Unlike the opera parodies performed at the Comédie-Italienne in the 1690s and collected by Evariste Gherardi, Dancourt's Angélique et Médor and Renaud et Armide were performed during the première runs of their target operas – Lully's and Quinault's Roland and Armide, respectively. Undoubtedly prompted by Lully's opera monopoly and the draconian restrictions on music and dance that affected the musical repertory at the Comédie-Française, Dancourt's parodies take a tongue-in-cheek view of the madness of opera in general, while specifically satirizing the themes, characters, and operatic situations found in Roland and Armide.

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.

In a recent issue of the Cambridge Opera Journal, Dorothea Link has proposed that Mozart may have been the author of an unattributed accompanied recitative that precedes the aria ‘‘Vado, ma dove?,” K. 583, in the Viennese court theatre’s original performing score of Martín y Soler's Il burbero di buon cuore. The present article re-examines the case for Mozart's authorship of this recitative in the wider context of Mozart studies as a whole, and through a detailed reconsideration of the source and stylistic evidence. The recitative preceding K. 583 is compared to two other accompanied recitatives with plausible connections to Mozart: an unattributed one that precedes a score of Mozart's aria ‘‘No, che non sei capace,” K. 419, in a Viennese manuscript of extracts from Paisiello’s Fedra; and one that is explicitly attributed to Mozart in the Viennese court theatre's original performing score of a pasticcio based on Guglielmi's La quacquera spirituosa.

Printed stage-direction books, so-called livrets de mise-en-scène, count among the most important sources for the history of staging of nineteenth-century French opera. Their function was to document the then-current condition of a Paris production, and to serve as a model for provincial or foreign theatres. In this essay, a comparison of two such livrets for Auber's Fra Diavolo from Paris, by Vieillard Duverger and Louis Palianti, shows that the staging of successful works underwent significant changes over time. One cannot, however, assume that a published stage manual indicates the chronological fixity of a production. Indeed, directors even in the nineteenth century did not aim at an ‘‘objective” reproduction of a staging, but rather at an innovative, lively, and ever-changing music theatre within the framework of contemporary operatic aesthetics.

Puccini reception lay at the heart of a crisis of national identity that gripped Italy between the turn of the century and the First World War. For Puccini's detractors his works were an emblem of decadence; for his supporters they provided a means for regeneration. In his vitriolic monograph, Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912), Fausto Torrefranca associated Puccini with dangerous ‘others’ – women, homosexuals and Jews – in order to instil fear about the ‘feminisation’ of Italian culture. The reception of his book shows that Torrefranca's ‘extreme’ views were widely shared.

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’.

Parma's lavish commemoration of the centennial of Verdi's birth took to an extreme the post-Unification trend to memorialize great figures of Italy's past. This essay examines the encyclopedic nature of the commemoration in the context of the local and national political climate. Its reception and display were symptomatic of contemporary changes in the physical sites of politics, sharing features with later, more overtly nationalist exhibitions and suggesting a symbiotic relationship between culture and ideology. The reception history of the monument to Verdi built on this occasion, however, warns against historical generalizations, underlining the contingency of the interactions between art, politics and ideology, and demonstrating that current concerns with nationalism often obscure more than they clarify.

Ernst Krenek's opera Karl V presents an ingenious interpretation of the life of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, which argues not only dramatically but also musically for the contemporary political significance of the Emperor's life. This was no forced pairing of music and politics, for Krenek had found that the historical and theological problems raised by the Emperor's ‘justification’ at the end of his life bore a striking resemblance both to the aesthetic dilemmas he was then having to face as a composer and issues common to the wider struggle for national identity and political legitimacy in Austria after World War I. This essay introduces these themes in the work, and Krenek’s rationalisations of the way he presents them. It considers their implications for our understanding of the history of serialism in music more generally, and for an aspect of Krenek's compositional development that has perplexed later commentators: the apparent stylistic gulf between this opera and Jonny spielt auf.

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.

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District became extraordinarily infamous after its damnation by Pravda in 1936. The amount of violence and sex in the opera distinguishes it from the Leskov novella on which it was based, and seems to have underpinned Stalin's disapproval. The complex relation between Shostakovich's detailed representation of sexuality and his portrait of Katerina, the opera's tragic heroine, mirrors the social tensions of the sexual revolution and the conservative backlash of the 1920s and 1930s. The writings of feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) about the new Soviet woman display striking similarities to Shostakovich's portrayal of his female characters and offer a context for his approach.