The King's Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Shortly thereafter some wealthy and powerful patrons – notably the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury – launched an ambitious scheme to build a fabulously expensive Royal Opera House in Leicester Square. The venture was designed to re-establish London as a major centre for Italian opera and ballet, to reform the wayward financial and artistic management of the King's Theatre and to give the capital city a grand opera house of modern design that would rival any in Europe. Because the royal patent promised for Leicester Square was blocked, the scheme had to be dropped, and the sponsors wound up establishing the ill-fated and short-lived Pantheon Opera instead – but that is another story. Our concern here is with the Leicester Square project which, though never realised, did set in motion many of the changes desired by its backers and helped to return London to the mainstream of opera.

It has become commonplace to assume that language and style in Italian opera are not a unified phenomenon, easily comparable with the language and style of a purely musical work. Rather they constitute the various elements of a plurilinguistic interplay in which the opposite pole from ‘the author’ is the characters: those figures whose personality, function and social condition command an individual musical language. Musical expression is determined by an interaction of the author's discourse with the fictive discourse of characters; even when one or the other seems to dominate, there remains an important, implicitly dialogic element, one that can sometimes be inferred solely from a sense of discordant context. In many instances, therefore, operatic discourse suggests analogies with the ‘dialogic’ nature of the modern novel posited by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

Just as politics can be analysed as a cultural and symbolic enterprise (that is, as theatre in the broadest sense), so too can theatre or opera (in a narrower sense) be analysed as political. Jonathan Dollimore identifies various conflicting processes at work in Renaissance English theatre: the ‘consolidation’ of power by a dominant order; the ‘subversion of that order’ and the ‘containment of ostensibly subversive pressures’. We need not accept Dollimore's essentially Marxist analysis of these processes in order to recognise the validity of his assertion that ‘the theatre [is] a prime location for the representation and legitimation of power’. But the way such power is consolidated, subverted or contained depends on the political and social systems in which the theatre operates. The issues are complex enough when one focuses on plays produced in Elizabethan or Jacobean London. They become even more difficult to sort out when single works or groups of related works are performed over a period of time in various locations, each with its own societal configuration, as in the different political entities that comprised the Italian peninsula during the first half of the nineteenth century (to which might be added the other European and even American audiences to which they were played). Under such circumstances, how can we measure the political implications of these works? Where does their meaning reside? How does that meaning change as a function of time or geography?

We have long been accustomed to think in terms of opera ‘stars’, and thus it should not overstrain the imagination to extend the astronomical analogy when dealing with operatic history: to speak of comparisons in magnitude, of orbits, or of suns and their satellites. A particularly useful notion in interpreting with reasonable accuracy evidence surviving more than a century and a half is that of parallax: the apparent displacement of an object caused by an actual change in point of view. A shift caused by the passing of years can intro-duce comparable distortions. My case in point involves the early Italian careers of two operas: Lucia di Lammermoor, making its way much more slowly at first than Belisario, which took off auspiciously but soon fell behind in terms of number of productions and performances. I select these two operas because, in spite of individual differences, they share the same composer and librettist, the same impresario commissioned them and only a little more than four months separates their first performances. Lucia's premiére took place at the San Carlo, Naples, on 26 September 1835; Belisario's the following 4 February at La Fenice in Venice. They emerged, therefore, into much the same climate of sensibility.

The millennium to which my title refers is that of the Christianisation of Russia, which took place in 988, and which was recently celebrated the world over, not least in newly broad-minded Russia herself. And yet the designation is somewhat imprecise: the millennium was really that of a sovereign's baptism. After considering and rejecting Judaism and Islam (so the legend goes), the Great Prince Vladimir of Kiev embraced the Christian faith and established it as a state religion – the statiest state religion that ever was (or is: the situation has been updated under the Soviets, but not fundamentally changed). The distinction is necessary if the subject of these remarks is to have any meaning at all, and it will also help explain why there is relatively little to say about it.