This article traces the Italian reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet’s Pygmalion (1770), ultimately arguing that the influence of early melodrama (and not the better-remembered Viennese reform) was behind the emergence of a style of speech-like singing and gestural mirroring in Italian opera in the decades immediately around 1800. Rousseauian melodrama was one of a few related projects subsuming the spoken word within the domain of music during the 1770s and 1780s; another was Joshua Steele’s Prosodia rationalis, which proposed a system of modified music notation in order to preserve and transmit the spoken word. This article suggests (contra most recent historians of melodrama) that such projects were inflected by a kind of twilight classicism, in which the revived object was made to show signs of decay. The revivalist strain in the first melodrama was particularly important for its Italian reception. Rousseau’s ideal of an ancient, onomatopoeic language collapsing meaning and medium was naturalised into the rhetoric of Italian opera reform during the 1770s and 1780s by the Jesuit theorists Antonio Eximeno and Stefano Arteaga. By way of a coda, this article traces the emergence of a ‘melodramatic’ style of Italian opera, first in all-sung adaptations of Pygmalion, thence into Venetian opera of the 1790s more broadly, and finally into Donizetti’s techniques of gestural mirroring and what was called the ‘canto filosofico’ of Bellini’s early operas.

When Sergei Prokofiev chose to adapt War and Peace for the Soviet opera stage in the 1940s, he faced both operatic conventions and Soviet ideological demands that ran counter to the philosophy and structure of Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece. Prokofiev’s early decision to split his opera into Peace and War, making the first a romantic love story of individuals and the second a collective story of the people’s love for Mother Russia, marked a major divergence from Tolstoy. This article explores how Prokofiev reworked Tolstoy’s philosophy of love and human connection to make his opera acceptable for the Soviet stage. Moving away from Tolstoy’s family ideal in Peace, with its basis on intimate sibling bonds, Prokofiev shifted the family to War, turning it into a national Russian family of Father Kutuzov, Mother Russia and their children – the Russian people. The opera uses choral glorification of these heroic parents to foster on a national scale the type of intimacy Tolstoy had advocated in the home.

Between the initial conception in 1848 of a project on the Siegfried legend comprising a single work, Siegfried’s Tod, and its subsequent expansion in 1851 with the addition of Der junge Siegfried as a ‘prequel’ about the hero’s early life, Richard Wagner turned against Giacomo Meyerbeer in public denunciations in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (1850) and Oper und Drama (1850–1). Changes in the treatment of the Mime–Siegfried relationship between 1848 and 1851 as well as similarities between Wagner’s characterisations of Meyerbeer and his portrayal of Mime in the 1851 sources suggest that Wagner’s animosity towards his former mentor informed a new conception of the dwarf. The troubled Mime–Siegfried relationship that crystallised in 1851 allowed Wagner to give symbolic, aesthetic form not only to his criticisms of Meyerbeer as man and artist but also to his own new creative path. That Meyerbeer by 1851 had come to represent to Wagner the personal and artistic deficiencies of all Jews necessarily also means that Wagner’s projection of Meyerbeer into Mime in Der junge Siegfried carried with it a more generally anti-Jewish message, as is frequently asserted in the literature.

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.

Operetta held an ambiguous position within Nazi German entertainment culture: while suitably diverting and escapist, many of the most successful hits had Jewish authors and were thus increasingly avoided by theatre directors. To replenish the Reich’s performable repertory, Goebbels founded the ‘Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’, whose revisions of classical works including Handel’s oratorios and Mozart’s Da Ponte operas have been widely discussed. This article focuses on one of the institution’s many operetta commissions, Viennese satirist Rudolf Weys’s unfinished 1944 version of Franz Lehár’s Der Rastelbinder (1902), a box office success that featured an itinerant Jewish peddler as the central character. Weys’s revisions as well as his own story show that this kind of Reichsstelle commission could be a lifeline for artists who could not afford to attract attention or leave the Reich.

Wagner’s vaunted model of artistic synthesis persists in scholarly assessments of his work. But at its centre, the composer argued that the media of voice and orchestra do not mix: they retain their identities as separate channels of sound that can neither duplicate nor substitute for one another. Taking as a starting point Wagner’s claims for the non-adaptability of media, this article addresses the adaptation of Wagner’s music to the modern digital technologies of HD cinema and video game. Drawing on a wide circle of writers, from Schiller and Žižek to Bakhtin, Augé, Baudrillard and second-generation media theorists, it interrogates the concept of ‘reality’ within live acoustic performance, both historically, as a discursive concept, and technologically, via the sensory realism of digital simulcasting and telepresence. The philosophical opposition of appearance and reality fails when reality is defined by the intimate simulation of a sensory event as it is registered on the body. And by contrasting the traditions of high fidelity in (classical) sound recording with that of rendering sound in cinema, I suggest ways in which unmixable media appear to have an afterlife in modern technologies. This raises questions – in a post-Benjamin, post-McLuhan context – about our definition of ‘liveness’, the concept of authenticity within mediatised and acoustic sounds, and our vulnerability to the technological effects of media.

During the 1780s a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra, known only as Monsieur Hivart, served the Russian Count Nicholas Sheremetev as an operatic agent, sending scores, librettos, costume designs, stage designs and other materials related to opera in Paris, and advising the count on the production of French operas in Russia. Hivart was in contact with such composers as Grétry, Sacchini and Piccinni, and the stage machinist and ballet master of the Opéra, and from his place in the orchestra he could watch their work take shape on stage. This gives his letters to Sheremetev (published in Russian translation in 1944 but largely unknown in the West) significant value for historians of opera in eighteenth-century Paris. Especially extensive are Hivart’s reports on the first production of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes, which contain much information about the first production available nowhere else.

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.

Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (1905) was conceived during a period of instability in both operetta and Viennese life. Considering the music and reception of both Witwe and some of its immediate, now-forgotten predecessors, this article argues that the operetta’s dramatic and musical dualism between urbane, Offenbach-like Paris and folksy, imaginary Pontevedro can be read both as a response to operetta’s conflicting priorities of satire and sentiment and as a depiction of the multi-ethnic world of working-class Vienna. The operetta’s unusual popularity, subsequent influence and exceptionally long performance history have tended to obscure these more immediate concerns.

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor contains several features that make it unusual within his dramatic output and that thus render problematic the idea of a unified ‘Shakespearean’ canon. Until very recently, literary criticism has either largely ignored or denigrated the play, with a sustained interest in its portrayal of female agency, family life and the natural world only consolidating in the early twenty-first century. However, earlier operatic adaptations, such as Salieri and Defranceschi’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle, demonstrate an engagement with those issues which literary criticism has only lately addressed. While approaches to adaptations of The Merry Wives often focus primarily on the character of Falstaff, Salieri and Defranceschi’s opera’s engagement with the play’s issues beyond Falstaff suggests it might give added weight to a growing awareness of a positive alternative reception history of the play beyond literary criticism. At the same time, a consideration of the opera’s engagement with the play’s themes of female agency, family life and the natural world might shed light on Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle beyond the shadow cast by Verdi’s central character.