This article examines the production and reception history of C. S. Favart's La fête du château, commissioned by a French noblewoman, the Marquise of Monconseil, to mark her granddaughter's inoculation against smallpox in 1766. The first half of the article situates the vaudeville comedy at the Bagatelle (Monconseil's private theatre), underscoring the gendered tropes that had accrued to the disease in the late eighteenth century and the function of elite sociability in promoting its prevention. The second half of the article reconstructs the public trajectory of the work, which was presented at Versailles after the controversial inoculation of Louis XVI in 1774. Notably, the agent behind this theatrical public-health campaign was the queen, Marie Antoinette. A consideration of La fête du château's popularity and influence broadens our understanding of the conditions under which ancien-régime opera took on political meaning, as well as the role of women patrons and consumers in this process.

In 1828, five years after the premiere in Venice of Rossini's final Italian opera, Semiramide, Gaetano Rossi's libretto was again set to music, this time by the famed bel canto tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City. The opera, one of the first to be composed in Latin America after the collapse of the Spanish empire, was intended to demonstrate independent Mexico's ability not just to import Italian opera from Europe but also to produce new works. Instead of proving Mexico's credentials as a successful operatic nation, however, García's Semiramide became a problematic space for bringing to light tensions between underlying colonial resistance and the new liberal influence of France, England and Italy. This article contextualises this momentous operatic event within the wider frame of Mexico's nation building and investigates how the manifold political tensions and cultural contradictions of Mexico's postcolonial transition were absorbed and amplified by both García's composition and its staging.

This article takes its cue from the claim, made both in 1831 and in our own time, that Bellini's La sonnambula is a pastoral opera. Frustratingly difficult to define, the term ‘pastoral’ is at once both musical and literary, able to attach itself to everything from madrigal to oratorio to symphony across four hundred years. This article explores the various meanings of pastoral specific to the early nineteenth century and argues that its currency in music analysis today – as a topic, as a mode – is of little use when attention falls on the music of Italian opera. It concludes with an extended analysis of Bellini's handling of cadences in both La sonnambula and his other operas, insisting that it is here, in Italian composers’ repeated affirmation of the conventions of tonality, that the pleasures promised by the pastoral can be enjoyed today as much as they were two hundred years ago.

Following the premiere of Tosca in January 1900, Giacomo Puccini's progressive critics generally took issue with two main aspects of the opera: the first was the composer's supposedly unoriginal modes of expression, and the second was the work's scandalous plot. While many attributed the dark tone of Tosca to its French source, Sardou's melodrama La Tosca, I contend that there is an underlying context for both the dramatic and the musical unsavouriness of Puccini's verismo opera: the Italian fascination with criminology. Beginning in the 1870s after Italian unification, positivist criminologists, led by Cesare Lombroso, sought to locate the organic causes of criminality and believed that deviancy was objectively readable through the body. Lombroso further conceptualised the ‘born criminal’ as an exceptional individual that was predisposed to artistic expression. His theories, rooted in deeply troubling stereotypes and conventional wisdom, gained traction with a bourgeois public as well as with contemporary luminaries, including Giuseppe Giacosa, one of Puccini's librettists. Drawing on Lombroso's writings, letters and archived objects, I show how the criminologist's bourgeois version of perversity provides a valuable framework to evaluate the derivative modes of deviant expression present not only in Tosca, but within verismo opera at large.

This article offers the first systematic investigation of the institution of opera censorship in Russia during the reign of Nicholas I. Drawing on new archival sources, it examines censorship legislation, the organisation of dramatic (i.e., theatre) censorship, the workings of its bureaucracy, censors’ reports and protocols and Nicholas's personal decrees on productions of specific operas, and printed and manuscript librettos. From these, it distils the patterns of state intervention in opera, revealing a remarkable fluidity – even capriciousness – of approaches. Decisions to ban or permit, and specific intrusions into the texts, were based on the censors’ adherence to or disregard for the Empire's censorship laws, Nicholas's inclinations and impulses, changes in cultural policy, practical needs of the Imperial Theatres, the shifting political climate at home and abroad, and, most of all, the national point of origin of the operatic work under review. In addition to surveying the trends, the article offers three case studies: Glinka's Zhizn’ za Tsarya (A Life for the Tsar), Verdi's Rigoletto and Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.

