Ditlev Rindom is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London, where he previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2019-2023).

Ditlev completed his BA in English literature at Oxford, also studying piano at the Royal College of Music. He subsequently gained a PGDip and MMus in piano and piano accompaniment at the RNCM before completing graduate studies in musicology at Cambridge. During his PhD he also held a visiting fellowship at Yale University.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Nineteenth and twentieth-century opera and operatic culture
• Modern Italian studies
• Film music
• Voice

Ditlev’s research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century opera and operatic culture, modern Italian studies, film music, and voice. More broadly, he is interested in urban history, transnationalism, gender and sexuality, performance and media theory (especially intermediality), music and technology, and histories of singing and performance.

Ditlev has recently completed his first monograph, Singing in the City: Opera, Italianitá and Transatlantic Exchange (1870-1918), which explores the circulation of Italian opera and ideas of italianità between Milan, New York and Buenos Aires in the decades around 1900. He is also the editor of a new critical edition of Puccini’s La rondine (1917) for Casa Ricordi. This edition received its world premiere at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in April 2024 in a new production conducted by Riccardo Chailly to mark Puccini’s centenary, and broadcast on international radio and television. Emerging out of this edition, Ditlev has also co-edited a special issue of Cambridge Opera Journal (together with Marco Ladd), exploring the history and historiography of Italian operetta from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Ditlev’s other articles and conference papers have explored topics such as interactions between opera and cinema in 1920s New York; failed opera in Venezuela in the 1880s; representations of the Iberian world on the late nineteenth-century stage; and Greta Garbo and voice in Hollywood’s transition era. Ditlev is now working on several new projects, including a series of articles on the material and affective cultures of early to mid-nineteenth century Italian opera (including work by forgotten women opera composers), and a new transnational project on opera, cinema and melodrama in the 1950s.

Expertise and public engagement

Ditlev has written programme notes and given pre-concert talks for organisations including Teatro all Scala, Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Gran Teatre el Liceu, Wigmore Hall, Chelsea Opera Group, Opera Holland Park, Opera Rara and Chandos. He regularly contributes reviews to Opera magazine and has also published in the Times Literary Supplement, Cambridge Humanities Review, Ritmo and at mundoclasico.com.

Teaching

Critical and historical topics in nineteenth and twentieth-century music; critical and methodological issues in musicology.

Selected publications

• “Gramophone Voices: Puccini and Madama Butterfly in New York, c1907”, 19^th-Century Music (Vol. 46, No.1), 2022, 60-87
• “Arcadia Undone: Teresa Carreño’s 1887 opera troupe in Caracas” in Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective: Reimagining italianità in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Axel Körner & Paulo Kühl (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 192-213
• “Review article: Dreams of Iberia”, Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 33 No.1 (2020), 115-128
• "Italians Abroad: Verdi's La traviata and the 1906 Milan Exposition", Cambridge Opera Journal Vol.31 No.2-3 (2020), 237-272
• "Celluloid Diva: Staging Leoncavallo's Zazà in the Cinematic Age", Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol.144 No.2, 287-321