ABSTRACT
The most cursory studies of nineteenth-century musical cultures betray an enormous mismatch between this view of ‘Teutonic Universalism’ and the reality of the cosmopolitan basis for almost everything that underpinned quotidian musical life. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ has been a term at the centre of much thought in the social sciences for a quarter of a century, and has recently taken on the same mystique in music as a number of concepts and authors that have characterised the subject during the last half-century. The chapter examines a number of instances where the Italian and French contributions to European and global musical culture may be examined and evaluated. The cosmopolitan framework of opera in the various macro-regions of the world up to 1870 is Franco-Italian, one in which French and Italian works, at various levels of transformation, intermingle and interbreed, and one where the two could occasionally divide up on macro-regional lines.
