In June 1867 Ismail Pasha, the new Viceroy of Egypt, arrived in Paris to represent his country at the Exposition universelle. The Egyptian pavilion, erected on a large corner of the Champs de Mars, featured a marvellous collection of architectural spaces that included a pharaoh's temple, a mediæval palace ‘richly decorated in the Arabic style’, and a modern-day bazaar showing all manner of merchants and artisans at work. If the temple, designed by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, was intended to display artefacts from the most remote corners of Egypt's history, other spaces transported spectators directly to the present, offering what one French commentator called ‘a living Egypt, a picturesque Egypt, the Egypt of Ismail Pasha’. An enormous panorama of the Isthmus of Suez, created by the Suez Canal Company with the help of M. Rubé, set designer from the Opéra, drew long queues of paying customers. Elsewhere visitors could gaze at authentic Egyptian peasants, or Bedouins on white dromedaries, all the races governed by the Viceroy ‘personified by individuals selected with care’, as the critic Edmond About put it. Most dazzling of all was the exhibit within the refabricated royal palace, where the Viceroy himself was the featured attraction: poised on a divan in a bedroom painted to look exactly like the place of his birth, he smoked a hookah and daily received guests from the best Parisian society. The whole sumptuous spectacle, About would conclude, ‘spoke to the eyes as well as to the mind. It expressed a political idea’.

Although there have been a few revivals of Verdi's Stiffelio since its first modern performance in 1968, including an important 1985 production at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the opera has received until now only limited attention. With two stagings by major theatres in 1993 (London's Covent Garden in January and New York's Metropolitan Opera in October), the situation has changed markedly. Those of us who know Stiffelio well have tried to temper our enthusiasm, avoiding excessive claims and acknowledging some of the work's dramaturgical problems. But it should come as no surprise that an opera exquisitely poised between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto is likely to be worth rehearing, particularly when the work was withdrawn from circulation by its author for reasons having to do primarily with censorship of its libretto (in which the wife of a Protestant minister commits adultery) rather than with intrinsic artistic merit.

For Adorno, the graphic reproduction of operatic performance means that the primary scene of audition has shifted as well: from the theatre – and the telic determinations towards which the natural history of the theatre tends – to the living room, where people gather to listen to what they no longer concern themselves to perform. The phonograph allows the vagaries and vulgarities of the visuality of (operatic) performance to be held off or back by an auditory experience whose condition of possibility and whose end is the illusory recovery of something literary – and thus essentially visual. What remains is to begin an attempt to see and hear what might be gained by moving through the opposition of the denigration of the recording in the discourse of performance and the denigration of performance in the discourse of ‘classical’ musicology. This attempt is made by way of the 1993 recording of Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, starring Jessye Norman as the opera's single character, Die Frau, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the baton of James Levine. It is an attempt that has required reading with and against Adorno – which is to say, listening to and for the sound that works in and against him.

‘Nothing is but what is not’. These words uttered by Macbeth after his bizarre first encounter with the three weird sisters could serve as a motto for the whole of Shakespeare's tragedy; for ‘the Scottish play’, as the superstitious have called it for centuries, is ruled by uncertainty, the questionable, the netherworld, where the only thing that is absolute is evil. It is about ambiguous forces that violate ife's natural order – witches, ghosts, a moving forest, an invisible dagger – what we call the macabre, what Freud called the uncanny, and what Verdi called ‘un genere fantastico’. Shakespeare constructs a world of binary opposites where boundaries, as Marjorie Garber has observed, are ‘continually transgressed, and marked by a series of taboo border crossings’.

Drawing on a wealth of new historical and musical documentation as well as the patriotic hymns of 1848, this essay places the Roman premiere of Attila at the forefront of revolutionary unrest. It also responds seriously to the claim that Verdi's Risorgimento agenda in his operas was not recognised in its own time.

