This article examines the new finale by Luciano Berio for Puccini's Turandot, commissioned by the Festival de Musica de Gran Canarias and prèmiered in 2002. This finale constitutes a priviledged point of view from which to revisit not only the composer's life-long engagement with musical works of the past, but also his theatrical aesthetics, thrown into sharp relief by the particular challenges of this endeavour. Berio's compositional process is carefully reconstructed, from his interventions on the libretto to his respectful yet creative use of the numerous sketches left behind by Puccini. Particular attention is then paid to Berio's choice of reminiscences from earlier scenes of the opera, as well as to his citations from Wagner's Tristan, Mahler's Seventh Symphony and Schönberg's Gurrelieder. A separate section is devoted to Berio's most original contribution: a long orchestral interlude at the moment when Calaf kisses Turandot. The article concludes with a detailed scrutiny of Berio's orchestration.

After the premiere of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960 at Venice's Teatro La Fenice in 1961, the critical press began a series of debates and redefinitions in response to what struck them most: how noisy the opera was. Although they agreed that Nono's work was unlikely to be popular with a broad public, many immediately recognized that Intolleranza could serve to recall the horrors of Fascism and the sounds of war – to offer, in other words, a warning call that history must not repeat itself. In a debate in the Communist newspaper L'Unità, the sonic hubbub was interpreted as a new kind of realism, formed in order to use memories of the Fascist regime as an allegory of contemporary oppression. The potency of the opera's noise was seen as in part due to Nono's incorporation of the auditory experiences of cinema and television, thus providing an insight into how traditionally elite genres such as theatre and opera could respond to the emergence and increasing hegemony of new mass entertainments. This article seeks to place Intolleranza within these fraught and conflicting discourses on mid-twentieth-century Italian modernity, and show that postwar reconstruction was as much about a concern for the past as it was with a coming to terms with the present.

This article takes its cue from the claim, made both in 1831 and in our own time, that Bellini's La sonnambula is a pastoral opera. Frustratingly difficult to define, the term ‘pastoral’ is at once both musical and literary, able to attach itself to everything from madrigal to oratorio to symphony across four hundred years. This article explores the various meanings of pastoral specific to the early nineteenth century and argues that its currency in music analysis today – as a topic, as a mode – is of little use when attention falls on the music of Italian opera. It concludes with an extended analysis of Bellini's handling of cadences in both La sonnambula and his other operas, insisting that it is here, in Italian composers’ repeated affirmation of the conventions of tonality, that the pleasures promised by the pastoral can be enjoyed today as much as they were two hundred years ago.

Lucretia's principal virtue is her undoing. Her chastity is vaunted as the guarantor of Collatinus's honour and standing, as the trigger for Tarquinius's lust, and its brutal loss as the symbol of the corruption of the Etruscans and thus the catalyst for Junius's ascent to power. She is established in a patriarchal system as a desexed woman, as innocent as a child, who can only exist as a chaste wife. When her virtue is polluted by rape, she has no choice but to kill herself in an attempt to restore her function as chaste wife.

Britten's opera encodes the naming of Lucretia in terms redolent of the oppressive ‘speech-acts’ of Peter Grimes. Through tonal and motivic association the projection of her innocence and the ‘stain’ introduced by her rape are worked into the opera's design at the level of long-range musical structure. Through analysis of the thematic implications of musical process in the work, this article opens to view the complex and at times conflicting moral hermeneutics of the work.

It seems a very long way from a dog howling in pain on François Magendie’s laboratory table in 1816 to Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s more-or-less novel accomplishment at the Paris Opéra two decades later: the tenor’s high C from the chest; the darkened voice; the sound of the future first heard in a performance of Guillaume Tell. Most obviously, the sounds of the dog were horrible and horrifying. When Magendie’s teacher, the great Xavier Bichat, tried the experiment some years earlier, his cleaning lady asked to move her chambers from near the scene because she could not bear the dog’s cries. Duprez’s sound was, arguably, beautiful; at least some people thought so, even if two doctors, driven to study the physiology of singing by the occasion, claimed that most people thought the voice was forced and false. Whether it was ‘pathological’ or not – I’d prefer, at worse, ‘pathogenic’ in the sense that so many unnatural new activities of the nineteenth century, like sitting long hours at a desk or riding on a train, were thought to make one ill – the tenor’s high C did, even its detractors admitted, ‘transport and dominate with its power’. It was musical and in the minds of many opened up radically new interpretative possibilities.

Although widely perceived as untraditional and unpatriotic, Sondheim’s 1991 Assassins is neither; it is in fact based securely on themes and strategies developed within the mainstream tradition of the American musical. In both respects, it shows particular affinity to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, a relationship that becomes especially evident when considering the latter’s basis in Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs. The author examines related background, dialogue and individual songs from each musical, the latter including ‘Pore Jud’, ‘Lonely Room’ and ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ from Oklahoma!, and ‘Everybody’s Got the Right’, ‘The Ballad of Booth’, ‘Gun Song’, ‘Unworthy of Your Love’, ‘Another National Anthem’ and the book depository scene from Assassins. Yet Assassins departs from the mainstream in one important respect: by failing to foreground adequately a sympathetic viewpoint (despite the addition of ‘Something Just Broke’), the show seems to place its dominant characters in opposition to the audience, who represent its real protagonist, the American people.

This study, intended as a seventy-fifth birthday tribute for Luciano Berio, examines the dramaturgy of his most radical theatrical work, Outis (1995–6). To a greater extent than any of his previous operatic works, Outis dispenses with linear narrative. Instead, it constructs an associative network of images – visual, verbal and musical – upon a cyclic frame. A recurrent source for these images is the story of Odysseus/Ulysses, the wanderer, and the many different texts that stem from that tradition. These include Ulysses by James Joyce – whose work has long been a source of inspiration for Berio. This essay suggests, however, that it is rather the techniques and aspirations of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake that provide the most telling analogue for what Berio here seeks to achieve.