The Houghton Library at Harvard University holds a copy of the 1685 livret for Roland by Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully that has been marked up in three different seventeenth-century hands. The meanings of these markings cannot be conclusively deciphered until further corroborative sources come to light, but they seem to refer to declaimed performances of Quinault's text. The purpose of the current article is to propose possible interpretations of these annotations, guided by seventeenth-century theory of the oratorical pitches (tons) and eighteenth-century links between the Académie royale de musique and the Comédie française.

The visual artist most commonly linked with the name of Richard Wagner from the 1870s to the early twentieth century was the now relatively little-known Viennese painter Hans Makart (1844–84). Makart's Viennese atelier – no less than his sumptuous history paintings, ‘bacchanals’, society portraits and multi-media design-projects (notably a lavish 1879 historical pageant celebrating the Hapsburg monarchy) – defined an influential visual and stylistic idiom for the early fin-de-siècle. The style is recognisable in the salon at villa Wahnfried, in Paul Joukowsky's set designs for the first Parsifal, and arguably, in aspects of Wagner's music itself. Like most artists of the era, Makart occasionally depicted Wagnerian motifs, but his affinity with the composer was recognised as a matter of style and technique. Two breakthrough works from around 1868 in triptych form, Moderne Amoretten (Modern Cupids) and Der Pest in Florenz (The Plague in Florence), suggest thematic and conceptual parallels with Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde, respectively. Makart's Renaissance history paintings and the 1879 Vienna Festzug stage national history as a collective aesthetic experience in the manner of Die Meistersinger. A ubiquitous theme in comparisons of artist and composer is the role of colour (visual, harmonic and timbral), raised to a quasi-autonomous force that dominates composition and ‘idea’. Makart's resistance to conventions of visual narrative, as read by contemporary critics, recalls Wagner's resistance to conventional melodic periodicity.

This article investigates the cultural and technical sources of Makart's appeal in the later nineteenth century and traces the comparison of Makart's and Wagner's styles as a critical topos. The disappearance of Makart and his ‘style’ from modern critical consciousness, I argue, mirrors a cultural Amnesia regarding features central to Wagner's irresistible fascination for his contemporaries.

The Enlightenment witnessed the rise of a public whose role as sovereign arbiter of operatic taste irreversibly changed the processes by which fame and renown were bestowed upon composers. The public sphere – a conceptual space in which texts (including music) were disseminated and debated – emerged as an expansive intellectual forum in which composers, performers and works could be evaluated. In spite of opera's long-standing association with fame and renown, its role in the processes leading to ascriptions of musical value and fame in the Enlightenment public sphere is a significant dimension of canon formation that has yet to be fully investigated. This article offers a case study of Electress Maria Antonia of Saxony (1728–1780), whose mutually beneficial relationship with the Breitkopf firm, coupled with its redesigned ‘movable type’ in 1755, prompted a new mode of opera criticism, one that focused sharply on the music itself. Maria Antonia's Il trionfo della fedeltà (1754) and Talestri (1762) were the first operas to receive reviews featuring in-text musical examples, fuelling the public's quest to monumentalise Maria Antonia as celebrated composer. Ultimately, the inclusion of musical excerpts in opera criticism was an important step toward the construct of the work as separate from individual localised performances.

Walther von Stolzing's songs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg have not attracted much critical interest, in part because of their deceptive appearance as straightforward diegetic music or stage songs. But in addition to comprising an extended ‘musical joke’ illustrating the hero's desire-driven progress towards musical competence, these songs also pursue a historicising agenda, replacing the Meistersingers' pre-modern rule-driven poetics of imitation with a modern aesthetics of inspiration.

The traditional story reception historians tell of Wagner in France is really a centralist story about Wagner in Paris. This article reverses the direction in light of the fact that seven French regional towns presented Lohengrin on publicly funded stages in 1891 before the directors of the Paris Opéra dared follow suit. Since the work's ‘job’ in the regions was to prove to Paris that Wagner stagings did not necessarily bring rioting with them, the focus is more on previews than on the usual (and logical) reception material of reviews. In addition, via its multi-centre approach and a sideways glance at a parallel phenomenon – the reception of Victorien Sardou's Thermidor – the article integrates reception study into a broader-based cultural history rather than treating it in potentially more limited fashion as an approach in and of itself.

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.

This article addresses the physical presence of Jules Massenet in the media during the Third Republic in France through the lens of the caricatural press and the cartoon parodies of his operas which appeared in journals such as Le Journal amusant and Le Charivari. Although individual works were rarely outright successes in critical terms during his lifetime, Massenet's operas always stimulated debate and Massenet, as a figure head for a national art, was revered by both the state and its people. Drawing on theories of parody and readership, I argue that despite the ‘ephemeral’ nature of these musical artefacts, they acted as agents of commemoration of the composer and of memorialisation and commodification of his works for both operagoers and those who rarely entered the opera theatre.

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.

This article examines an example of what might be called ‘nested’ reception – the representation of one work of art within another – in the shape of Gounod's Faust, performances of which were depicted in media ranging from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels to the long-running comic strip Les Aventures de Tintin. In particular, it considers the reception issues raised by the last of these, in which the opera's persistence in the surrounding culture is represented by repeated (and often unexpected) performances of the ‘Jewel Song’ by the diva La Castafiore. Part repository of opera cliché and part creative commentary on Faust's place in a shrinking and stagnating repertory, the passages featuring Castafiore may also pose questions for musicologists: not just about the materials we use to recuperate and represent historical echoes, in the broadest sense, of opera, but also about the historical and critical models we use to interpret them.

Since 2000 a notable trend has emerged in the way in which Italian comic operas by composers from Donizetti to Puccini are staged. In British and American productions, such works are consistently updated to the mid-twentieth century, usually the 1950s. This article explores what such stagings – and their implied intertextual references to wider representations of the era in popular culture – can tell us about the reception of opera today and the ways in which opera is used to create romanticised notions of historical time. Specifically, the article considers the implications for Puccini historiography of updating Gianni Schicchi, an opera whose Renaissance setting might at first glance seem essential. Considering changing attitudes towards historicism from the nineteenth century to the present, the article proposes that ‘retro’ mid-twentieth-century stagings of Gianni Schicchi compel us to hear the opera itself in new ways and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about Puccini's place in music history.

This article focuses on the paratexts of opera DVDs as a route into the status and cultural placement of opera videos in contemporary visual culture. In particular, it analyses the picture covers, menus and openings credits of four productions of Verdi's Don Carlo, arguing that, although the videos fall within the broader discourse of the ‘televisual’ (a discourse that encourages the viewer to conceive the image as a transparent document of the performance on-stage), these paratexts put forward alternative ways of conceiving the relationship between medium and subject matter, imagining opera's materials, however briefly, in terms of narrative cinema and music video, video games and computer loops.