Propped up in his bed, for all the world the quintessential fin-de-siècle invalid, Marcel Proust listened to the perplexing sound of music far away. He heard it from beyond the walls of his room, through a connecting tube: the famous théâtrophone, a permanent subscription telephone line that could connect Proust's apartment in the boulevard Haussmann to a number of Parisian theatres, opera houses and concert halls. The operatic scenes that succeeded in penetrating those walls were not scenes at all: they were disembodied voices, issuing instructions for the visual imagination. Those moments that progressed further — onto the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu — were of course even less corporeal: both invisible and soundless. In the passage from opera house to author to novel, who can say how much was lost? All that remains are words, hundreds of thousands of them, pouring noiselessly into a space where the music has sunk without trace; the fevered patient added reams more supplementary material (inflations, substitutions, emendations) as fast as the opera came in through the wall, papering — soundproofing — the room with words.

After years spent reflecting on Western imperial practices, critic Edward Said wrote that Giuseppe Verdi's Aida is ‘a kind of curatorial art’, a work

whose rigorous and unbending frame recall[s], with relentless mortuary logic, a precise historical moment and a specifically dated aesthetic form, an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience.

One of the final scenes of Farinelli, Il Castrato, dir. Gerard Corbiau (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994), shows a solar eclipse witnessed, eighteenth-century style, by members of the court of Philip V of Spain around 1740. Restless spectators squint through pieces of tinted glass prepared in the smoke of a small fire. It is a precious visual detail, a jot of history in this sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed film that offsets the melodrama to follow. Without warning, a wind, helped along by corny, time-lapse photography, ushers in a sea of Goya-like clouds. A murmur passes through the entourage; eerie blackness falls on the court.

This article focuses on two cinematic versions of the ‘Madame Butterfly’ tale. Produced near the beginning of the sound era, the 1932 Madame Butterfly struggles to co-opt Puccini's opera and thereby create a fully cinematic Butterfly. My Geisha, created three decades later, aspires to subvert Orientalist representation by reflecting back upon Puccini's and Hollywood's Butterflies with hip sophistication. Both films work simultaneously with and against the Butterfly canon in intriguing ways and both are shaped by prevailing American perceptions of race and gender. In investigating the relationship between these films and Puccini's opera, I raise broader issues of comparative genre analysis, focusing particularly on exotic representation on stage and screen. Does film, in its bid to project exotic realism in both sound and image, succeed in surpassing the experience of staged Orientalist opera?

The score of Kurt Weill's Zeitoper, Der Zar läßt sich photographieren (1928), is void at its centre: the musical and dramatic climax, the ‘Tango Angèle’, only exists as a gramophone recording, played on stage, while the orchestra falls silent. Just as the perennial themes of love and death are relentlessly updated in this farcical opera into their anti-metaphysical modern-day equivalents – sex and political assassination – so the music avails itself of modern media to bring across its McLuhanesque point: the medium is the message. The sound medium matters in two ways: first, the gramophone emphatically teleports the tango – a fashionable and sexually loaded dance – into the realm of opera; second, the recorded performance constitutes its exclusive musical reality. As if to underscore this point, parts and score of the ‘Tango Angèle’ were lost shortly after Weill produced the recording for the première: only the recording remained. This article reconstructs the nexus between popular music, modern sound media and operatic aesthetics in Weimar Germany: while the recording is an expression of Zeitoper's demand for radical up-to-dateness, the sound of the record, paradoxically, locks it forever in 1928. A relatively obscure work nowadays, Der Zar remains perhaps the most far-reaching response to the Opernkrise of the mid-1920s, reconfigured here as a crisis of musical writing.

The final performances of castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti in London in the late 1820s constitute a particularly rich vantage point from which to explore why the castrato was eventually forced from the operatic stage. What does this historical moment have to say about shifts in vocal style and audience expectations? Why did the question of castration become so loaded under ‘Romantic’ conditions? This article constructs a speculative theoretical framework by bringing together recent insights in the history of vocal science, histories of gender and subjectivity, the history of listening and opera studies. Velluti's hostile reception in the London press is surveyed in detail, alongside a historically informed examination of his vocal manner. Evidence suggests that the castrato quickly became an unthinkable figure, falling from grace in the wake of embodied conceptions of vocality and ‘natural’ expression, newly dominant ideas that projected him beyond prevailing notions of human nature.

