When Verdi's Don Carlo made its debut at La Scala in March 1868, it was hardly the latest operatic news; since its 1867 premiere at the Paris Opéra, it had been widely performed and written about. One aspect of the debates in the Milanese and the Italian press, however, deserves special attention: the depiction of the opera as a ‘monument’. Although the work's astonishing length (compared to that of most of Verdi's previous operas) and the composer's increasing prestige as a national figure might both have been reasons for this impression of monumentality, there were clearly others. The article explores some of these reasons in relation to post-Unification urban renewal, the increasing success of la musica dell'avvenire and the beginning of a slow rediscovery of ‘ancient’ musical works. It argues that Don Carlo was thought of as a monument primarily because it was perceived as standing between the past and the future, and as such was the epitome of contemporary attitudes towards these temporal categories.

Music is frequently overlooked by scholars of adaptation, who concentrate primarily on questions of literary and visual transformation. Undertaking a close reading of a pivotal scene in Joe Wright’s Atonement, this article demonstrates the vital contribution music can make to the adaptation process. Wright uses music, and Puccini’s in particular, in ways that are both narrative and reflexive, creating shifts of emphasis, deliberate ambiguities and intertextual allusions. Opera becomes a tool that allows the film-maker to interrogate notions of authorial and historical reliability, themes that lie at the heart of Ian McEwan’s highly self-aware novel.

In a recent issue of this journal, David J. Levin proposed an approach to evaluating the work of directors and producers of opera. The idea that one might be able to theorise the difference between good and bad stagings is appealing, not least because many of us would like to feel able to raise the standard of debate on this subject. Most public discussions of opera productions (or at least of those productions that generate public discussion) can be predicted in advance, more or less verbatim; the persistence of the arguments used on all sides is in itself enough to suggest that little progress is being made. On the other hand, it is not easy to see how academic debate contributes. Theatre is where operas enter public discourse. Performance might seem like a decisive act of interpretation – choices have to be made about how to present the given work – but, paradoxically, it also marks the point at which opera escapes the attentions of the academy in favour of a constituency which is (presumably) less grounded in theory and less committed to consciously interpretative acts. With understandable reservations, Levin suggests the use of commercially available videos to analyse details of a staging, but details of this sort are not likely to contribute significantly to a theatre audience's experience of how a production works and what it has to say. Videotape permits us the mastery of freeze-frame enquiry, and at the same time confines us within the flattened perspective chosen at each moment by the camera's eye. Both its advantages and its drawbacks are incommensurate with theatre, where (especially in opera, with its simultaneous but distinct modes) the stream of information is diverse and continuous, and our eye moves in relative freedom, never capturing the totality of the stage. One might draw an analogous distinction between academic criticism, which works by isolating certain elements of the ‘text’ or its contexts and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, and the more holistic act of sitting in the opera-house watching a ‘work’ unfold. The pause button creates a sequence of discrete images submitted to the critic's intellectual play. In the theatre, a staging is more likely to achieve its effects through what we might call its ‘feel’, its general character and stance. When Peter Sellars set Così fan tutte in a diner, the air of incongruous modernity – conveyed through costume, set, the characters' ways of behaving–must have determined the audience's sense of his interpretation far more powerfully than (for example) the fact that he had Ferrando and Gugliemo sing ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ in their own characters rather than their assumed ones.

The several contradictory, and even apologetic, explanations that were put forward concerning the origins of Mozart's Così fan tutte, ossia La scola degli amanti in the years following its première in 1790 reflect both the dearth of hard information concerning the commission to Mozart, and the unease with which the post-Josephinian era greeted this most unsettling of comic operas. One of the composer's first biographers, Franz Xaver Nêmetschek, wrote:

In the year 1789 in the month of December Mozart wrote the Italian comic opera Cosi fan tutte, or ‘The School for Lovers’; people are universally amazed that this great genius could condescend to waste his heavenly sweet melodies on such a miserable and clumsy text. It was not in his power to refuse the commission, and the text was given expressly to him.

This article analyses the complicated and conflicted critical response to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera within the political, economic and cultural context of the Thatcher/Reagan era. British critics writing for Conservative-leaning broadsheets and tabloids took nationalist pride in Lloyd Webber’s commercial success, while others on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that Phantom was tasteless and crassly commercial, a musical manifestation of a new Gilded Age. Broader issues regarding the relationship between the government and ‘elite’ culture also affected the critical response. For some, Phantom forged a path for a new kind of populist opera that could survive and thrive without government subsidy, while less sympathetic critics heard Phantom’s ‘puerile’ operatics as sophomoric jibes against an art form they esteemed.

