Emma Sohlgren

I am a PhD student at the Department for Musicology. In my research I investigate how Italian opera arias were acquired, circulated and performed in Sweden in the Eighteenth Century.

I did my undergraduate degree in Music at the University of Cambridge and graduated with a first class in 2012. After that, I studied Italian at Stockholm University and Università degli studi di Padova, and taught music and music theory at Lilla Akademiens Musikgymnasium in Stockholm. I studied for an MA in Musicology at Uppsala University in 2018–2020 and in my master's thesis I studied performances and reworkings of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice in London, Florence, and Naples in the early 1770s. I started my PhD studies in Uppsala in February 2021.

PhD project

Compared to many other parts of Europe, opera came to Sweden relatively late: the first opera house did not open until 1773 and there are only a few examples of full-length opera performances in Sweden before that. Nevertheless, operatic music existed outside purely operatic contexts throughout the century. Italian arias could be heard in public and private concert performances, adapted and performed in Swedish plays, and found in private music collections. Arguing that such performances and practices are important expressions of eighteenth-century operatic culture, I focus on the independent arias, how they were used and performed, and why they were acquired and collected. Through studying the manuscripts of Italian opera arias in the music collections of Patrik Alströmer (1733–1804), Jean Lefebure (1736-1805) and Claes Ekeblad (1708–1771), I intend to show not only that the dissemination and performances of single arias contributed to a knowledge of and familiarity with operatic music in Sweden, but also that the interest for opera can be understood like other types of cultural consumption in this period, as motivated by the aspiration to present oneself as someone with learnedness and cultural refinement.