Contemporary press reports of two important stagings of grand opéra in Bologna – Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (as Rodolfo di Sterlinga) in 1840 and the Italian première of Verdi’s Don Carlos in 1867 – shed light on some intriguing details of the beginning and culmination of the genre’s reception in Italy. Through the prism of local civic pride, they illuminate not only the national standing of the composers in question and the state of regional operatic production, but also the political issues of the day as they impinged – frequently in unexpected ways – on then-current debates about musical style and genre. In particular, when read alongside the pronouncements of Angelo Mariani (conductor in Bologna from 1860) and, above all, Verdi, they reveal that the role, provenance and relative status of the works’ visual aspect (apparently so integral to the development of grand opéra) figured surprisingly importantly in the complicated and often contradictory discourse on unity in the nation at large.

Like the modern romance novel or murder mystery, late-eighteenth-century opera buffa is a thoroughly conventional genre. Standard plot devices, stock characters and vocal types, and particular kinds of musical number appear again and again, and any reasonably comprehensive understanding of the genre requires that we recognise these familiar patterns in text and music. This is especially important in the case of Mozart, who lies at the heart of our interest in the repertory: while his operas are routinely praised for their uniqueness and originality, we can evaluate these claims only by addressing the formal and stylistic procedures that served as his immediate context.

‘If forced to choose, I would prefer Monsieur Zola widi wings than Monsieur Zola on all fours.’ So groused Anatole France about the apparent new turn in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle taken by die publication of Le Rêve in 1888. Because the gritty surface of La Bête humaine (1890) followed closely upon the delicate folds of Le Rêve, France's critical quandary was soon resolved. Yet ever since the publication of Le Rêve even critics much more congenial to Zola than France have remarked upon the unusual place in die Rougon-Macquart of this tale about a virginal heroine set adrift in the small provincial town of Beaumont.

Conservative writers in seventeenth-century France tended to agree that the morals of women were degenerating, though they disagreed as to whether the cause was the excessive strictness or the leniency of husbands. We would perhaps characterise the change more as a newly found sense of freedom and self-confidence that allowed women, however tentatively, to contest the double standard of the age. The new morality was seen in fashions that bared progressively more of the neck, shoulders, breasts, ankles and legs, revealing new erotic frontiers; in a relaxation of the taboo against female swearing and coarse language; in an epidemic of female gambling; and in scandalous reports of women's over-indulgences in the sensual pleasures of food, drink, nicotine and sex.

Suzanne Cusick has recently argued that the musical processes of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna purge Ariadne of passion and desire in order symbolically to make her a good wife. Written for the 1608 marriage of Francesco Gonzaga to Margherita de Savoy, the lament, according to Cusick, reflects Renaissance marriage and gender ideologies that were determined to silence women and put them in their place. Ariadne has dared to choose her own mate and therefore must suffer. Her fate is dramatised by her uncharacteristically long lament, which enacts the transformation women experienced as they gave up their own desires to the constraining institution of marriage. Cusick's argument is in line with recent critical tendencies to read early modern culture in terms of the opposition between passive female silence and active male desire.

Fidelio has always posed difficulties for operatic interpreters. On the literal level it is straight-forward enough, much more so, certainly, than its great Mozartian predecessor, The Magic Flute. All three of its versions tell the unproblematical story of a wife, Leonore, who disguises herself as a boy in order to rescue her unjustly imprisoned husband. In the prison she obtains a job with the jailor, Rocco, whose daughter proceeds to fall in love with her (in spite of being promised to the prison gatekeeper). The central action is triggered when the governor of the prison, Don Pizarro, learns that the Minister (representing the central monarchy) has set out to visit the prison, suspecting that it harbours several ‘victims of arbitrary force’. Pizarro is terrified that the Minister will discover one particular inmate, Florestan, who had threatened to expose his crimes and whom the Minister believes to be dead (we, of course, have no difficulty recognising him as Leonore's husband). Pizarro thus resolves to murder Florestan. In the second act Rocco and Leonore precede Pizarro into the dungeon to dig the victim's grave, and there Leonore ascertains that the condemned prisoner is indeed her husband. When Pizarro descends for the kill, he is confronted by Leonore, who tells him he will have to kill Florestan's wife first, and pulls a gun on him. At exactly this moment, a trumpet call announces the Minister, whose arrival dissolves the dramatic situation with breathtaking suddenness: Florestan is rescued, husband and wife are reunited, and Pizarro's tyranny is broken. In the final scene all the prisoners are liberated, Pizarro is banished (presumably to face imprisonment himself), and the Minister, learning that his friend Florestan has been saved by his wife's courage, invites her to unlock his chains. The opera ends with a choral tribute to wifely devotion.

