Opera and Law: Critical Notes

This paper intends to provide some methodological tools to explore the many different connections between law and opera. While the paper may of course be set in the context of studies about law and humanities, it intends to address some specific issues typical of the opera context. It proposes three different pathways: studies about legal problems as described in opera plays (“Law in opera”); analyses about the regulation of opera itself (copyright, etc., collectively referred to as “Law on opera”); and a broader, less theoretically-constrained field of connections between the two worlds, covering parallels between the circulation of legal and operatic traditions, regulations of new interaction between the audience and the staging, etc.