Resilience and Change in Opera Theatres: Travelling the Edge of Tradition and Contemporaneity

Over the last century, the opera has changed dramatically and on several levels. This chapter maps out the major changes of the opera since its origin in its country of birth, Italy, discussing whether this evolution displays a form of transformative resilience. As a theoretical contribution, this case allows to challenge the resilience framework presented in Chapter 1, by raising several prominent questions for the conceptual advancement and empirical grounding of resilience. We ask: To what extent can an entity change in order to be considered a persisting entity and not a different entity? Or in other words: How much continuity is necessary to recognize resilience in the same entity? We add: How are different levels of resilience (institutional, organizational and individual) nested one into another, and therefore, how is the ‘agency of resilience’ played out? As an empirical contribution, this chapter sketches an empirical reconstruction of the history of the opera in a holistic longitudinal perspective.