I am happy to strive to add an appoggiatura – if my comments might be considered a minor bridge towards a deferred conclusion – to the very stimulating set of articles by Michelle Duncan, David Levin and Fred Moten that appear in this issue. It struck me that these three articles can be read as imbroglio in that they offer contest, or dissonant engagement, more than seamless convergence. Indeed, by underscoring the complexities that haunt our habits of reception in ‘artistic’ practice, these essays further the passion and urgency in listening closely to less audible aspects in any cultural production including opera.

From 1748 onwards, the marvellous made a comeback in opera seria via the Königliches Opernhaus in Berlin. The striking resurgence of myth and magic in the predominantly historical operatic genre appears to bespeak a growing interest in Lullian tragédie en musique, which in turn can be associated with Frederick II's French orientation in literary and philosophical matters. But how did deities, sorcerers and Louis quatorzien imports chime with Frederick's notorious resistance to superstition and divinely ordained kingship? The juxtaposition of the relevant operas with theoretical writings from Friderician Prussia yields a multi-faceted, somewhat paradoxical answer, revealing that the marvellous, alongside nourishing a new type of operatic spectacle, served Frederick as a vehicle to impart his philosophical agenda to his state, a former centre of Pietism.

When Jules Massenet began work on Hérodiade in the late 1870s, he likely expected to see his work premiered at the Paris Opéra. But the coveted Parisian premiere was not to be. Based on a liberal reworking of the infamous tale of Herod, Salome and John the Baptist, Hérodiade undoubtedly challenges traditional Catholic doctrine. Yet Massenet's opera was not as ‘secular’ as it may seem. I argue here that it draws instead on a Republican-friendly brand of Catholicism that encouraged individual religiosity as an anticlerical strategy. Herein, I argue, lay the reasons why Hérodiade was outlawed. It was not so much the libretto's liberal transformations of biblical characters as what those transformations represented both to the Catholic Church and to the French state: in the end the representation of a simultaneously Republican and Catholic Christ presented a dangerous analogue to the country's strained political situation.

This article examines the political and cultural circumstances leading to the Italian premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s posthumous opera L’Africaine at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in November 1865. Meyerbeer’s death in May 1864 and the French premiere of his last opera the following year combined to produce a striking moment of transnational cosmopolitan sentiment that built on the composer’s reputation for writing music that had the capacity to communicate across national and political boundaries. Shortly after the Unification of Italy, Bologna was keen to capitalise on these emotions and used the Italian premiere strategically in order to position itself as one of the cultural capitals of the new Italian nation state.

Scholarship on Monteverdi’s Orfeo has frequently considered Orpheus’s failure to persuade Charon during his grand aria-oration, ‘Possente spirto’, in terms of style and performance. In the eyes of academics such as the Accademia degli Invaghiti (for whom Orfeo was first composed), however, these issues would have been viewed as secondary to the goal of offering moral instruction, in keeping with the Ciceronian maxim, ‘instruction is the first goal, followed by the movement of the mind, and the delight of the senses’. After assessing the compatibility of my ‘academic’ reading of Orfeo with those that have focused on the subject of music and its power, this article considers the Invaghiti’s practice and philosophy of oratory, as well as Monteverdi’s knowledge of this art. The reasons for Orpheus’s failure as an orator are then considered through a comparative analysis of ‘Possente spirto’ and the other full oration from Orfeo, La Musica’s Prologue, as well as further ‘musical orations’ from Monteverdi’s catalogue. This analysis is based primarily on the teachings of the Ancients, as interpreted in the writings of Academy member Stefano Guazzo – in particular his dialectic on ‘civil conversation’ – as well as the model presented in academy member Pompeo Baccusi’s oration, ‘In defence and praise of women’, given for the Invaghiti in 1571.

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.

Few things are more comforting to those with a tendency to procrastination than the knowledge that the fault is hardly unique. Few examples of procrastination are as magnificently extended, or should offer more solace to an author who has missed a deadline, as the history of Liszt's Sardanapale. Not only is the protracted gestation of this ultimately abandoned opera fascinating in its own right, and central to our view of Liszt's early Weimar years; it also illustrates a familiar maxim that in music, as in other human activities, the amount of talk is often in inverse proportion to the action.

Wagnerian gestures were from the outset translations onto the stage of the imagined reactions of the public – the murmurings of the people, applause, the trumpet of self-confirmation or waves of enthusiasm. In the process their archaic muteness, their lack of language, proves its worth in a highly contemporary instrument of domination.

The operatic diva, a singer of strange songs, and too often a turbulent, unkind girl, haunted the nineteenth-century imagination, as evidenced by the musical tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and numerous retellings of those tales in theatre, ballet and opera. Each adaptation of Hoffmann's ‘Rat Krespel’, ‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘Don Juan’ reflects an ambivalent attitude towards women performers, whose potent voices make them simultaneously desirable and fearsome. How do these stories about female singers contrive to contain and manage the singing woman’s authority? And how does the prima donna's voice repeatedly make itself heard, eluding and overcoming narrative attempts to shape or contain its turbulent noise?

