This essay frames Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die tote Stadt (1920) as a mise-en-abyme narrative containing four nested realms of diegesis: (1) the opera's ‘real’ world, (2) a prolonged dream sequence, (3) a dance troupe's rehearsal of an opera within that dream, and (4) an expressly requested baritone song performed by a ‘Pierrot’ character in the midst of that dreamt rehearsal. I conceptualise the opera's dense meta-theatrics as a reflexive celebration (and also a didactic warning against the escapist pleasures) of sung spectacle. Excerpts from my interviews with Inga Levant – director of the 2001 Strasbourg production of Die tote Stadt – are used to supplement my broader examination of the ways in which Korngold's reputation as a ‘problemless’ and ‘apolitical’ child prodigy has impacted critical, dramaturgical and hermeneutical orientations towards this opera since its earliest post-war performances.

With a diverse and colourful cast of animals, birds, insects and human villagers, Příhody lišky Bystroušky (known in English as The Cunning Little Vixen), is one of Leoš Janáček's most popular, if peculiar, operas. Though nowadays Bystrouška is typically characterised as a charming portrayal of the continuous renewal of life in nature, this idea emerged only gradually from a tangle of competing and occasionally contradictory views in which, however, the complexity of the moral laws by which the opera's inhabitants live was frequently central. By tracing the history of the opera's stagings in the Czech Republic; drawing out themes that developed in the journalistic and critical discourse around those performances; and reading the opera's music and stage action closely, this article argues that the amoral codes of Bystrouška's world not only inhere in the story, its text, and even, perhaps, in the idea of nature's cycle of life itself, but that at certain times in the opera they are also given expression through particular correlations and disjunctions between the opera's music and the physical actions and gestures of the singers on stage.

Through investigating the production and reception of Death in Venice (1973), this essay considers the ways Britten and his audiences responded to the fraught discourse surrounding opera in the twentieth century. If the genre as a whole often threatened to fall on the wrong side of contemporaneous aesthetic oppositions – between abstraction and immediacy, the intellectual and the visceral, the high and the low – early critics of this particular work tended to translate its visual spectacles and musical rhetoric into more rarefied terms. Taking my cue from elements of contradiction and ambivalence in this sublimating criticism, I will examine how Britten's opera resists the very suppressions it promotes. I will suggest that, in simultaneously staging and confounding oppositions at the heart of contemporary operatic discourse, Death in Venice offers a powerful case study of the way composers, directors, critics and audiences responded to and overcame the terminal illness with which opera had been diagnosed in the middle third of the twentieth century.

Catherine Tofts, ‘the first English prima donna’, was the female lead in the all-sung operas in the Italian style performed on the London stage from1705, but little has previously been known about her early life or musical training. This article draws on various sources, including her father's will, a petition she wrote in 1704 and Delarivier Manley's Memoirs of Europe to show that her family background was Scottish and that she grew up in the household of Bishop Gilbert Burnet. It names possible singing teachers and lovers, and shows that she did not leave the stage in 1709 because of mental instability, as has been assumed, but because of debt and the consequent need to escape from her creditors. The end of her career shows the difficulties faced by a leading English singer when Italians, particularly the castrati, came to dominate the operatic scene in London.