose namesake vaudeville theater on Pineapple Avenue became the Sarasota Opera House in the late twentieth century. Sarasota’s special relationship to Italy provides a rich background for the Verdi Cycle’s stubbornly old-fashioned production style and scholarly sensibilities. Focusing on Sarasota Opera productions of Un giorno di regno (2013), which workshopped Francesco Izzo’s new scholarly edition, and Aida (2016), which propelled the company both forward and backward in time, I outline the artistic principles of the Cycle and its work to build a decades-long community around a constructed canon. In all, I take the company’s claims seriously and consider what it signifies for a small winter opera festival in a small Florida city to become, however implausibly, “Verdi’s American Home.”

Emily Richmond Pollock (Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 2012) has been on the faculty of the Music and Theater Arts Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2012; she was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in 2020. Pollock’s research focuses particularly on conservatism, the historicization of modernist musical value, operatic institutions, and the relationship between modern musical style and convention. Her first book, Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Other research on German opera has appeared in Twentieth-Century Music, Opera Quarterly, and the Journal of Musicology, as well as in the edited collections Dis|kontinuitäten (2025) and Dreams of Germany (2018). In 2019, she was awarded the Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in music theater since 1900. A chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Music and Fascism is forthcoming in 2026. Her current project, “Opera on Uncommon Ground,” is a fieldwork-based study of five American opera festivals.

Admission Information

• Free admission