Let me begin with an excerpt from ‘Rat Krespel’ (1818), which might serve as a parable for relationships between female singers and male music lovers in the Romantic imagination. Krespel, a young German musician, travelled in Italy and was fortunate enough to win the heart of a celebrated diva, Angela, whose name seemed only appropriate to her heavenly voice. Unfortunately, her personality was less than heavenly, and when she was not actually singing he found her violent whims and demands for attention very trying. One day, as he stood playing his violin:

[Angela] embraced her husband, overwhelmed him with sweet and languishing glances, and rested her pretty head on his shoulder. But Krespel, carried away into the world of music, continued to play on until the walls echoed again; thus he chanced to touch the Signora somewhat ungently with his arm and the fiddle bow.

From 1807 to 1864, Parisian music drama was governed by a system of licences that controlled the repertory of its three main lyric theatres: the Opéra (variously Académie Royale, Nationale and Impériale de Musique), the Théâtre-Italien and the Opéra-Comique. Between 1838 and 1840, the Théâtre de la Renaissance gained a licence to put on stage music, and quickly succeeded in establishing a reputation for energetic management, imaginative programming together with artistically and financially successful performances. It could do this only by exploiting what were effectively newly invented types of music drama: vaudeville avec airs nouveaux and opéra de genre. The invented genres however brought the theatre into legal conflict with the Opéra-Comique and Opéra respectively, and opened up a domain of jurisprudence –associated with repertory rather than copyright – hitherto unsuspected.

In little more than a year, between October 1892 and November 1893, the Italian operatic repertory acquired two ambitious and monumental works, similar in their choice of a national–historic subject and in their dramatic form: Alberto Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo and Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici. After a few revivals scattered over several decades, both disappeared from circulation, and recent productions have confirmed doubts about their stageworthiness, notwithstanding some convincing passages (particularly in Colombo) and the enormous investment of intellectual and historical reflection that had attended their birth. Ideological motivations determined the musico-dramatic structures of the two operas, and are closely related to the failure of their projects.

Cesti's Orontea (Innsbruck, 1656), one of the most celebrated operas of the seventeenth century, is considered a significant antecedent of eighteenth-century opera buffa; the important role of Gelone is deemed one of the first basso buffo roles in opera history. Yet this view is based on incomplete and problematic historical data. This article reexamines that data and develops strategies for handling the text-critical problems that plague seventeenth-century opera. It concludes that Cesti probably designed Gelone for an alto – the most common voice type for buffo servants in the mid-late seventeenth century – and warns against using eighteenth-century models to interpret the seventeenth-century repertory.

I propose that certain ‘Japanese’ elements of Puccini's Madama Butterfly have cultural analogues that support a reading of the opera as more profoundly authentic than has usually been argued. My discussion begins with the house, the most basic scenic component of the opera, and develops via a number of interrelated issues: the Japanese home as the center of the life cycle, Puccini's choice of the home as his single set, and finally, Butterfly's ‘Vigil’ as the central event in an unfolding home-based life-cycle that raises issues of ritual and ceremony corresponding to values of the geisha culture.

Long considered to lie ‘light years’ apart, Ravel and Wagner actually have multiple points of contact. Several appear in the comments Ravel made about the German composer in his articles, interviews and correspondence. Another is a previously unrecognised allusion to Parsifal in the Passacaille of Ravel's Trio (1914), which he composed shortly after writing a review of the opera's premiere in Paris. Additional Wagnerisms can be located in Daphnis et Chloé (1909–12) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1920–5). More broadly, Wagner plays a central role in the ‘decadent dialectics’ of Ravel's style.

In the original version of the libretto of Hippolyte et Aricie, the librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin prefaced Act V with the rubric ‘le théatre ne change qu'à la troisiéme scéne’ [‘the stage changes only at the third scene’]. This is one of the few acts in the entire repertoire of tragédies en musique where the conventional formula ‘le théatre représente …’ [‘the stage represents … ’], followed by a description of what the stage was intended to depict, was not used. The annotation in Hippolyte warned audiences that, instead of the change of scenery that would normally occur during the entr'acte, the first two scenes of Act V retained the setting of Act IV (‘a wood by the sea, consecrated to Diana’), and the new décor (‘a delightful garden comprising the avenues of the Forest of Aricie’) was revealed only in the third scene. The sense of discontinuity at this ‘internal’ scenery change was also heightened by a break of liaison de presence (that is, none of the actors in scene 2 remained on stage for scene 3). A dispute arose over this breach of convention, and resulted in the first two scenes being omitted from performances sometime during the opera's first season in 1733, ostensibly to avoid the breach of unity of place caused by the change of scenery. This was not the only revision made to the opera in that season, but it was arguably the most significant.