This article compares early and mid twentieth-century Italian-language recordings of Lohengrin excerpts with German-language recordings of the same period. The production and distribution of Italian-language recordings in the United States is an extension of nineteenth-century practices, in which ‘national styles’ of singing were detachable from specific repertoires. Preserving characteristic vocal inflections and distinctive interpretations, these recordings give insight into the intersections and conflicts between the various national performing traditions that were so important to nineteenth-century operatic life. The interpretative diversity of these recordings is an index of the extent to which performance traditions and individual character were markers of cultural (and economic) value in the first decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on Elsa’s Dream and the Grail Narration, I show how this interpretative diversity declined dramatically during the course of the twentieth century. This decline was precipitated by a number of factors, including the introduction of the LP disc in 1948. But the decline of the Italian Lohengrin also attests to a paradigm shift essential to the reception of classical music in the United States: from the idea that the recording is a reproduction of a voice to one in which it functions primarily as a realization of the composer’s score.

In 1779 Chabanon noted the potential danger inherent in gesture because it might produce instantaneous and harmful effects. This article examines how Rameau, Rousseau and Grétry incorporated putatively dangerous gestures into the pantomimes they wrote for their operas, and explains why these pantomimes matter at all. In Rameau's Pygmalion (1748), Rousseau's Le Devin du village (1752–3) and Grétry's Céphale et Procris (1773, 1775), pantomime was presented as a type of dance opposite to the conventional social dance. But the significance of this binary opposition changed drastically around 1750, in response to Rousseau's own moral philosophy developed most notably in the First Discourse (1750). Whereas the pantomimes in Rameau's Pygmalion dismiss peasants as uncultured, it is high culture that becomes the source of corruption in the pantomime of Rousseau's Le Devin du village, where uncultured peasants are praised for their morality. Grétry extended Rousseau's moral claim in the pantomime of Céphale et Procris by commending an uneducated girl who turns down sexual advances from a courtier. Central to these pantomimes are the ways in which musical syntax correlates with drama. Contrary to the predictable syntax in most social dances, these pantomimes bring to the surface syntactical anomalies that may be taken to represent moral licence: an unexpected pause, a jarring diminished-seventh chord, and a phrase in a minuet with odd-number bars communicate danger. Although social dances were still the backbone of most French operas, pantomime provided an experimental interface by which composers contested the meanings of expressive topoi; it thus emerged as a vehicle for progressive social thinking.

Despite the number of musicological studies that have focused upon Wagner's theories of tempo modification, the basic speeds adopted in early performances of Wagner's music dramas have been more difficult to identify. This article focuses upon an important new source of information concerning Wagnerian performance – a list of metronome timings made by Edward Dannreuther at the first dress rehearsal of Das Rheingold at Bayreuth in July 1876. After considering the practical difficulties of tempo measurement, and briefly placing the broad implications of Dannreuther's timings in the context of Wagner's theories and practice, the dress rehearsal tempi are examined in more detail in terms of their potential for practical realisation in performance. Six readings of Das Rheingold from the recorded canon (Bodanzky, Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Solti, Karajan, Boulez) provide a suitable comparative perspective from which to discuss how these tempi might affect perceptions of physical distance, the nature of motifs related to characters or events, tempo relationships within a musical scene, and larger-scale tempo connections in Das Rheingold as a whole. In particular, the very quick tempi identified by Dannreuther (especially in relation to modern sensibilities) might encourage a reassessment of practical possibilities in the realisation of Wagner's scores, along with a reconsideration of Wagner's music and its meanings.

This essay explores the roots of Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers (1903–04), composed to a libretto by H. B. Brewster, in fin-de-siècle debates on the legal and religious regulation of morality. Taking into account Smyth's jaundiced use of Cornish history, the contribution of Brewster's professed individual anarchism and sexual libertarianism, and Smyth's willingness to parody and manipulate musical conventions in order to reinforce radical ideals, it views the work both as a reflection of its authors' engagement with modernism and as a herald of Smyth's subsequent contribution to militant feminism.

