This article explores the relationship between politics, society and culture in Napoleonic Milan (1796–1814) on the one hand, and opera reviews published in the city’s periodical press at the time on the other. This relationship is worth discussing for two reasons: first, Milan under French rule constituted the earliest, embryonic instance of the modern city in Italy; second, it was there that for the first time in Italy operatic criticism shifted from an undivided focus on the performance, mostly treated as a social occasion, to a prominent concern for the work being performed, which became the object of lengthy critical scrutiny. The article focuses specifically on the function of the periodical press as a crucial link between the discourse of opera and that of the city, exploring the complex ways in which Milanese society, culture and ideology, especially as represented in the city’s newspapers, are connected to the epoch-making shift from performance to work in the opera reviews published there.

Britten and Auden’s ‘choral operetta’ Paul Bunyan, written in New York in 1939–41, has often been seen as out of touch with its American context and as an anomalous precursor to the triumphant Peter Grimes (1945). A closer look, however, suggests a more complex engagement with American musical life and with the problem of American operatic populism. Indeed, if Paul Bunyan offered one set of answers to this problem, toying with popular genres and smaller forms, the rejection of this approach in Peter Grimes also seems tied to shifting American ideas about contemporary opera. Attention to Paul Bunyan in its American context highlights the transatlantic nature of both American and British operatic developments in the mid-twentieth century, while also recasting Britten’s operatic trajectory, restoring a sense of scepticism and uncertainty to his operatic project at its very beginnings.

Music is frequently overlooked by scholars of adaptation, who concentrate primarily on questions of literary and visual transformation. Undertaking a close reading of a pivotal scene in Joe Wright’s Atonement, this article demonstrates the vital contribution music can make to the adaptation process. Wright uses music, and Puccini’s in particular, in ways that are both narrative and reflexive, creating shifts of emphasis, deliberate ambiguities and intertextual allusions. Opera becomes a tool that allows the film-maker to interrogate notions of authorial and historical reliability, themes that lie at the heart of Ian McEwan’s highly self-aware novel.