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.

It all started with voices – voices not meant to be heard. Verdi's demand that at crucial moments in Macbeth the performers stifle vocal expression is by now famous. Again and again he urged that the duet and sleepwalking scene be sung ‘sotto voce’, ‘with mutes’, that the singers should speak more than sing, that their voices should sound ‘harsh’, ‘stifled’, ‘hollow’, ‘veiled’. Verdi's wilful insistence that his singers not sing has been understood as part of the composer's struggle to curb the excesses of primo ottocento opera and invest it with a new psychological depth. Gilles de Van, for example, argues that the suppression of the voice in Macbeth creates a shadowy subjective interiority, and claims further that the decision represents a shift in Verdi's aesthetic orientation from ‘melodrama to music drama’. De Van understands Verdi's inward turn as a renunciation of the kind of extroverted display upon which melodrama relies, as a ‘turning point, the beginnings of a dramaturgy of interiority that does away with the superb transparency of traditional melodrama and marks Verdi’s new awareness of the aura of confusion and ambiguity that can inhabit the human soul'.

What makes Bernard Shaw, for us, the most perfect of Wagnerites is that he did not mince words when he judged the master to have taken a wrong turn. Such a turn came in Das Rheingold, and Shaw was quick to expose it, even though he had just spent a chapter elaborating the profound political allegory he discerned in the work:

In the midst of these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and blood-curdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in the matter.

The title of this issue, ‘Performance Studies and Opera’, optimistically announces a conjunction between two disciplines that have previously had surprisingly little to do with each other, despite substantial common ground. The three articles gathered here, however, bear marks both of the excitement sparked by the novelty of bringing the methods of performance studies to bear on opera (significantly, the reverse process, operatic theory used to interpret other modes of performance, remains almost unimaginable) and a caution occasioned by their authors' sensitivity to the difficulties involved in any such translation.

This article examines the relationship between Milan's 1906 Exposition and a celebrated revival of Verdi's La traviata (1853). An event of national and international importance, the Exposition was notable for its focus on Italy's global presence, and in particular Italy's relationship with Latin America. The Traviata production, meanwhile, comprised the first Italian staging of Verdi's opera in period costume, performed at La Scala by a quintessentially modern, celebrity ensemble to mark the Exposition's opening. This article explores the parallels between the Exposition and the production, to investigate the complex, shifting position of Milan (and Italy) within the transatlantic cultural and operatic networks of the time; and more broadly, to examine the role of operatic staging in shaping understandings of global space within the mobile operatic canon of the early twentieth century.

This article proposes that dance was a central way in which Venetians reinvented the ancient world on the operatic stage. Focusing on Niccolò Bartolini's preface to Venere gelosa (1643) and his use of dance in that opera, this article explores how Venetian balli became a locus for expressing otherwise inexpressible passions and desires – ecstatic Bacchic rituals, the goat-dances of Pan, or the erotic games of nymphs and satyrs – that were integral to the early modern reception of antiquity. It concludes with a consideration of the balli in La Calisto (1652), demonstrating the significance of the dances for understanding the work as a whole.

Alongside the model embellishments Mozart composed for various keyboard works, he also wrote embellishments for contemporary arias including ‘Ah, se a morir mi chiama’ from Lucio Silla, the concert aria ‘Non sò d'onde viene’ K.294 and ‘Cara, la dolce fiamma’ from J.C. Bach's Adriano in Siria. Although these have been overlooked in the critical literature, they shed light on many aspects of Mozart's art of melodic decoration. In this article, I begin by examining these notated operatic embellishments: their textual histories, the styles of elaboration they evince, the pacing with which they unfold, and their motivic construction, as well as their relation to broader trends in Mozart's style. I then explore the embellishments Mozart composed into the texts of his other operas, arguing that these served not only a musical but also an aesthetic purpose, furthering elements of characterisation and drama, particularly in Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. I end with brief remarks on the challenges facing modern-day interpreters who wish to embellish Mozart's operas.

In his trilogy of masterpieces composed to texts by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart radically changed the musical and theatrical nature of Italian opera. The dramma giocoso became a true ‘comedy in music’ through the use of psychological realism: a vivid representation of life in continuous transformation and in all its naked immediacy is now the real protagonist of the story, an all-embracing totality within which each character represents a separate feature. This influx of a non-rationalist sense of life into the classical proportions of sonata form (whose tonal relationships and free approach to thematic development controlled the vocal set pieces) made for an explosive mixture. Even before his collaboration with Da Ponte, Mozart himself seemed well aware of his uniqueness: ‘I guarantee that in all the operas which are to be performed until mine [L'oca del Cairo] is finished, not a single idea will resemble one of mine.’