While Moulin Rouge! (2001) riffs on and even exaggerates conventions from classic Hollywood backstage musicals, it owes a clear debt to an even earlier musico-dramatic genre – the opera. Combining operatic and film musical elements with those of pop videos, contemporary cinema and the rave scene, Baz Luhrmann's film engages with many of the thorny issues that have concerned opera critics of late, such as power, gender, exoticism, authorship, and identity construction and performance. The spotlight on the central love triangle of a consumptive courtesan, a writer and a wealthy patron makes possible a deeper scrutiny of traditional gender roles in the production and reception of Western art. The film's formulaic plot and the backstage musical format render transparent the commercial impetus behind the creative process and demystify the role of the Romantic artist-genius. Finally, the transnational and transhistorical elements of the film – a mostly Australian production team and crew, American and British pop songs, a Parisian backdrop, the Bollywood-inspired show-within-a-show, numerous anachronisms that refuse to stay confined within the specified time setting of the late nineteenth century – disrupt the Classical ideals of artistic unity and integrity and suggest new postmodern geographies and temporalities. This article considers how Luhrmann, by simultaneously paying homage to and critiquing operatic practices in Moulin Rouge!, deconstructs and reinvents opera for the postmodern age.

Counterpoint plays a surprisingly large role in the musical language of Mozart’s Die Entführung au dem Serail. In solo material for the deep bass voice of the character Osmin Mozart suggested contapuntal relationships with other parts to give the vocal line independence from the instrumental bass. In ensemble numbers like Osmin and Blonde’s duet No. 9 the composer strongly suggested a contrapuntal relationship between lines sung by antagonistic characters. In Osmin and Belmonte’s duet No. 2, represented in the sources in a nearly complete sketch, Mozard used numerous contrapuntal techniques in support of the dramatic situation. Though the work was composed right around Mozart’s well-known Bach year of 1782, most of the counterpoint is not particularly Bachian. But the polyphonic textures and contrapuntal thinking mark the work as stylistically connected with the composer’s most mature music. Contrapuntal analysis turns out to be a useful perspective of Mozart’s operatic writing.

Russian composer Arthur Vincent Lourié (1881/2–1966) dedicated his The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1948–1961), an opera based on Pushkin's story about the poet's African great-grandfather, to ‘Russian culture, the Russian people and Russian history.’ Neoclassical in its subject matter, reliance on conventional musical forms, and adherence to tonality, Lourié's Blackamoor is nevertheless also an exemplary symbolist opera. This article explains three symbolist aspects of the work: the sources of its libretto (Lourié's librettist Irina Graham interspersed the libretto with symbolist texts), its multi-layered cultural associations, and Lourié's decision to liberate and embody the erotic drive of the main character Ibrahim by representing it as the figure of Eros. Eradicated during the years of Stalinist terror, the culture of Silver Age Russia thus continued to find a voice in the emigrant Lourié's last opera.

The article explores an interdisciplinary conjunction of music, literature and modernism. I examine the relationship between aspects of early music scholarship and modernism, with specific reference to Ezra Pound’s critical and editorial work on medieval song, and to the composition, in the 1920s, of his modernist opera Le Testament. This analysis places Pound’s work as editor and composer not only in the context of recent critical reflections on the idea of authenticity, but also in relation to the histories and methodologies of medieval music interpretation. First, in drawing attention to Pound’s much–neglected collaborative edition of medieval songs entitled Hesternae Rosae, I contextualise his experiments in rhythmic reconstruction with reference to early and late twentieth-century musicologists working in this field. I make particular reference to the work of Pierre Aubry and rhythmic mode theory, and the later perspectives of Hendrik van der Werf. Secondly, I proceed to analyse Pound’s monophonic and dance song compositions in Le Testament, exploring the way in which serious medieval musicological scholarship prepared for, and is allied to, the development of a rhythmically and dramatically complex musical style.

Bizet’s Carmen entered Spain’s cultural consciousness when it was first staged in Madrid in the 1887–8 season. A public battle for the performance rights in the autumn of 1887 led to competing productions at major theatres: the first in a new Spanish translation at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, and the second in the fully-sung Italian version at the Teatro Real. This article explores the Spanish encounter with Carmen during this season, from the political machinations of the lawsuit, to the opening nights and the extended critical debates that greeted the two premières. The Spanish adaptation is compared with the original French version and mapped against the native musico-theatrical tradition of the zarzuela, which had long purveyed constructions of ‘Spanishness’ for local consumption. Contemporary debates about national identity and its theatrical and musical representations underscore the varied critical responses to Carmen, which was embraced by Madrid opera audiences.

Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, to a libretto by David Harsent, was premiered at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in April 2008. This article offers a synopsis, a diary of rehearsals for the opera (for all of which the composer was in attendance), and an analytical essay. The diary chronicles the development of the production, with its diversions from, and clarifications of, the text as well as the composer's reaction to these. The essay presents The Minotaur as a departure for Birtwistle, from narrative (as in the earlier Gawain) to characterisation, its basis being a trio of protagonists. While a predictably heroic Theseus and tragic Minotaur are characters fashioned by the libretto as much as the music, a multi-faceted Ariadne is primarily the composer's creation.