‘If music is a language, who is speaking?’ asked Edward T. Cone on the first page of The Composer's Voice (1974), later turning to such questions as ‘does a vocal persona [whether protagonist of a song or character in an opera] know he is singing?’ And does that persona hear the accompaniment? Cone's answer then was that ‘Consciously, he neither knows that he is singing nor hears the accompaniment; but his subconscious both knows and hears’.

Recent Monteverdi scholarship has set great store by the composer's last work for the new ‘public’ opera houses of Venice, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643). The problematic status of the sources for Poppea – at least some of its music is not by Monteverdi – and a rather prurient fascination with its supposed amoral excess have provided ample scope for scholars to play their textual and critical games, often with impressive results. But this has deflected attention from Monteverdi's first Venetian opera, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640), written to a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro. Once a cause of some debate – Wolfgang Osthoff carried the torch in the 1950s – Il ritorno d'Ulisse is now seen as a much less complicated work. We have only one manuscript of the score – A-Wn MS 18763 – the uncertain provenance of which has caused scant musicological anxiety; nor have the surviving copies of the libretto, with their divergent readings, excited much recent comment from scholars. Thus the text is seemingly secure. Moreover, the supposed ‘moral’ of Il ritorno d'Ulisse – ‘the rewards of patience, the power of love over time and fortune’ — seems unproblematic, nay predictable, perhaps tedious. Even Ellen Rosand's noble attempt to inject a fly in the ointment by focusing on the seemingly minor character of Iro, the social parasite, has scarcely troubled complacent critical comment on an essentially straightforward opera with an essentially straightforward message.

Offenbach's first commercially performed dramatic work, the opéra comique Pépito, premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Variétés on 28 October 1853. This article examines it from historical and musical perspectives. First, I argue that its production at the Théâtre des Variétés is an example of what Mark Everist has called ‘the politics of genre’, in this case the attempts by managers of Parisian boulevard theatres to circumvent the hierarchical system of genre imposed on them by the government. Offenbach may have been directly complicit by offering an opéra comique to a theatre that was legally not allowed to perform the genre and by supplying a musical element – ‘local colour’ – as part of the political strategy by which the manager of the Variétés sneaked the opéra comique past the authorities. The subterfuge did not work, however: I argue that Pépito was recognised by audiences as an opéra comique primarily through the character of its music. A discussion of the score, and the musical competence of the original cast and orchestra of the Variétés, allows a partial reconstruction of the actual sound of the first performance of Pépito. Finally, I consider the later history of Pépito, and in a postscript suggest that a faint memory of Offenbach's Spanish opéra comique may have resurfaced twenty-two years later when Georges Bizet, who became part of Offenbach's circle in the late 1850s, was composing his own Spanish opéra comique, Carmen.

During the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, Elizabethan culture was insistently invoked as a source of solidarity and renewal. Through the trope of ‘New Elizabethanism’ members of the press and public reimagined Britain's future on the foundations of a most productive period in its past. This article traces forms of ‘New Elizabethanism’ and other complex negotiations between modernity and the past in the music presented for the Coronation. Its central focus is the debate surrounding Britten's Gloriana, an opera based on the life of Elizabeth I, commissioned for the Coronation Gala by the Arts Council. The opera and the debate it inspired reveal both the stakes placed in the Elizabethan period and a marked anxiety about the status of the past in the remaking of the present – an anxiety that arguably plagued the Coronation as a whole.

In his recent book on Hamlet, Stephen Greenblatt writes:

What there is again and again in Shakespeare, … is a sense that ghosts, real or imagined, are good theatre – indeed, that they are good for thinking about theatre's capacity to fashion realities, to call realities into question, to tell compelling stories, to puncture the illusions that these stories generate, and to salvage something on the other side of disillusionment.

In the course of his insightful analysis of Act II of Un ballo in maschera, Harold Powers recurs to two critics of earlier generations who hyperbolically describe how, to cite his more measured summary, ‘the drama has turned into music as the opera was being composed. The music is the drama for an audience habituated to its conventions, its style, its genres’. Powers first quotes Gabriele Baldini, who describes the libretto of Il trovatore as ‘a phantom libretto, which became completely engulfed by the music and, once the opera was finished, disappeared as an individual entity’, and then the earlier Bruno Barilli, in whose view ‘the grotesque libretto is only the causal element that provokes the explosion, after which it collapses, annihilated – a confused scattering of rhymes, syllables, babblings – to vanish forever without a trace’. Although Powers and other more recent scholars tend to pay operatic words greater respect, I begin with an invocation of views that might seem anathema to a scholar of texts for the inspiring idea that the text can be ‘annihilated’ as one moves to another level of the work. In what follows, I intend to annihilate both text and music in order to dissolve to a yet higher level of analysis and to recuperate a specific history in which Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, I maintain, participates.

