Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In the New York Times of 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that. I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?

This essay explores the artistry of the nineteenth-century Italian singer Giuditta Pasta within the broad context of an ‘artwork’ (Goehr) and ideas of ‘presence’ (Gumbrecht). Pasta was the acknowledged diva del mondo during the 1820s, famed not only for an extraordinary if flawed voice, but also for the physicality of her performance modes. Her innovative practices contributed to the development and reconceptualisation of opera’s dramatic potential on the early Romantic stage. Making her reputation in roles such as Medea (Mayr) and Semiramide (Rossini), Pasta later inspired the composition of three of the most striking operatic heroines of the period: Amina in La sonnambula (Bellini) and the title-roles of Norma (again Bellini) and Anna Bolena (Donizetti). Focusing on her performance as Norma, I consider a polemical debate in 1835 in the Italian periodicals Il Figaro and Il corriere delle dame that illuminates aspects of Pasta’s gestural style in relation to those of her younger colleague and rival, Maria Malibran, and ultimately raises questions about the ‘authenticity’ of performance in the emerging economy of the operatic marketplace.

The tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez is today remembered for his invention of the ‘C from the chest’, first presented to Parisian audiences in 1837. This has retrospectively been mythologised as the origin-point of modern tenor technique, though recent research has thrown the exact nature and significance of Duprez’s achievement into doubt. Nonetheless, one context in which Duprez was understood as revolutionary was in the scientific work of two Lyonnais doctors, Paul Diday and Joseph Pétrequin, whose 1840 essay ‘Mémoire sur une nouvelle espèce de voix chantée’ offers a unique perspective not only on what Duprez sounded like, but also on developments in the understanding of the physiological phenomenon of singing itself. Placing this work in the context of earlier medical writings on the voice, and of the authors’ subsequent debate with the singing teacher Manuel Garcia Jr., suggests that the late 1830s were a period of flux in the history of the understanding of singing, one in which long-held certainties were being questioned. Duprez thus arrived in Paris at a unique moment. The changing conceptual background shaped the understanding of Duprez’s voice even as the tenor was used by the doctors as a ‘living experiment’ to reach conclusions about the function of the voice generally.

The 1859 revival of Gluck's Orphée, reworked for the occasion by Berlioz, was one of a series of operatic résurrections staged at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris during the Second Empire. Starring Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) in the title role, it was the first major revival of Gluck's opera since the 1820s and attracted considerable attention in the press and elsewhere. Critics and others were fascinated by Viardot's dramatic presence on stage, producing images (both in pictures and words) of her Orpheus that are often striking in their awareness of time past. Indeed, ambivalence about the past and its artefacts might be said to haunt the reception of a work – and performer – many designated as the epitome of the classique. Contextualising this Orphée within the changing meanings of the term classique in the mid-nineteenth century, the article focuses on a particularly revealing moment in the transition between an operatic culture based on new works and one ever more reliant on revivals of acknowledged masterpieces.

A natural starting point for a critical reading of Verdi's Rigoletto might be the protagonist's ‘Cortigiani, vil razza dannata’ in Act II: an utterance around which much of the emotional intensity of the opera is centred. Rigoletto's outburst can be discussed to great advantage in terms of current musicological fashion, as it alters conventional forms in fascinating and provocative ways, and to great dramatic effect. Yet such an approach presupposes that the key to understanding operas lies in their Great Moments – those passages of intense musical expression that tend to be quoted in movies and television commercials. Of course these moments are a crucial aspect of our delight, and can be a rich source for interpretative ventures. But there is more to opera: various levels of meaning invite our exploration and enjoyment; hermeneutic ‘secrets’ lurk behind seemingly ‘trivial or irrelevant’ passages, and can lead to new perspectives on familiar works.

From Flaubert to Richard Strauss, male artists in late nineteenth-century Europe were fascinated by the figure of Salome. This fascination, indeed, amounted to a genuine craze. One representation sparked another: J.-K. Huysmans fantasised about paintings by Gustave Moreau; Oscar Wilde expanded on Huysmans; Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Wilde. Fine editions of Wilde's Salome with Beardsley's illustrations remained cult objects well into the twentieth century. In general, the Salome craze, like the science and medicine of its day, sought to legitimise new forms of control by men over the bodies and behaviour of women. The present paper revisits this well-known episode in cultural history with two distinct aims in mind, one interpretative, the other methodological. The interpretative aim is to offer a feminist approach to the fin-de-sièclecompulsion to retell the Salome story with lavish attention to misogynist imagery - those quivering female bodies and gory male heads. The methodological aim is to find a meeting ground for literary criticism and musicology as both disciplines aspire to become vehicles of a more comprehensive criticism of culture.

