Emilio Sala - Biography#

From 1990 till 1999 he worked as adjunct professor of Musicology at the University of Urbino. Since 1999 he has been Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Milan where he currently teaches Musical Dramaturgy and Musical Historiography. In 2014 he obtained the “Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale” as Full Professor.

He serves as a member of many boards, including the Critical Edition of the Works of Giuseppe Verdi (Chicago), the Fondazione Rossini (Pesaro), the Giacomo Puccini National Edition (Lucca) and the Fondazione Pergolesi-Spontini (Jesi). From 2010 to 2023 he was member of the “Conseil d’orientation” of the Palazzetto Bru Zane-Centre de musique romantique française (Paris-Venice). From 2012 to 2014 he was scientific director of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani (Parma) and director of its journal Studi Verdiani. Since 2008 he has taken part into the “Comité de lecture” of the French journal Orages, directed by Olivier Bara. He is also editor of the series “Le Sfere” (Ricordi, Milan).

Since 1985 he has been speaker and chair in several international conferences, among which four times at the International Musicological Society meetings (Bologna 1987, London 1997, Zurich 2007, and Athens 2022).

He has published many books as author and editor. Among them is The Sounds of Paris in Verdi’s “La traviata”, published by Cambridge University Press (2013). His articles and essays have appeared in various collective volumes (proceedings, encyclopedic entries, etc.), and international musicological journals (Cambridge Opera Journal, Music and the Moving Image, Musica/Realtà, Musica e storia, Opera Quarterly, Orages, Revue de Musicologie, R.H.L.F., Saggiatore musicale, Studi verdiani, etc.).

His essays have also been published in program notes for opera houses like Milan La Scala, Venice La Fenice, Tourin Teatro Regio, Florence Teatro Comunale, London Royal Opera House, Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival, etc.

He organized some international conferences on opera and film music, including the first conference on the composer Antonio Draghi (1998). He held also many lectures at the Tours, Cardiff, and Brown Universities.

From 2000 to 2010 he was musicological supervisor and dramaturg for the Notti Malatestiane Festival in Rimini, where he promoted the first modern revival and musical edition of Malipiero’s Ecuba (incidental music for Euripides’ tragedy - 2001), of Pizzetti’s Pisanelle (incidental music for d’Annunzio’s play - 2003), and Zingarelli’s Andromeda (melodrama based on a libretto by Giovanni Bertati - 2006).

He also coordinated the conference Suoni e immagini della ‘Vestale’ nel cinema muto (Jesi, 12 October 2013), within the Fondazione Pergolesi-Spontini Festival, where he promoted the first revival in modern times of Luigi Maggi’s silent film Lo schiavo di Cartagine (1910) with the reconstruction and synchronization of the original musical accompaniment composed by Osvaldo Brunetti.

In 2016 he was a member of the steering committee of the Leverhulme-funded network on Italian opera from a transnational perspective organized by four partners: University College London, Brown University, Cambridge University and Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

In 2019 he founded the online journal Sound Stage Screen, published by the University of Milan, and co-edited by him and Giorgio Biancorosso (Hong Kong University). Under the aegis of this journal, he organized the international conference “Spaces of Musical Production/Production of Musical Spaces” (Milan, 2023), bringing together a selected group of scholars and artists to examine the relationship between music and space from a variety of perspectives—historical, theoretical, ethnographic, and poetic.