Treacherous Contracts: Treaties and the History of Western Opera, 1648-1976

Opera—drama in which all or most of the action is sung—is one of the world’s oldest continuous art forms and was the first to go global. From its late sixteenth-century origins behind closed doors at the courts of northern Italy, opera conquered the world and there are now more than 1500 opera houses on every inhabited continent.    This lecture asks how international history has shaped opera, and how opera has shaped international history, by focusing on works by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Strauss and Stephen Sondheim, among others, to show opera’s entanglement with the modern history of treaty-making and treaty-breaking since the Peace of Westphalia.

Speaker
 

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University where he teaches intellectual history and international history.    He is also an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast. A prize-winning author and teacher, he has held visiting positions in Australia, China, France, German, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has lectured on six continents and his works have been translated into sixteen languages.    

Among his nineteen books as author or editor are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2014), Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), A Cultural History of Peace in the Enlightenment (co-ed., 2020) and The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives (co-ed., 2026). He is completing an edition of John Locke's colonial writings and working on opera's international history c. 1600-2026.