This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi's Aida. While scholars have explored the opera's resonances with late nineteenth-century conceptions of Orientalism, Blackness and the imagined ‘East’, Aida's etymology and character traits reflect a much broader archetype that extends back a century from its 1871 premiere. Her name is not Egyptian or Ethiopian but Greek, and her backstory was modelled on characters named ‘Haidée’ and ‘Haydée’ who appeared in works by Lord Byron and Alexandre Dumas fils, as well as in a celebrated opéra comique by Daniel Auber. Aida was thus an assemblage of ready-made character archetypes and scenarios rather than an author's sui generis depiction of non-Western culture. An intertextual reading of Aida offers a broader perspective on alterity in the nineteenth century, which eschewed geographical specificity for archetypes, quotations and allusions. It also offers another way to confront claims of authenticity made by current-day defenders of brownface in Verdi's work.

On the score of his St Ludmila oratorio, Dvořák scribbled: ‘completed in the days when The Cunning Peasant was executed in Vienna’. Indeed, Dvořák's comic opera sparked a riot at its Hofoper premiere in 1885 and was met with harsh criticism in the Viennese press. David Brodbeck argues that the rioters were motivated to action not by The Cunning Peasant itself, but by the composer's nationality. Likewise, Brodbeck shows that the opera's harshest Viennese critics belonged to a new generation of German liberals, who subscribed to an increasingly ethnic, rather than civic, view of nationalism and were thus predisposed to disapprove of any Dvořák opera because it was not German. Based on this analysis, it would appear that Dvořák's fate was sealed long before the first notes of The Cunning Peasant were sounded at the Vienna Hofoper. This article builds on Brodbeck's claims, by exploring the Viennese scandal from the perspective of Czech critics, many of whom remained unconvinced that all Czech operas – whether by Dvořák or by another composer – would have been greeted with the same kind of disdain. In their view, The Cunning Peasant failed because it was too overtly Czech for Vienna, having been designed for Prague's Provisional Theatre, and because it was insufficiently representative of Czech achievement in the genre, paling in comparison with the operas of Smetana. Rather than offering a more plausible explanation for the riot, the opinions articulated in the Prague press reveal much about the biases and motivations of the Czech critics themselves.

This article retraces Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) to the great Italian mattatori (star actors), particularly Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915), whose ground-breaking performances of the Moor of Venice, in a translation by Giulio Carcano, coincided with the time when Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, were collaborating on their Otello. The grandi attori enjoyed a reputation for realistic immediacy and impulsiveness readily associated with cultural stereotypes about Italy's perceived ‘otherness’. In the ethnographic context of nineteenth-century Italy, it is argued here that the actors’ interpretation of Shakespeare's Moor not only synthesised the multilateral cultural threads of the Jacobean Othello, but also partnered this racial alterity with a new dramatic language, which went on to influence Verdi's opera and prompt book, and, ultimately, to perpetuate an exoticised ‘brand’ of Italian artistic culture on stage at a time when Italy was fashioning its own national identity.

In 1888, Norwegian newspapers eagerly announced the arrival of ‘Miss Gina Oselio’, who was returning to Norway ‘after seven years of staying abroad’. Oselio (Ingeborg Aas (1858–1937)) had achieved tremendous success as an opera singer in Europe and her performance on the Norwegian concert stage did not disappoint. Her new popularity positioned the singer as a member of the country's cultural elite and introduced a new complexity to her operatic identity. Unlike other Norwegian musicians who were treated primarily in terms of their nationality, her ‘Norwegianness’ had been largely incidental during her career. Oselio's private papers, however, offer new insights into the complex relationship between the singer and the nation. Together with her reception history, these materials invite a fresh examination of Oselio's position in fin-de-siècle Norwegian musical life. They show how she cultivated her career and her identity outside Norway, as well as her deliberate decision to assert her ‘Norwegianness’. They demonstrate the roles that Oselio wished to occupy on the country's stages and how other Norwegians responded to these roles. Ultimately, they document a period of transition, as artists, critics and audiences sought to determine the place that opera would occupy within the nation.