‘Quoi du reste’, to paraphrase Derrida on Hegel in Glas, ‘ici, maintenant, d'une Carmen?’ What's left of Carmen here and now? Aside from its intrinsic interest, the question seems worth asking in light of a bias that recent treatments of opera – particularly those influenced by poststrucuralist theory – seem to betray. The most prominent, Catherine Clément's Opera, or The Undoing of Women, Michel Poizat's The Angel's Cry and Jeremy Tambling's Opera, Ideology, and Film, regard opera as an institution rather than as a body of texts. Each of the authors, to my mind at least, allows a prior structure or structures – the systemic presence of male domination and its construction of women in society, a quasi-Lacanian understanding of unconscious fantasy, the bourgeois construction of operatic experience – to constrain what operas, and opera, can mean. They thus produce what are in effect reception studies or analyses of the audience, which is perhaps why they operate at some distance from the detail of the texts, musical or verbal, of the operas they analyse.

An assumption widespread in twentieth-century analyses of Mozart's operas is that ‘high-level tonal planning’ – that is, a network of relationships among the tonic keys of separate numbers of an opera – contributes significantly to structure and meaning. A relatively recent example can be found in writings by Daniel Heartz and Tim Carter on Act I of Le nozze di Figaro, which concludes in C major with Figaro's aria ‘Non più andrai’.

It is a commonplace that the poetry best suited to an operatic libretto has fewer pretensions, and more transparency in the range of interpretations that can be placed upon it, than ‘literary’ poetry. Otherwise, it will scarcely bear the weight of the music, much less contribute to the great emotional climaxes that justify opera for many listeners in the first place. And some might mistrust a libretto that is too ‘literary’ or too complicated, for metaphysical and other subtleties are not easily projected across the footlights. No one was more acutely aware of this ‘unliterary’ relationship between words and music in opera than W. H. Auden. Writing in 1948, he stated: ‘Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry.’

Towards the end of a life spent meditating on music, philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote that ‘music is the silence of words, just as poetry is the silence of prose’. With this lapidary remark, he bottled up essences of French symbolist musical doctrines, their elevation of music above language, their impulse to urge poetry towards the condition of musical sound, and their sense that music is ineffable. ‘And the ineffable’, Jankélévitch wrote, ‘cannot be expressed because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it’. Denying that music was inarticulate – that what it invokes is indicible, unable to be said – he saw instead a hall of sonorous mirrors, saturated with implications and suggestions diat draw the mind on to a vanishing point that can never be reached. Music has the perfect apparitional quality that others would deem characteristic of symbols per se, as that which materialises in the distance and cannot be caught when we journey towards its meaning: it will always recede, leaving us with our glowing trail of assumed connotations. Thus symbolist literature, with its rhapsodies to musical mystery, dealt profitably in poetic images of suggestive but unimaginable sound. Such sounds have their most famous incarnation in the melody of Mallarmé's faun's flute, repository for all that cannot be thought, said or remembered. Mallarme created a poetic symbol, verbally couched, which as symbol per se borrows the ineffability of music. It is a mirage, which we approach and lose even as we imagine its meaning. By choosing a musical object (a flute melody), Mallarmé drew doubly on music's apparitional quality — as if to say: even if the impossible could occur and we were to grasp the symbol and its single luminous meaning, hearing what the flute plays, that sound, like all music, would merely send us wandering onwards again.

