Colloquium: Flora Willson

Dr. Flora Willson
Cultural historian of music, writer and broadcaster 

This is a talk about interfaces between opera and urban life in a period and trio of cities self-conscious about their own modernity. The 1890s have been mythologised on both sides of the Atlantic—as the fin de siècle, the Naughty Nineties and the Gilded Age—while London, Paris, and New York are now canonical places in histories of modern life in the West. Opera rarely features in such histories. Within operatic historiography, the art form’s entanglements with the era’s technological systems (from railways and transatlantic shipping routes, to the mechanisms of insurance and circulations of the mass press) were long consigned to the contextual periphery. Only much more recently have scholars begun to scrutinize opera’s complex relationship with technology as an essential feature of its history.

My talk goes one stage further, to investigate the material underpinnings of opera’s very existence at century’s end—as an inter-urban, multimedia network. I’ll focus mainly on two brief case studies drawn from my forthcoming book, Operatic Infrastructures: Materiality and Meaning in 1890s London, Paris, and New York (University of Chicago Press, 2026), which demonstrate the impossibility of demarcating neatly between opera and its so-called contexts. More importantly still, however, I will argue that taking seriously the mundane aspects of opera’s material history (from the laying of wires to the taking of board minutes) also reveals the physical roots—what media theorist John Durham Peters has called the “forgotten infrastructures”—of opera’s own problematic systems of meaning-making.

About Dr. Flora Willson

Flora Willson is a UK-based writer, broadcaster and cultural historian of music. Until December 2025 Flora was a Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, where her teaching focused on nineteenth-century music history. Her academic research appears in journals including 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters and Opera Quarterly as well as in numerous edited collections, including the award-winning Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense edited by Gavin Williams. Flora edited the critical edition of Donizetti’s 1840 grand opera Les Martyrs (Ricordi, 2015) and her first monograph, Operatic Infrastructures: Materiality and Meaning in 1890s London, Paris, and New York, will be published by University of Chicago Press in May 2026.  

As a professional music journalist, Flora is one of the Guardian’s classical music critics as well as writing regularly for Gramophone, the Times Literary Supplement and other outlets. As a presenter and speaker, Flora has worked on and off camera with leading UK cultural institutions including BBC Proms, English National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Opera Rara, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Ballet & Opera and Southbank Centre. Flora has been a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 3 and 4 for over a decade, occasionally appears as a music expert in BBC TV documentaries and is the presenter of the eight-part series Unmissable Opera on Royal Ballet & Opera Stream.