Despite the advent of voice studies, opera scholars have yet to develop a thoroughgoing conversation about one of the most familiar elements of operatic vocal culture: voice type (categories such as soprano, tenor and the like). To address this, I suggest opera scholars analyse ideologies of voice type: the complex of ideas and practices that guide how individuals understand voice types and their relevance to the operatic experience. I devote the main part of this article to a historical case study of ideologies of voice type in action, focusing on Maurice Ravel, his 1911 opera L'heure espagnole, and the relatively obscure voice type Ravel assigned to Ramiro, the opera's male protagonist, the baryton-Martin. I argue that the characteristically modern ideology of voice type Ravel adopted in L'heure espagnole was unusual for its time and that this helps explains the work's reception.

It has long been claimed that opera can give expression to the uneasy relationship between the body and the voice. Operatic voices seem to exceed the capacity of the bodies that produce them in a way that conveys a sense of mechanisation or limited agency, inviting metaphorical comparisons to marionettes. Yet recent studies of gesture have suggested that bodies are not simply passively inscribed with meaning but that they also mediate the process of inscription. Investigating the implications of this claim for opera, this article discusses two recent essays by Judith Butler, in which she draws from Walter Benjamin's account of gesture in Brecht's epic theatre to argue for the performative power of incomplete or decontextualised bodily actions. It then traces this idea to a moment in epic theatre's own prehistory, focusing on Ferruccio Busoni's opera Doktor Faust. The article makes both a theoretical point and an historical claim: it highlights how bodies and words that are decontextualised can perform a critical function despite not enjoying the usual citational supports necessary for a speech act; and it argues that Busoni's Doktor Faust and his theory of opera were a part of the intellectual prehistory to Butler's conceptualisation of bodily performativity.

Benjamin Britten, gravely ill at the time of its composition, was surely aware that Death in Venice would be his last opera, and it is not surprising that the work should make reference to his first opera, Peter Grimes, as if to bookend his entire operatic career, and survey the enormous distance he had travelled, as a hallmark of what might be considered the composer's late style. Even so, the dramatic and musical relationships between the two works are unusually extensive. Both operas concern an outsider at odds with the society around him, in a strange reflection of the composer's particular situation as he wrote each work. Each is set in a place particularly special to the composer, where land borders sea in a metaphor for the boundary between life and death. Finally, the protagonist's interactions with a mysterious silent boy in each case hints at a part of Britten's character that dared not speak its name. These dramatic correspondences are paralleled in important musical connections between the operas, despite their ostensibly very different musical languages. Britten's final opera could therefore be understood to exemplify the famous words borrowed by T.S. Eliot from Mary, Queen of Scots: ‘In my end is my beginning’, an appropriate concept given the degree to which Britten was occupied with Eliot's verse at this time.

In 2018, Maria Callas rose from the dead. During a series of tours dubbed Callas in Concert, local orchestras performed with a three-dimensional hologram of the departed diva as she re-sounded arias of her past. This virtual manifestation of Callas put on a convincing show. Listeners were struck by the quality of the diva's voice – ‘from heart-breaking vulnerability to imposing strength’ – and marvelled at foley effects such as the clicking of her heels and rustling of her gown. Notably, however, the performance fell victim to repeated technical failures. In Chicago, a glitch caused her final encore to end prematurely; in Blacksburg, Virginia, audience members were distracted by the transparent nature of the hologram, which gave Callas an ‘especially ghostly appearance’. The performances set the operatic sphere atwitter with questions of ethics and taste, debates over classical music's obligations to the living and devotions to the dead. Anthony Tommasini likened the performances to a grand séance, an act of operatic necrophilia. Catherine Womack interpreted the spectral shows as a sign that ‘in the twenty-first century, living and breathing are not prerequisites for a successful performing career’. However, as Deirdre Loughridge, Gundula Kreuzer and Gabriela Cruz demonstrate in their monographs, Callas in Concert is not a phenomenon unique to the twenty-first century. Indeed, the authors show that technologically mediated resurrections of the dead, operatic appeals to nostalgia, and illusion-busting technical failures are instead part of a long operatic tradition, one which began well before the holographic revitalisations of Maria Callas.

