Shortly following the premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, performances of this opera often featured a strange substitution: sopranos performed the rondò-finale from one of Donizetti's earlier operas, Fausta, in place of the now-famous mad scene aria. At least four productions were affected and this alteration was performed by some of the most famous sopranos of the time. This article explores the brief tradition of altering the mad scene by looking carefully at its origin and subsequent appearances, discussing its effects on the experience of hearing Lucia di Lammermoor as a whole, and investigating the possible reasons why this substitution lasted only for a brief period of time.

Puccini reception lay at the heart of a crisis of national identity that gripped Italy between the turn of the century and the First World War. For Puccini's detractors his works were an emblem of decadence; for his supporters they provided a means for regeneration. In his vitriolic monograph, Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912), Fausto Torrefranca associated Puccini with dangerous ‘others’ – women, homosexuals and Jews – in order to instil fear about the ‘feminisation’ of Italian culture. The reception of his book shows that Torrefranca's ‘extreme’ views were widely shared.

Ernst Krenek's opera Karl V presents an ingenious interpretation of the life of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, which argues not only dramatically but also musically for the contemporary political significance of the Emperor's life. This was no forced pairing of music and politics, for Krenek had found that the historical and theological problems raised by the Emperor's ‘justification’ at the end of his life bore a striking resemblance both to the aesthetic dilemmas he was then having to face as a composer and issues common to the wider struggle for national identity and political legitimacy in Austria after World War I. This essay introduces these themes in the work, and Krenek’s rationalisations of the way he presents them. It considers their implications for our understanding of the history of serialism in music more generally, and for an aspect of Krenek's compositional development that has perplexed later commentators: the apparent stylistic gulf between this opera and Jonny spielt auf.