One of the contemporary production books for Don Carlos thus austerely sums up the Philippe–Posa duet in Act II (of the five-act version); its none-too-subtle indication of grand themes handled seriously is one that has consistently driven the piece's reception. As so often, Verdi himself encouraged the trend – most significantly by treating the duet to more substantial revision than any other major piece in his entire output. Some drastic cutting occurred even during rehearsals, so that the supposed Urfassung predates the first performance. What is commonly referred to as the ‘original’ version corresponds, then, to the music performed at the 1867 Paris première. This was substantially refashioned for Naples in 1872 (with Italian text only), and given an even more thorough overhaul in 1884. The four versions have been much discussed: indeed, revisions such as these were one of the proving grounds on which Verdi (and thus his admirers) became musicologically respectable. Where would we stand today without those four versions and their many Verdian copains? Possibly on some other, less comfortable podium.

Young Millie Dilmount arrives in New York City during the jazz age, shingles her hair and looks for a job with a rich, handsome boss she can marry. The musical-film Thoroughly Modern Millie (dir. George Roy Hill, Universal, 1967) may have been a spoof of the 1920s but various twists and turns in its plot nonetheless reveal its middlebrow scaffolding. Social aspiration is written into the plot, as is the ambiguity of its signifiers: although Millie (Julie Andrews) falls for the penniless Jimmy Smith (James Fox), she sets her sights on the seemingly more appropriate Trevor Graydon (John Gavin) only to discover that, of course, Jimmy was a millionaire all along. This is a narrative as much about cultural and social as financial capital. Through its ‘second-order parody’ of racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes, Angelo Pao argues, Thoroughly Modern Millie – along with other American musicals – ‘has played a significant role in the formation of a national persona’. The middlebrow, though, is not necessarily about identity politics, storylines or style; it is also closely bound with modes of dissemination and their relative costs and, because of that, with questions of class. Indeed, the Broadway musical was (and continues to be) a mainly middle-class affair, from its makers to its consumers, who David Savran points out have long needed ‘a good deal of disposable income’, given that ticket prices have always outstripped cinema, spoken theatre – and, on occasion, opera.

Claudio Monteverdi may not have been ‘the creator of modern music’, as Leo Schrade has styled him, but he did play the leading role in the creation of opera. Lacking illustrious predecessors and pre-existent generic prescriptions, he moved confidently as an innovator: the first great opera composer. But he was also a madrigalist, the last great contributor to a genre that was clearly on the wane by 1600. Here he was a follower. Numerous composers had defined and developed the madrigal before him: Rore, Marenzio, Wert, Luzzaschi, Pallavicino. His contribution lay not in creating the genre but in stretching it to its limits.

The age of Louis XIV was an age of contrasts. It was fond of spectacle and ostentation, typified in the great fêtes of Versailles, yet it is rightly known as ‘l'époque classique’, characterised by order and decorum. Its greatest playwright was Jean Racine, whose eleven tragedies had only the barest of sets, presented one action in one place during a maximum of twenty-four hours, chose subjects from history or mythology that featured only mortal characters in easily believable situations, relegated violence and other unseemly behaviour to the wings and to descriptions (récits), and used a limited, noble vocabulary to explore the depths of the human condition and to create poetry of extraordinary beauty. However, in 1673, during the peak of Racine's career, Quinault and Lully created French opera (tragédie lyrique), which, while also using a limited, noble vocabulary, featured spectacular sets and costumes for each act, allowed subplots (even comic ones in the first three operas), staged battles, storms and divine interventions, eschewed historical characters, and presented simpler situations and characterisations in order to leave time for music and dance.