This article interrogates how Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten and its early reception reflected an uneasiness about the confines of manhood. As an opera with a complex genesis and a difficult reception history, Die Gezeichneten's allure comes from its resistance to being reduced to only one thing. I nevertheless seek to locate this opera around the time of its premiere towards the end of the First World War. I contend that Die Gezeichneten and its immediate reception charted a key transition in Austro-German masculinity. Specifically, the opera's early performances marked a move away from the period's normative models of bourgeois masculinity (and their corresponding ideas about appearance, health and nationhood) and towards an alternative masculinity preoccupied with degeneracy. I focus on the opera's masks, arguing that, through acts of concealment and disclosure, the opera's two male protagonists struggle to negotiate expectations of an emotionally controlled modern manhood, calling attention to wartime anxieties about what it meant to be a man. Such anxieties resulted in a hardening of attitudes towards the masculine gender, which influenced contemporary music criticism too. Die Gezeichneten's highly sensationalist early reviews relied on a language of degeneracy. Yet I suggest that the opera's initial reception captured a critical moment in this language's history before it was subsumed under Nazi ideology.

What exactly is operetta? As a genre it seems defined by its lack of definition, by its inherent in-betweenness. On an aesthetic scale defined by opera at one end and music hall, revue and burlesque at the other, it lies somewhere in the middle. But where? True, it is difficult to disentangle operetta from the various kinds of variety theatre; it shares their fondness for a chorus line and a catchy refrain. On the other hand, the name operetta suggests a love–hate relationship with opera, its high-brow relative. ‘Little opera’ is generally shorter than opera (though what about concise classics of ‘big opera’ such as La bohème?), funnier than opera (though what about comic touchstones such as Il barbiere di Siviglia?) and less serious than opera (though the satirical bent of some operettas can be taken seriously). Perhaps, then, the difference is that it takes itself less seriously, with fewer pretensions to grandeur and more concessions to popular taste. Capitalising unashamedly on its popularity through promotional tie-ins, flaunting musical numbers poised to become well-known hits on the bandstand or on the mechanical piano, and almost invariably giving spectators the happy ending they desire: operetta is selling out, in all senses of the phrase.

This article explores the technological affordances of vocal production software in performance through a case study of Shibuya Keīchirō's The End (2012). In the performance of this ‘humanless opera’, desires for pliability and fantasies of control are realised through the affordances of a singing voice synthesis software known as Vocaloid. By reflecting on The End's thematic focus on death and existentialism and on notions of vocal virtuosity, and by exploring the socio-technical processes by which the protagonist, virtual pop star Hatsune Miku, was constructed, the article provides an alternative narrative to vocal production and intermundane collaboration as it relates to the fluid and reversible configurations between voices, bodies and technologies in performance.

Let's start with where opera happens: the opera house. For the 2022/23 season, Opernhaus Dortmund, known for its fine instinct for rare gems on the operatic stage, decided to mount Jacques François Fromental Halévy's La Juive. Having been introduced to this grand opéra as a first-year musicology student, I was excited to see the premiere of Sybrand van der Werf's production on a Sunday night in November 2022 – while preparing this review. As it turns out, the performance transferred me straight into the core arguments of each of the three books under consideration here: the intense co-presence unfolding between the performer and audience, generated as in Clemens Risi's account by a briefly indisposed singer; the inclusion of visual codes evoking SM erotic play on stage, which also informs Axel Englund's investigation; and finally, the production of a hypermedia spectacle, which is Tereza Havelková's central concern. A single performance demonstrated the relevance and applicability of each of Risi's, Englund's and Havelková's studies.