The traditional story reception historians tell of Wagner in France is really a centralist story about Wagner in Paris. This article reverses the direction in light of the fact that seven French regional towns presented Lohengrin on publicly funded stages in 1891 before the directors of the Paris Opéra dared follow suit. Since the work's ‘job’ in the regions was to prove to Paris that Wagner stagings did not necessarily bring rioting with them, the focus is more on previews than on the usual (and logical) reception material of reviews. In addition, via its multi-centre approach and a sideways glance at a parallel phenomenon – the reception of Victorien Sardou's Thermidor – the article integrates reception study into a broader-based cultural history rather than treating it in potentially more limited fashion as an approach in and of itself.

This article addresses the long-controversial dating of the cadenza with flute in the mad scene of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. New manuscript sources indicate that the famous cadenza dates not from the first half of the nineteenth century, as musicologists had assumed, but from 1889, when it was added to the opera for Nelly Melba’s performances at the Palais Garnier, Paris. The cadenza was most likely composed by Melba’s teacher Mathilde Marchesi to showcase the light voice and virtuosic technique of her student. Once introduced, the cadenza with flute decisively altered the impact and reception of the mad scene. In the first two decades after the opera’s 1835 première, the mad scene had not been particularly popular, perhaps because it contravened contemporary Italian taste for mad scenes featuring docile, virginal heroines. By the fin de siècle, however, the mad scene was regarded as the highlight of the opera, the excesses of the cadenza resonating with the new vogue for violent and hysterical heroines on the operatic stage.

Rossini's comic finales consistently foreground the propensity of noise to overwhelm the senses, to both signify and induce madness or confusion, and to transform the bodies on stage into noisy automata. Such mechanical noisiness may appear ‘naturally’ comic and dramatically appropriate – and therefore hardly in need of comment. But the din of Rossini's operas was a point of contention for critics; even Stendhal, normally the composer's staunch advocate, displays a kind of ambivalence about the sheer physical force of Rossini's music. This ambivalence mirrors a larger division between fans and critics, a bifurcation that produced an immense volume of printed matter as Rossini's music became a nexus for debates about the place of reason versus sensation and the troubled relationship between physiological and moral stimulation. These tensions are especially apparent in two operas from 1817, La Cenerentola and La gazza ladra. Both works tend to subvert the conventions of sentimental comedy by ironizing sentimental display, mocking tender feelings or, most tellingly, juxtaposing tears with violent cacophony – tactics that did not always sit well with critics. Using Stendhal's Vie de Rossini as a focal point, this essay situates Rossinian noise and the controversy surrounding it in the context of pervasive concern about the sensible body in a post-sentimental era. Because it seemed to act on the body in such powerful ways, noise very easily allowed commentators to invoke a whole panoply of overlapping discourses – of politics, sentimentality and sensibility, morality, medicine and physiology – in their attempts to account for Rossini's popularity.

‘Pur sempre su le nozze canzoneggiando vai.’ Arnalta's remark to Poppea (L'incoronazione di Poppea, Act II scene 10), occasioned by Poppea's lyrical exultation over the death of Seneca, provokes the closing sententia of Edward T. Cone's recent exploration of the ambiguous world of opera and its inhabitants. Translating the nurse's comment as ‘You're forever going around singing songs about your wedding’, Cone concludes that ‘this is just what characters in opera do: they go around singing songs all the time’.

With the exception of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Soviet opera in the 1930s has been relatively little studied. Yet this was an era in which opera was vigorously promoted as an ideal Soviet form after more than a decade of criticism from radical proletarian groups. This article considers three main aspects of Soviet operatic culture in the 1930s. First, opera's emotional power was valued as a way to mobilise mass opinion and the opera house was increasingly seen as a highly ideological site. Second, whilst most of the work in founding a Soviet repertory was carried out at Leningrad's Malyi Opera Theatre, Moscow became increasingly involved as the decade continued. Third, Soviet opera was highly dependent on adaptations of socialist realist novels. This phenomenon of ‘transposition’ is seen here as an attempt to invest scores with an unimpeachable political message. Moreover, transposition was an ideal method of regulating ambiguous literary texts by condensing their cardinal features in dramatic form. Although the story of Soviet opera was largely one of failure, its study sheds important light not only on the development of the Russian operatic tradition, but also on the dynamics of Stalinist culture.

It has often been suggested that a renewed fascination with Verdi’s Don Carlos coincided with the advent of Regieoper (or radically revisionist staging) in Germany over the past few decades. However, Don Carlos already counted among the most frequently revived operas in German-language theatres during the first half of the twentieth century. This article argues that neglect of this rich performance tradition is linked both to a German-centred narrative of the history of operatic production, which constructs the 1930s and 1940s as a gap in the development of ‘avant-garde’ direction, and to an over-emphasis on the visual side in recent academic discourse on operatic staging. These attitudes are challenged by a close look at selected German productions of Don Carlos from the 1920s to 1940s. Treatment of the opera's most difficult scenes – the mystical elements of the auto-da-fé finale and the dénouement – reveals striking continuities between the Weimar and Nazi eras, as well as conceptual affinities to some of the most acclaimed recent stagings. These findings call for a more historically grounded approach to operatic production.

