Opera Fandom in the Digital Age

CONTEXT

Today, interactions between audiences and theatres occur to a significant extent via online platforms and digital media. OPANDA (Opera Fandom in the Digital Age) studies the impact of these transformative technologies on opera fandom. Although recent research has addressed the digital dissemination of opera, the phenomenon of cyber-fandom remains under-researched. Situated at the intersection of musicology, sociology and media studies, the project asks how opera fans perform their passion digitally. This entails the investigation of their interactions on the web, but the project also considers how cyber-fandom intersects with traditional fan behaviour. In a post-pandemic and hyper-mediatised society in which the divide between stage and screen is constantly blurred, the project reconsiders past audience practices and envisions possible future ones.

METHODOLOGY
The project OPANDA aims at providing a pioneering study of today’s opera fans (i.e. the most active operagoers), including their digital practices and communities. To reach this goal, OPANDA is based on a comparative and qualitative analysis of representative case studies, combining digital ethnography on web communities and fanzines, participant observation at opera companies (La Scala, Paris Opera, the New York Metropolitan Opera), and interviews with fans.
 

RESEARCH TEAM

Dr Nicolò Palazzetti is the Principal Investigator of this Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action. He has an academic background in musicology and sociology, and an expertise in performing ethnography among opera fans.

Hosted by La Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), the project is supervised by Prof. Emanuele Senici (Supervisor), a prominent opera scholar specialising in opera and media, and by Prof. Romana Andò (co-supervisor), an expert in fan and media studies.

The achievement of the project is supported by the Digital Ethnography Research Centre of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia) and the Music Department at Yale University (United States).