When we young Austrian Jewish artists grew up, our self-esteem suffered very much from the pressure of certain circumstances. It was the time when Richard Wagner's work started its victorious career, and the success of his music and poems was followed by an infiltration of his Weltanschauung, of his philosophy. You were no true Wagnerian if you did not believe in his philosophy, in the ideas of Erlösung durch Liebe, salvation by love; you were not a true Wagnerian if you did not believe in Deutschtum, in Teutonism; and you could not be a true Wagnerian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, ‘Judaism in Music’. … You have to understand the effect of such statements on young artists.

This article argues that the early nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of operatic aesthetics in France: fuelled by post-Revolutionary notions about theatre's importance in processes of nation-building, the Opéra sought to strengthen its reputation as the ‘Académie that unites all the arts’. The intertwinement of this aesthetic and political aim is conspicuous in the production of Jean-François Le Sueur's Ossian ou les bardes (1804), loosely based on James Macpherson's Ossianic ‘translations’. The work's meticulous coordination of the arts sought to bring third-century bardic society back to life and make audiences feel part of this long-forgotten, supposedly ‘historical’ and French, past. Thus, this article points to the Opéra's intensifying interaction with nationalism and genealogical historiography around 1800 as it sought to define its role as a national theatre. It also challenges the common scholarly notion that the Opéra's productions served primarily to aggrandise Napoleon.

Between the initial conception in 1848 of a project on the Siegfried legend comprising a single work, Siegfried’s Tod, and its subsequent expansion in 1851 with the addition of Der junge Siegfried as a ‘prequel’ about the hero’s early life, Richard Wagner turned against Giacomo Meyerbeer in public denunciations in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (1850) and Oper und Drama (1850–1). Changes in the treatment of the Mime–Siegfried relationship between 1848 and 1851 as well as similarities between Wagner’s characterisations of Meyerbeer and his portrayal of Mime in the 1851 sources suggest that Wagner’s animosity towards his former mentor informed a new conception of the dwarf. The troubled Mime–Siegfried relationship that crystallised in 1851 allowed Wagner to give symbolic, aesthetic form not only to his criticisms of Meyerbeer as man and artist but also to his own new creative path. That Meyerbeer by 1851 had come to represent to Wagner the personal and artistic deficiencies of all Jews necessarily also means that Wagner’s projection of Meyerbeer into Mime in Der junge Siegfried carried with it a more generally anti-Jewish message, as is frequently asserted in the literature.

Rimsky-Korsakov dwelled at length on his place in music history. His musings informed his creative processes, notably his handling of operatic time and space relationships. His stage works rely on structural and syntactic reflection rather than patterns of cause and effect for cohesion. This article examines the narrative contents of Sadko (1896), a setting of the merchant tale ‘‘Sadko the Rich Trader” that follows the contours of the Orpheus parable. The analysis, focusing on the mirror relationships between Russians and non-Russians, indicates that the composer conceived the score as a parody of nationalism and orientalism. In depicting self as other and other as self, Sadko also demonstrates the inherent universality, rather than the inherent Russianness, of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music.

While the political impact of Italy's 1936 Ethiopian invasion has long been recognized, its cultural history has only recently come under scrutiny. This paper investigates one musical legacy of Mussolini's colonial project by means of a case study of Alfredo Casella's Il deserto tentato (The Attempted Desert, 1937). Performed on the first anniversary of the Empire's founding and dedicated to ‘Mussolini, fondatore dell'Impero’, the work depicts the arrival of a group of Italian airmen in Ethiopia and their welcome by the indigenous peoples. I set the text against contemporary propaganda such as speeches, visual imagery and popular song, exploring tropes central to fascist imperialist rhetoric: virility, civiltà and aeronautical prowess. The opera's integration of historical musical references into a modern musical setting not only represents the theme of endowing the Ethiopian people with a history, in this case embodied by the Italian musical past, but also exemplifies a contemporary desire to make the past present in everyday fascist life. The historiography of Casella's work, what is more, characterized by the same ‘missing debate’ as the broader discussion of Italian colonialism, raises questions about the effects of Italy's ‘memory wars’ on accounts of twentieth-century Italian music history.

In the age of AIDS, few would be surprised to find sexuality connected to suffering and disease; in the age of syphilis – from its arrival in Europe in 1492 to today, when it is on the rise once again – the connection is equally strong, though many of us have forgotten this. The brief respite offered by the discovery of a cure for syphilis (through the use of penicillin) in the 1940s ended with the appearance of AIDS. Over the last five hundred years, the Christian reading of syphilis as the scourge of God directed against the sexually sinful has merged with societal sexual anxieties about the effects of syphilis on the general social fabric and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the family in particular. The perhaps surprising focus of this discussion (by a literary theorist and a physician) of suffering and social decline in the context of sexually transmitted disease is Richard Wagner's last music drama, Parsifal, finally completed in 1882 and called a Bühnenweihfestspiel (a stage consecration festival play) for his Bayreuth theatre.

