While Jean-Philippe Rameau left behind copious evidence of his changing beliefs as a music theorist, he remained silent about his most deeply held beliefs as a composer of opera. His occasional protestations of admiration for Lully, and his petulant responses to criticism, have formed a small basis for the large amount of commentary on his compositional career. The possibility remains, however, that Rameau's theoretical writings could offer some clues about his compositions and, more generally, about his career as a composer. I am thinking of a brief, but well-known moment in his career when theoretical remarks and compositional attitudes worked together in the performance of what we today would consider an analytical act: his commentary on Lolly's monologue, ‘Enfin it est en ma puissance’, from Act II scene 5 of Armide.Rameau published this commentary in 1754 in his Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, as a response to Rousseau's criticism of Lolly's monologue in the Lettre sur la musique française of 1753. The commentary is well known in modern scholarship and has been the subject of a number of studies, the most thorough being Cynthia Verba's work on the evolution of implied chromaticism in Rameau's theories. Here we will be concerned less with its purely theoretical content than with how Rameau's discourse can be said to betray his compositional beliefs about setting texts to music.

Like many composers of his period – and not just Italians – Rossini in his creative phase was no theorist: he was a practitioner, exclusively devoted to his craft. Theory was at one with practice; thinking fused with doing. It is thus fruitless to search Rossini's writings for some account of his poetics during his career in the opera house, and this not so much because he lacked time to provide one, involved though he was in hectic production schedules, but because his mental framework militated against it. He never discussed these matters in a treatise, never produced a formal plan of action for his work, and scarcely raised the subject even when writing to friends and colleagues. A systematic search through his correspondence bears little fruit, the sole exceptions being two letters from 1868 to Lauro Rossi and Filippo Filippi.

Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life

Until recently, women's biography and feminist interpretation of texts have travelled along separate paths, the exhaustive documentation required by biography often seeming to overwhelm efforts at interpretation, dictating that the genre remain essentially conservative and anti-theoretical. This is unfortunate, if only because it is in the writing of women's lives that biography and theory may need each other most. The women we examine are sometimes minor figures, ordinary people most interesting when seen as emblematic of a broader context; and of course they rarely lived according to modern feminist principles: what does one make of a talented woman who devoted her life more to caring for men than for herself? Such situations present conundrums that simultaneously resist and require the solace of theory.

When we young Austrian Jewish artists grew up, our self-esteem suffered very much from the pressure of certain circumstances. It was the time when Richard Wagner's work started its victorious career, and the success of his music and poems was followed by an infiltration of his Weltanschauung, of his philosophy. You were no true Wagnerian if you did not believe in his philosophy, in the ideas of Erlösung durch Liebe, salvation by love; you were not a true Wagnerian if you did not believe in Deutschtum, in Teutonism; and you could not be a true Wagnerian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, ‘Judaism in Music’. … You have to understand the effect of such statements on young artists.

In a little study of the orientalist trope denoting sensuality (nega ) in nineteenth-century Russian opera, ‘“Entoiling the Falconet”: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context’ (this journal, 4 [1992], 253–80), I closed by observing that Chaikovsky, one among major Russian composers of his time, seemed immune to the lure of the East, and that his only orientalising numbers were two late and insignificant items: the Arabian Dance in The Nutcracker and the Moorish physician Ibn-Hakia's aria in the one-act opera Iolanta, which shared a double bill with The Nutcracker on their joint premiére during the last year of the composer's life (18/30 December 1892).