According to conventional wisdom, East German censorship of The Trial Of Lucullus (1951) required that composer Paul Dessau and librettist Bertolt Brecht completely overhaul the opera before it could be re-premièred later that year as The Condemnation Of Lucullus. However, archival sources prove that the two versions are virtually identical, suggesting that the attendant controversy was adroitly managed by East German officials to appease both internal/Soviet and the external/Western audiences. Analysis of several versions of scene 8 demonstrates that Dessau revised far more before the first première than after, and examines his use of musical style to symbolize sociopolitical status.

London composers competed for a music prize in 1701, setting William Congreve's libretto on the judgment of Paris, a beauty contest among Juno, Pallas and Venus. Paris, contest judge, exiled prince and amorous shepherd, prefers Venus, placing love above Juno's promised empire and Pallas's martial success. This essay reveals the general political meanings of the judgment of Paris myth, shows how the tale had been used to critique Charles II and James II, examines the political beliefs of the sponsors and librettist, and demonstrates how music by John Eccles, Daniel Purcell and John Weldon supported the politics of Congreve's libretto.

Opera seria underwent more change in the latter part of the eighteenth century than is commonly recognized, but the nature of the change often had as much to do with practical considerations as with aesthetic ideology. This essay focuses on Turin's Teatro Regio, which in the 1760s imported two particularly innovative operas, Sofonisba and Oreste, and retained some ‘‘progressive” features while discarding others. This essay demonstrates the importance of extra-musical factors in decisions regarding production.

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.

For the past twenty-five years a key piece of evidence for an anti-Semitic subtext in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger has been identified in the Grimm Brothers’ anti-Semitic tale ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ and a possible allusion to this in the text of Walther’s Act I ‘trial song’. This article argues that the passages in question are better explained with reference to a medieval poetic tradition still prevalent in nineteenth-century German culture involving the vocal contest between birds, paradigmatically the owl and the nightingale. Since the twelfth century, the owl and the nightingale have debated the merits of high and low art, religious themes, social forms, poetic diction and more. The associations of pedantry and harsh, coarse vocal character with the figure of the owl maps readily onto the negative traits of Beckmesser, just as the contrasting associations of the melodious nightingale with springtime, courtship and ‘natural’ musicality align with traits of Wagner’s artist-hero, Walther von Stolzing. Rather than displacing the possible anti-Semitic reading of Beckmesser, however, this alternative reading of the Beckmesser–Walther antagonism through the lens of avian conflict or debate poetry relocates that reading within a broader discursive and figurative context, one that is more commensurate with the possible role of anti-Semitic subtexts within Wagner’s music dramas in general.

With its combination of gestures and music, instrumental sections, a narrator who occupies most of the composition, and two characters who sing for very short sections while acting and dancing for the rest of the piece, Monteverdi’s Combattimento defies genre definition. Starting from Tim Carter’s reading of the composition as a salon entertainment and responding to Suzanne Cusick’s call for the untangling of Combattimento’s multiplicity of meanings, this article investigates Combattimento in its ritualisation and performance of mutually defining relations that are mediated by the social and ideological implications of its immediate performance space, the salon – or portego, in Venetian dialect – the main entertainment hall of Venetian palaces. Using this as a key framework, the article explores the Combattimento’s associations with Venice itself as the broader performance space. Within that context, the choice of a particular episode from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata for Monteverdi’s composition – with its mixture of love and violence, assimilation and confrontation, personal identity and agency, history of winners and history of victims1 – proves as crucial to seventeenth-century Venice, at the crossroads between Western and Islamic civilisations, as it does for today’s culture.

This article begins with a late Verdian conundrum, one that is arguably distinctive of the fin de siècle: even as Verdi seemed to be withdrawing from the stage, he turned repeatedly to a small group of practical musicians, among them the French baritone Victor Maurel, the first Iago and Falstaff and creator in 1881 of the revised role of Simon Boccanegra. An exploration of the circumstances in which Maurel first made an impression on the composer, as Hamlet and Amonasro at the Paris Opéra in 1880, suggests a significant role for the baritone in late Verdian historiography. In particular, Maurel’s case reveals a Verdi interested in and even actively encouraging new approaches to operatic acting and declamation, a fact we might want to relate to the composer’s larger trajectory in this period. It also reveals a fin de siècle in which singers continued to be important, in spite of composers’ anti-performance rhetoric.

This article explores new conceptions of voice in late eighteenth-century Italy as expressed in discourses connected with opera reform. Inspired by the convergence of Enlightenment epistemologies of feeling and neoclassical aesthetics, certain progressive singers and literati sought to rebrand the singing voice as an agent of moral and political edification. Here, this ideology-laden project is traced through two conflicting representations of singer-poets, both of whom wield the power of lyric song to achieve political ends. First, the article unpacks Giuseppe Millico's narrative of his performance as Gluck's Orfeo (published in Naples in 1782), in which the singer argues for voice as audible interiority and, as such, a warrant of political subjectivity. It then turns to a reading of Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico's libretto for Giuseppe Sarti's dramma per musica Alessandro e Timoteo (Parma, 1782), in which voice transforms into an instrument of anti-absolutist critique. The article concludes by considering how these two modes of voice were imagined, together, as capable of revivifying Italian culture.

Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.

This article examines the protracted negotiations between the castrato Francesco Bernardi, known as ‘Senesino’, and the Royal Academy of Music, documented in five letters sent by the singer to diplomat Giuseppe Riva between 1717 and 1720. They reveal a tight network of singers, patrons and agents, and highlight how Senesino negotiated not only for a role of primo uomo in the cast, but also for a role of artistic influence in London. This episode in Senesino’s career together with examples of ‘unofficial’ directorial practice and ‘hidden’ artistic influence of singers such as Nicola Grimaldi (‘Nicolini’), Antonio Bernacchi and Luigi Marchesi suggest a yet stronger presence of singers, especially castrati, in the economy of eighteenth-century opera than has been hitherto recognised.

Premièred at Glyndebourne in October 1994 and subsequently performed in the UK, Austria, Germany and Holland, The Second Mrs Kong was the result of a collaboration between the American writer Russell Hoban and British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The opera's reception has tended to emphasise the disparity between Hoban's diverse and eclectic interests, which emerge not only in the libretto but also in his novels and essays, and Birtwistle's more introspective and linear approach. Possible connections between Hoban's aesthetics and Birtwistle's music have generally been disregarded. I argue, however, that the opera's main aesthetic concerns – namely, the mediation of images through ideas and the workings of image-identification in diverse media – are shaped by a productive exchange between librettist and composer. The clearest expression of this interaction is the love between Kong, who embodies ‘the idea of’ King Kong from the 1933 RKO film, and Pearl, a character drawn from Vermeer's iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The representation of these visual icons in The Second Mrs Kong is inflected by Birtwistle's own views on images, by his attempts to find musical analogues for visual techniques, as revealed especially in his sketches, and by his lively engagement with Hoban's ideas.

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.

In the early part of this century Italian musical critics were bemoaning the decadence of the national lyric stage. No inspired figure had come forth to claim the mande of Verdi; new Italian opera was becoming artistically irrelevant. In an effort to reclaim a ‘lyric spirit’ from Wagnerian Germany, Gabriele D'Annunzio ‘rediscovered’ the early seventeenth century as the birthplace of opera. Specifically, he fashioned Monteverdi – ‘il divino Claudio’ – as visionary proto-lyricist, a nostalgic move seconded by many other Italian authors through the 1920s and 30s.

In Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Brutus Jones undertakes a fatal flight through the jungle, near the end of which he stumbles into a clearing and ‘incoherently mumbles’: ‘What is – dis place? Seems like – seems like I ben heah befo’.’ He's right – he has been there. Jones's frantic run has brought him full-circle, leading him to roughly the same place where he began. However, Jones retraces his steps in more man just O'Neill's drama: he repeatedly rushes through die same jungle in the numerous adaptations of the play that followed its successful 1920 première. The first progeny of die Emperor – Louis Gruenberg's opera performed at the Metropolitan and Dudley Murphey's film starring Paul Robeson – appeared in 1933. Surprisingly, given die dated and, to present-day audiences, offensive racial depictions, the work is still being translated into other media, including Sven-David Sandström's 1985 opera and a 1986 dance version by Donald McKayle set to music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

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.

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 examines the political and cultural circumstances leading to the Italian premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s posthumous opera L’Africaine at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in November 1865. Meyerbeer’s death in May 1864 and the French premiere of his last opera the following year combined to produce a striking moment of transnational cosmopolitan sentiment that built on the composer’s reputation for writing music that had the capacity to communicate across national and political boundaries. Shortly after the Unification of Italy, Bologna was keen to capitalise on these emotions and used the Italian premiere strategically in order to position itself as one of the cultural capitals of the new Italian nation state.

Richard Wagner wrote in 1852 that in settling on the theme of the phantom ship he had entered ‘upon a new path, that of Revolution against our modern Public Art’, that is, grand opéra. Wagner’s revolution has often been described in light of the poetics of return and homecoming that contributed a new sense of identity to (German) opera. The present article is written against the grain of this conviction, and highlights the cosmopolitan career of the phantom ship and of the vernacular art forms – the nautical theatre and the phantasmagoria – that maintained the seafaring image at the forefront of the liberal imagination, first in Britain, and then in Paris, where Wagner arguably seized on it. Specifically, it explores the significance of ‘apparitional images’ to mid-nineteenth-century opera and Wagner’s turn to a regime of modern spectacle, inspired by the art of phantasmagoria, in Der fliegende Holländer.