Leonardo Vinci's Li zite 'n galera (The Newlyweds on the Galley) has been afforded a moderate degree of attention by musicologists because it is the first Neapolitan commedia per musica to survive with music almost completely intact. It is also Vinci's first extant opera, and has thus been considered in terms of the light it sheds on the style of his later drammi per musica for which he is better known today.

Donizetti's involvement with Paris has been understood to date from February 1834, when Rossini, acting as the Théâtre Italien's music director, commissioned Marino Faliero for performance the following winter. Though written in Italy, the work was substantially revised in Paris during the two months Donizetti spent there before the première on 12 March 1835, hence William Ashbrook's assertion that Donizetti ‘wrote for the first time for Paris, absorbing the musical tastes of that city, when he presented Marino Faliero at the Théâtre Italien’. While this opera unquestionably remains the one that officially launched the composer's Parisian career, new manuscript and printed musical sources reveal that Donizetti's ties to the city actually date back to 1833, when plans were laid for productions of two of his earlier operas: Gianni di Parigi (1831) and Gianni da Calais (1828). Like Marino Faliero, the first of these works was composed in Italy with a Paris (or a London) première in mind, Donizetti having hoped diat Giovanni Battista Rubini would introduce it at one of his benefit performances soon after rejoining the Italiens (part of the troupe spent spring and summer seasons at the King's Theatre). A close study of the work might shed light on the composer's understanding (or ignorance) of operatic practice in the city at this point in his career; indeed, it was precisely because Gianni di Parigi was so French at least in terms of its libretto (Felice Romani's adaptation of Claude Godard d'Aucour de Saint-Just's libretto for Boieldieu's classic and closely protected Jean de Paris, in the repertory of the Opéra-Comique since 1812) that the comic melodramma was never mounted in Paris. But it was the second work, composed for the Teatro del Fondo in Naples (where it was premièred on 2 August 1828), and performed at the Théâtre Italien twice, on 17 December 1833 and 4 January 1834, that Donizetti actually helped adapt to Parisian taste.

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus (1947) is the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose Faustian pact with the demonic consists of a long, voluntarily untreated syphilitic infection, which his brain craves as an exhilarating if destructive liberation from its icy germanic discipline. The craving is implanted on the very day on which, having renounced the call to theology, he commits his life to music. Arriving in Leipzig late in 1905 to take up his studies, he has a guided tour of the city, among other things visiting Bach's Thomaskirche. But his guide concludes the tour by dumping him in a brothel. Confused, he heads for the piano and tries to work out a harmonic problem: ‘Modulation from B major to C major, … as in the hermit's prayer in the finale of the Freischütz … on the six-four chord on G’. Then he rushes out, but not before a prostitute has brushed him on the cheek and indelibly fascinated him.

In a recent issue of this journal, David J. Levin proposed an approach to evaluating the work of directors and producers of opera. The idea that one might be able to theorise the difference between good and bad stagings is appealing, not least because many of us would like to feel able to raise the standard of debate on this subject. Most public discussions of opera productions (or at least of those productions that generate public discussion) can be predicted in advance, more or less verbatim; the persistence of the arguments used on all sides is in itself enough to suggest that little progress is being made. On the other hand, it is not easy to see how academic debate contributes. Theatre is where operas enter public discourse. Performance might seem like a decisive act of interpretation – choices have to be made about how to present the given work – but, paradoxically, it also marks the point at which opera escapes the attentions of the academy in favour of a constituency which is (presumably) less grounded in theory and less committed to consciously interpretative acts. With understandable reservations, Levin suggests the use of commercially available videos to analyse details of a staging, but details of this sort are not likely to contribute significantly to a theatre audience's experience of how a production works and what it has to say. Videotape permits us the mastery of freeze-frame enquiry, and at the same time confines us within the flattened perspective chosen at each moment by the camera's eye. Both its advantages and its drawbacks are incommensurate with theatre, where (especially in opera, with its simultaneous but distinct modes) the stream of information is diverse and continuous, and our eye moves in relative freedom, never capturing the totality of the stage. One might draw an analogous distinction between academic criticism, which works by isolating certain elements of the ‘text’ or its contexts and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, and the more holistic act of sitting in the opera-house watching a ‘work’ unfold. The pause button creates a sequence of discrete images submitted to the critic's intellectual play. In the theatre, a staging is more likely to achieve its effects through what we might call its ‘feel’, its general character and stance. When Peter Sellars set Così fan tutte in a diner, the air of incongruous modernity – conveyed through costume, set, the characters' ways of behaving–must have determined the audience's sense of his interpretation far more powerfully than (for example) the fact that he had Ferrando and Gugliemo sing ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ in their own characters rather than their assumed ones.