It is becoming increasingly usual to think of music of the Classical period as conveying its meanings at least in part through a rhetoric of topoi. According to this model, such elements as rhythm, texture and melody evoke both musical and extra-musical ‘echoes’. Woven into the structure of the music, these echoes form a collage of connotations from which meaning can be inferred. As a genre of its time, opera buffa is in no way exempt from this ‘combinatorial’ process, or its corollary system of associative meaning. Indeed, every level of meaning in opera buffa arises from the combination and recombination of textual, musical and dramatic elements. For example, the characters, plot types and comic riffs of opera buffa are often drawn from the commedia dell'arte; we also find stories from folk tales and fairy tales, and from fashionable novels and spoken theatre. We find gestures and scenes from opera seria and tragédie lyrique, as well as quotations from and allusions to other opere buffe. The music also ranges widely in stylistic origin and reference, moving from low comedy to elevated coloratura, from bland neutrality to affecting sentimentality, and from extended expressions of a single emotion to lightning changes in Affekt. Thus the rhetoric of topoi characteristic of instrumental music of the period is included within a structure of reference and resonance that invokes textual and dramatic ‘sources’ as well as musical ones. Opera buffa is, in other words, a fundamentally intertextual genre.

This essay examines the attributes of some typical opere buffe by Vincenzo Fioravanti, Nicola De Giosa, and Errico Petrella that may count as particularly Neapolitan. Contextualizing these ‘Neapolitan’ elements – especially the ‘Neapolitan characters’ like Pulcinella, and the use of local dialect and spoken dialogue – demonstrates their function in the comedy of these works, which rests on the multifarious, complex and yet direct connections between theatrical events and the real world surrounding them.

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’.

There are few opportunities to compare differing readings by Mozart of the same text. Except in his sacred music, Mozart rarely had occasion to return to texts that he had already set, and relatively few sketches, drafts or heavily revised autographs offer extended alternative versions of other settings. Although most of the surviving sketches and drafts for operas and other vocal pieces do not diverge significantly from the final versions, some of these preliminary materials reveal Mozart reconsidering a text-setting, and thus offer important glimpses into his dramatic imagination. Such is the case with a draft for ‘Da schlägt die Abschiedsstunde’, the first aria of Der Schauspieldirektor. The draft and final autograph present related yet significantly different conceptions of the same number, enabling us to examine Mozart's revision of one particular aria, and his reconciliation of an individual solo number with the larger dramatic argument of the opera.

Il crociato in Egitto was the last in a series of Italian operas written by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1817 and 1824. Although his Emma di Resburgo and Margherita d'Anjou had been successful in Venice and Milan, it was Il crociato that put Meyerbeer in the first rank of internationally renowned composers of Italian opera. The work's contemporary popularity makes it an important element in the history of early nineteenth-century Italian opera, and the abundant source material that survives for the opera permits a reconstruction of its early history. Furthermore, the publication in facsimile of a copyist's score from the première at La Fenice and the recording of the work by Opera Rara have encouraged a modern revaluation.

This article aims to illuminate the meanings and aesthetic effects generated by scenes of staged opera in video games. It also explores the images of opera transmitted to the huge audiences that games address. Three dimensions of the opera-game encounter are discussed. First, Tosca in Hitman: Blood Money and The Beggar’s Opera in Assassin’s Creed III are used to examine the treatment of violence and the discourse of popular appeal in games and opera. Second, the arias sung by women in Final Fantasy VI and Parasite Eve illustrate how a melodramatic mode of expression represents a confluence of the aesthetic priorities of the two media. Finally, The Beast Within’s meditation on Wagner reveals how opera sequences aim to engage players by conjuring phantasmagorias through a unifying and enrapturing spectacle.

Mozart's ability to craft music closely suited to his singers took a remarkable turn with the soprano Adriana Ferrarese del Bene. This singer's career, from sporadic prominence in serious opera to notoriety as a prima donna in Viennese opera buffa in the late 1780s, was capped by her association with Mozart and Da Ponte in Così fan tutte (1790). Certain reports notwithstanding, Ferrarese seems to have been far from a great artist; her successes were modest and she never before or after attained the artistic triumph she achieved in the Mozart–Da Ponte opera. Reviews and contemporary comments suggest that her comic and dramatic skills were uneven, her vocal equipment impressive but incomplete and her performances less than inspiring. Mozart's achievement was to transform a particular set of vocal skills and limitations into something of exceptional artistic value; Fiordiligi was fashioned out of the temperament, vocal style and dramatic abilities – and limitations – of his soprano.