During the last hour we spoke about the transformation of opera into music drama, and I explained the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. So that nobody has any excuses, I'll write on the blackboard once more the names of

Richard Wagner

Richard Strauss

Now we come to a new chapter. You'll remember that I read to you from Wagner's texts. They always dealt with gods and heroes and curious concepts like forest murmur, magic fire, knights of the Grail, etc., which you found rather strange. Then there were some difficult thought processes, which you were unable to follow, and also certain things that you could not yet comprehend and are as yet none of your business. None of this was of much interest to you't want to go to sleep. You want to hear music you can comprehend without special explanation, music you can readily absorb and sing with relative ease. … Nowadays there are matters of greater interest to all, and if music cannot be placed in the service of society as a whole, it forfeits its right to exist in today's world.

On 26 October 1928 Paris was witness to a gala opera performance some sixty years in the making: the city’s first staging of Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866). Organised under the auspices of the Czechoslovak embassy, joined with the tenth anniversary celebrations for the foundation of the First Czechoslovak Republic, and promoted as a marker of French-Czechoslovak cultural ties, the event constituted a triumph for Czech opera in one of the interwar period’s most important European cultural centres. The Paris premiere of The Bartered Bride allows for a detailed examination of two distinct but interconnected issues: the status of Smetana’s opera as political, ideological and national symbol for the nascent Czechoslovak state, and the diplomatic relationship between interwar France and Czechoslovakia.

During the Paris Commune of 1871, four spectacular concerts took place at the Tuileries Palace. Although the musical genre most often associated with the Communards is popular song, these Tuileries concerts primarily featured instrumental works and operatic numbers. Indeed, during much of their short reign the Communards sought to nurture elite music, in particular through attempts to control the Paris Opéra and its repertory. This article treats the Tuileries concerts as a starting point for understanding the Commune's brief direction of the Opéra, exploring ways in which the movement's attitude towards elite music at both venues engaged with a number of its central preoccupations. It suggests that Communards, often depicted as merely destructive, were anxious to rehabilitate their reputation and legitimise their status through the appropriation of high culture.

Active at the height of the apartheid regime, the Eoan Group treated South Africans to operas ‘in the true tradition of Italy’. The group relied on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings and the most stereotypical of operatic conventions to construct a hereditary link between itself and Italy, thus creating an alignment with the cultural ideal of Europe and its colonial representative – whiteness. This article offers a materialist reading of the Eoan Group's first operatic endeavour, La traviata in 1956, to argue that their invocation and emulation of the ‘Italian tradition’ served to situate them within a class-based discourse of racially inscribed civility. Drawing on archival records relating to props, costumes, advertisements and funding, it shows how the group constructed an imagined Italian heritage both to emphasise the quality of their productions, and to create an affinity with their white audiences. In this reading, the construction of an Italian operatic tradition functions not as a neutral aesthetic category, but as a historically situated politics of race and class.

Printed stage-direction books, so-called livrets de mise-en-scène, count among the most important sources for the history of staging of nineteenth-century French opera. Their function was to document the then-current condition of a Paris production, and to serve as a model for provincial or foreign theatres. In this essay, a comparison of two such livrets for Auber's Fra Diavolo from Paris, by Vieillard Duverger and Louis Palianti, shows that the staging of successful works underwent significant changes over time. One cannot, however, assume that a published stage manual indicates the chronological fixity of a production. Indeed, directors even in the nineteenth century did not aim at an ‘‘objective” reproduction of a staging, but rather at an innovative, lively, and ever-changing music theatre within the framework of contemporary operatic aesthetics.

This article presents a reading of Gian Francesco Busenello's and Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'incoronazione di Poppea in light of seventeenth-century theatrical practices. Reconstructing the doubling plan from the opera's premiere in 1643 on the basis of contemporary doubling practices and the correspondence of the Ferrarese music patron Marquess Cornelio Bentivoglio, the author argues, adducing circumstantial evidence, that Ottavia and Drusilla were conceived as a double role for the operatic quick-change artist Anna Renzi. While Renzi is known to have created Ottavia, this part is half the size of all other roles written for her, which invariably involve dramatic, emotional and musical variety to a much greater extent than does Monteverdi's tragic Empress. Renzi was admired for her command of both tragedy and comedy, and the essay develops the hypothesis of the double role as an intertextual interpenetration of the title heroines from the pseudo-Senecan tragedy Octavia and Girolamo Bargagli's sixteenth-century comedy La pellegrina.