It is well known that mounting large-scale productions at the Paris Opéra during the 1830s and 1840s was a highly collaborative effort. The nature of so-called ‘grand opera’ demanded that composer, librettist and stage designer work closely together for the sake of a creation larger than the sum of its parts. Above them loomed the directeur, who laboured to ensure that his creative team had the means to produce their æuvres both in materials and human resources, and to guarantee that the Opéra made a profit from the finished products. A fifth collaborator, the singer, is not often cited as such in the literature, but in many ways wielded the greatest power in the creation of Parisian operatic works. By the 1830s, European singers had achieved professional status, and a singing artist of high calibre could find the Opéra a perfect venue in which to flex muscle. During the Opera's ‘golden age’, a bourgeois public, tired of political upheaval and economic uncertainty, found escape in the new ‘romanticè fare of the Opéra, and elevated the singers who strode its boards to what today is called ‘star status’. The Opéra became a temple and its singers, adored gods and goddesses. A beloved singer could – and did – ensure an opera's success simply by appearing in it, or doom it to failure by refusing to appear. With such power a singer could easily hold a new opera for ransom, forcing the composer and librettist to revise, excise or otherwise alter the work to some self-serving end. To secure a place for their stage works at the Opéra and to guarantee a public triumph, therefore, it is not surprising that composers such as Donizetti, and especially Meyerbeer, the leading composer of French grand opera, composed or revised their operas for particular singers.

The historiography of Italian opera is particularly well suited to illustrate some problems in the general field of music history and musicology. On the one hand, there is little doubt that Italian opera belongs to the canon, not to say the museum, of learned western music; indeed, today's opera houses surpass concert halls in projecting the ‘museum character’ in which musical tradition seems ‘frozen’. On the other hand, it is also true that only in recent years has international musicology accepted Italian opera as unquestionably deserving of attention. The reasons for this delay are clear enough. Some were easily overcome, connected to the very history of our discipline: since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the musical language of Italian operatic composers diverged from the mainstream Austro-German tradition; the dramaturgy of Italian opera was difficult to understand in a cultural context moulded by Wagnerian theory and practice (in part also by Shakespeare, Schiller, etc.). Other factors, however, are more deeply embedded, and continue to have an effect even in intellectual conditions very different from those of traditional musicology. These include: the manner in which extra-artistic factors determine the operatic work; the various creative competencies that take part in operatic production; the considerable importance accorded to performers, particularly singers; the possibility that parts of an opera may be moved from one work to another, or from one author to another; the fact that in die history of Italian operatic conventions, shared codes and repetition of formulas often prevailed over the search for novelty.

Early twentieth-century Paris saw an embarrassment of half-naked women dancing with seven veils and papier-mâché heads: ‘Salomania’ had gripped the capital. By 1913 Salome was a regular feature on music hall show-bills, besides the balletic and operatic stage. This study focuses on three variations on Salome's notorious Dance of the Seven Veils, performed by Loie Fuller (1907), Ida Rubinstein (1909) and Maud Allan (from 1906) on music by Florent Schmitt, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss respectively. Such an investigation provides a peculiar line through the cultural and aesthetic determinants of early twentieth-century theatrical dance. In this context music takes on new narrative significance, offering ways of configuring the Dance above and beyond its mere visual surface.

In February of 1929, the German National Party raised a matter of pressing concern in the Prussian State Parliament: the party requested a parliamentary investigation into ‘the transformation of the State Opera at the Platz der Deutschen Republik (popularly known as the Kroll Opera) into a laboratory for Bolshevik art experiments’. The crisis had become particularly acute in the wake of the Kroll Opera's production of Der fliegende Holländer, which had been premièred a few weeks earlier on 15 January 1929 and which, according to the party, brazenly ‘mocked the spirit of Richard Wagner’. For anyone who has worked on Wagner or, for that matter, simply attended performances of his works, the sentiments come as no surprise. Indeed, the fact that they arose in the wake of Otto Klemperer's and Jiirgen Fehling's famously abstract production (with sets by Ewald Dülberg) make them almost predictable. Fehling and Klemperer incurred the wrath of the National Party for producing what I want to call a ‘critical reading’ of Wagner's text. In Klemperer's and Fehling's reading, the Dutchman's ship may be anchored in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not permanently mired there. And that is precisely what enraged the National Party, just as years later Patrice Chereau would incur the wrath of countless like-minded Wagnerians, whose recourse to the official channels of government for the redress of their aesthetic grievances was, however, no longer so direct.