The day following the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), Voltaire observed in a letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville that the opera's libretto was by the abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, and he added with characteristic irony that it was ‘worthy of the abbé Pellegrin’. As we know, Voltaire was not alone in his sentiments. Few poets were reviled with the relish one finds in criticism of Pellegrin. Doomed to be a less-than-perfect poet in a literary culture, Pellegrin was forced by circumstance to do something few of his time could understand or accept: he earned a living writing poems on commission. This made him a faiseur. a hack who pursued art for money rather than inspiration, a paid servant who, improbably, sought to move in the very social circles that employed him. It is emblematic of Pellegrin's situation and his reputation that in 1774, twenty-nine years after his death, Voltaire did write noëls when the marquise du Deffand requested them, but complained that it was ‘une rude commission’ and compared his lot to Pellegrin's. Chastened, the marquise apologised. Pellegrin's artistic destiny would seem to have little to do with diat of die urbane and widely admired Voltaire, but I will argue that, in spite of this, the two shared some similar attitudes and experiences regarding the emplotment of tragedy and tragic opera, and further, that these shared views may have had a direct bearing on Rameau's development as a composer.

Each year for the past decade, the French vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants has visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In that time, three of their productions stand out as particularly significant: Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys (1989 and 1992), Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Medée (1994) and Hippolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1997). This trilogy of landmarks in the history of French opera was presented in fully staged productions conceived by stage director Jean-Marie Villegier and conductor William Christie.

In his autobiography, John Adams mused that his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, challenges directors and conductors owing to its ‘abstracted treatment’ of time and space. This abstraction also challenges scholars. In this article, I bring the cross-disciplinary field of sound studies into the opera house to demonstrate that Adams's obfuscation of operatic space–time is achieved primarily through the use of a spatialised electroacoustic sound design. Drawing on archival materials and new interviews with director Peter Sellars and sound designer Mark Grey, I outline the dramaturgical, epistemological and hermeneutic ramifications of sound design for opera studies and advocate for disciplinary engagement with the spatial dimensions of electroacoustic music generally, and within opera specifically.

The Houghton Library at Harvard University holds a copy of the 1685 livret for Roland by Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully that has been marked up in three different seventeenth-century hands. The meanings of these markings cannot be conclusively deciphered until further corroborative sources come to light, but they seem to refer to declaimed performances of Quinault's text. The purpose of the current article is to propose possible interpretations of these annotations, guided by seventeenth-century theory of the oratorical pitches (tons) and eighteenth-century links between the Académie royale de musique and the Comédie française.

In this article I explore how public acts of defiant silence can work as forms of historical evidence, and how such refusals constitute a distinct mode of audio-visual attention and political resistance. After the Austrians reconquered Venice in August 1849, multiple observers reported that Venetians protested their renewed subjugation via theatre boycotts (both formal and informal) and a refusal to participate in festive occasions. The ostentatious public silences that met the daily Austrian military band concerts in the city's central piazza became a ritual that encouraged foreign observers to empathise with the Venetians’ plight. Whereas the gondolier's song seemed to travel separate from the gondolier himself, the piazza's design instead encouraged a communal listening coloured by the politics of the local cafes. In the central section of the article, I explore the ramifications of silence, resistance and disconnections between sight and sound as they shape Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, which premiered at Venice's Teatro la Fenice in 1851. The scenes in Rigoletto most appreciated by the first Venetian audiences hinge on the power to observe and overhear, suggesting that early spectators experienced the opera through a mode of engagement born of the local material conditions and political circumstances.

August in the Restoration, like Augusts before and since, was a time for those who could afford it to escape the hot, dirty streets of Paris to head for the country. With this in mind, Ludovic Vitet, music critic of Le Globe, broadcast an appeal in his Bulletin musical on 1 August 1829 (cloudy and unseasonably cool): Have patience, you poor dilettanti who have rushed back from the countryside; and those of you who have put off your departure to be present at the first performance of this marvel, don't think that you have yet reached the end of your suffering.

Aida famously inaugurated the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1908, but the musical history of the city is also linked to two earlier productions of the piece: its debut in Cairo in 1871, and another legendary performance, in Rio de Janeiro in 1886. This article retraces the steps of five Italian musicians who played in the orchestras of the Cairo or Rio productions before moving to Buenos Aires, and thereby formed part of the vast Italian emigration to Argentina in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Once there, Pietro Melani, Tomaso Marenco, Giovanni Grazioso Panizza, Italo Casella and Ferruccio Cattelani radically transformed the concert life of the city through their musical activities, not least through their introduction of a wide range of orchestral and chamber music repertoire. By reconstructing their trajectories, I argue for a stronger focus on international networks in thinking about the history of Italian opera at this time and for a greater attention to the contributions of performers who would later fall into obscurity. In addition, I suggest that the insignificant attention given to such figures even in Argentinean narratives would seem to indicate the persistence of a historiography that plays down the contributions of European immigrants in the musical history of the city and the nation.

A notorious adultery scandal involving Guillaume Kornman (a co-founder and sponsor of the French mesmeric society) and Beaumarchais, who defended Kornman’s unfaithful wife, should be considered one of the main sources of inspiration for Così fan tutte. A pamphlet war between the two broke out in 1787, when Salieri was living with Beaumarchais in Paris. Significantly, the earliest sources of the opera – Salieri's first unfinished setting of La scola degli amanti, Da Ponte's original libretto, and Mozart's autograph – all spell the name of Guglielmo as ‘Guilelmo.’ A study of this real-life Parisian drama helps to clarify several dramatic and musical elements of the opera, including the use of mesmeric references, which is more pervasive than previously recognized. In this new light, the opera appears to offer a political response to the radical ideas on the regulation of sexual and social matters disseminated by Kornman's mesmeric circle.