It is becoming increasingly usual to think of music of the Classical period as conveying its meanings at least in part through a rhetoric of topoi. According to this model, such elements as rhythm, texture and melody evoke both musical and extra-musical ‘echoes’. Woven into the structure of the music, these echoes form a collage of connotations from which meaning can be inferred. As a genre of its time, opera buffa is in no way exempt from this ‘combinatorial’ process, or its corollary system of associative meaning. Indeed, every level of meaning in opera buffa arises from the combination and recombination of textual, musical and dramatic elements. For example, the characters, plot types and comic riffs of opera buffa are often drawn from the commedia dell'arte; we also find stories from folk tales and fairy tales, and from fashionable novels and spoken theatre. We find gestures and scenes from opera seria and tragédie lyrique, as well as quotations from and allusions to other opere buffe. The music also ranges widely in stylistic origin and reference, moving from low comedy to elevated coloratura, from bland neutrality to affecting sentimentality, and from extended expressions of a single emotion to lightning changes in Affekt. Thus the rhetoric of topoi characteristic of instrumental music of the period is included within a structure of reference and resonance that invokes textual and dramatic ‘sources’ as well as musical ones. Opera buffa is, in other words, a fundamentally intertextual genre.

In much nineteenth-century European art ‘The Woman’ appears as an essentially symbolic figure saturated with ‘higher’ significance. Perhaps only in those literary forms that depend heavily on narrative does ‘she’ have any real chance of escaping a passive role. Otherwise, the female figure was used by male artists in an almost de-personalised manner that invariably emphasised abstract characteristics. At times The Woman is ‘elevated’ – so it would have appeared – to the highest symbolic level: to Liberty, Virtue, Humanity, Science, Art, Europa, etc. ‘She’ is, in aesthetic production, frequently a normative and seldom a narrative figure. Indeed her status as the former helps preclude her from active participation in the latter, so that even in narratives she often appears merely to observe the stories in which she is nominally involved. In artistic discourse, her best chance of liberation from an essentially symbolic identity and of breaking into the realm of active ‘life’ is to assume those qualities that lie most at odds with her conventional, morally uplifting status. The ‘bad’ woman – whore, temptress, manipulator of men – has a better chance than her ‘good’ Doppelgänger of playing a role rather than of merely assuming an ideological part.

One of the tasks of opera scholarship, broadly defined as an interdisciplinary enterprise, should be to include within its purview areas of investigation that have received little attention in purely musicological research. While it is obvious that libretto studies might form one such focus, there is a broader area that should not be ignored. This is the historical and cultural situation of opera and its reception, a subject usually excluded in formalist analyses and studies of musical sources or performance practice, often with the implicit assumption that the ‘aesthetic world’ of opera is self-contained or has nothing to do with the ‘real world’. Even if one does not subscribe to contemporary theory's penchant for subsuming art and history into textuality, the interactions between opera and its cultural context are many-sided and complex, and deserve full scholarly attention.

Wagnerian gestures were from the outset translations onto the stage of the imagined reactions of the public – the murmurings of the people, applause, the trumpet of self-confirmation or waves of enthusiasm. In the process their archaic muteness, their lack of language, proves its worth in a highly contemporary instrument of domination.

Among the Puccini materials at The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (hereafter NYpm), there is a single folio that contains three previously unknown sketches for Puccini's final opera, Turandot. No doubt the sketches have escaped notice up to now because the folio on which they appear had inadvertently been included with a large series of sketches and drafts devoted to another of Puccini's operas, La fanciulla del West. The folio was included in the collection catalogued as Koch 989, where it stood as Item No. 8 among a series of twenty other folios and/or bifolios (forty-five pages of music in all) that transmit both preliminary sketches and more fully developed short-score continuity drafts for La fanciulla. Now, thanks to J.