Shortly following the premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, performances of this opera often featured a strange substitution: sopranos performed the rondò-finale from one of Donizetti's earlier operas, Fausta, in place of the now-famous mad scene aria. At least four productions were affected and this alteration was performed by some of the most famous sopranos of the time. This article explores the brief tradition of altering the mad scene by looking carefully at its origin and subsequent appearances, discussing its effects on the experience of hearing Lucia di Lammermoor as a whole, and investigating the possible reasons why this substitution lasted only for a brief period of time.

The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth equivocate between the demons of random malevolence and ordinary (if exceptionally nasty) old women; and both King James I, whose book on witchcraft may have influenced Shakespeare, and A. W. Schlegel, whose essay on Macbeth certainly influenced Verdi, also stress this ambiguity. In his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Verdi uses certain musical patterns associated with the witches; and like the witches, who sound sometimes tame and frivolous, sometimes like incarnations of supernatural evil, Lady Macbeth hovers insecurely between roles: she is a hybrid of ambitious wife and agent of hell.

Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life

Until recently, women's biography and feminist interpretation of texts have travelled along separate paths, the exhaustive documentation required by biography often seeming to overwhelm efforts at interpretation, dictating that the genre remain essentially conservative and anti-theoretical. This is unfortunate, if only because it is in the writing of women's lives that biography and theory may need each other most. The women we examine are sometimes minor figures, ordinary people most interesting when seen as emblematic of a broader context; and of course they rarely lived according to modern feminist principles: what does one make of a talented woman who devoted her life more to caring for men than for herself? Such situations present conundrums that simultaneously resist and require the solace of theory.

Ever since the cultural watershed of the 1960s, predictions of the imminent demise of classical music, especially in America, have been rife. Its audience, undermined by the precipitate decline in public music education and decimated by defections to pop (respectable for aspiring intellectuals from the moment rock became British), was assumed to be aging, indeed dying off. Whether as a symptom of this process or as one of its causes, media coverage for classical music steadily and drastically diminished over the 1970s and 1980s (coinciding with the rise of serious pop coverage), as did the number of radio stations that offered it.

France receives little attention in narratives about the sublime in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This article will argue that the cataclysmic tableau at the climax of Cherubini's first opera for the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris, Lodoïska (1791), can be understood as part of a coherent and distinctively French discourse of the sublime, rooted in revolutionary experience that can be understood in relation to wider European trends.

Permeable boundaries form the musical ‘thread’ of Don Giovanni– a compositional strategy fundamental to the opera's character. Customary cadential borders get omitted or blurred; material heard early in the opera prominently returns; and all the accompanied recitative-set piece pairs act as ‘composite pieces’ – scenes in which musical material as well as dramatic function bind the accompanied recitative and aria or duet together and fuse them into one entity. ‘Permeability’ is heightened in Don Giovanni due to the supernatural elements of the plot, the title character's refusal to to submit to society's strictures, Gluck's association with the story, and Mozart's propensity for musical one-upmanship. Yet it is by no means unique to that work. Studying the relationships between accompanied recitatives and adjacent numbers reveals a ‘middleground’ of musical continuity that lies between long-range tonal plans and the motivic and tonal unities of individual numbers. Hence these passages challenge, as well as complement, some of our underlying assumptions about operatic form, and urge us to expand our definition of a ‘number’.

By all accounts the premiere of Puccini's Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera on 11 February 1907 was a triumphant success, with the presence of the composer adding special lustre to the brilliant performance of a distinguished cast. Amidst the general acclamation, however, a foreign visitor named Jihei Hashiguchi raised a dissenting voice in a letter to a local newspaper:

I can say nothing for the music of Madama butterfly. Western music is too complicated for a Japanese. Even Caruso' celebrated singing does not appeal very much more than the barking of a dog in faraway woods.

It seems fair to say that we are enmeshed in an Age of Reconstruction. Whatever groans the shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ may elicit from musicians and musicologists, the film industry's leap for the bandwagon is proof of the principle that Period Pieces Pay. Of the recent spate of feature films set in the eighteenth century, one in particular has marketed itself through its reconstructive credentials. The technologies that allow us to remodel our bodies, and revive old recordings on compact disc, also allowed the makers of Farinelli, Il Castrato to reach back and breathe new life into the voice of the long-dead castrati.