FARAWAY WORLDS

A lecture in English, open to the public and students.

Organised by the University of Parma.

Prof. Francesco Izzo (University of Southampton) and Prof. Diego Saglia (University of Parma)

This open lecture, delivered in English and aimed at sixth-form students and a wider audience, explores the role of exoticism in nineteenth-century European arts – including literature, painting and music – with a particular focus on opera. Throughout the nineteenth century, distant worlds and cultures perceived as ‘other’ exerted a profound attraction on the Western imagination; above all, the East became a space onto where to project desires, anxieties, fears and fantasies of freedom, transgression and adventure. Through a dialogue between words, images, music and stage performance, this lecture aims to demonstrate how exoticism does not merely consist of the choice of remote or picturesque settings, but constitutes a complex and deeply inter-artistic cultural language. Characters, landscapes, costumes, sounds, orchestral colours, gestures and images all contribute to creating a fascinating sense of distance, steeped in stereotypes and interwoven with power dynamics. We will also examine how this language has evolved over the course of the century: from the Romantic exaltation of travel, rebellion and extreme passions to the fin-de-siècle sensibility, dominated by artifice, sensuality and the allusions of decadence. The session will thus invite participants to reflect critically on the ways in which European culture has imagined ‘elsewhere’ and, through this, has also defined itself.