Ravel's comic opera L'Heure espagnole (1911) has often been criticised for a certain coldness and lack of sentiment. Such characteristics, however, might profitably be seen in light of Ravel's modernity, an art where surface is privileged over depth. Parallels between Ravel's approach and Henri Bergson's nearly contemporaneous theory of laughter developed in Le Rire – in itself an articulate explication of the surface/depth binary – provide insight into Ravel's aesthetic. This orientation unfolds in the detached adaptation of two historical models in L'Heure espagnole: secco recitative from opera buffa and leitmotivic writing from Wagnerian opera.

Although the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s comic opera Platée predated the Querelle des bouffons by several years, it raised questions that were at the centre of the debate that shook the Paris Opéra in the early 1750s. Commentators had difficulty situating Platée within the French operatic tradition; and many identified it as a work derived from Italian models. The opera’s music and libretto, mentioned in many of the letters and pamphlets written during the Querelle, clearly struck a nerve. Platée challenged the aesthetic status of French opera by foregrounding aspects of the French language to which participants in the Querelle, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, objected: the silent ‘e’, the presence of diphthongs and an overabundance of consonants. In the end, by undermining the traditional poetic framework through which operatic works were understood in the mid-eighteenth century, the debate on Platée during the Querelle opened up new possibilities for discourse on music.

Opera is a genre that prizes interior expression. How then does it cope with characters who are defined by reticence and inscrutability? Donizetti's 1837 opera Roberto Devereux thematises these issues – a reflection, in part, of the nineteenth century's growing anxieties over public self-expression. Engaging with contemporary 1830s criticism, this article focuses on two numbers in the work that were identified as problematic by early audiences, arguing that their perceived failure is a consequence of the work's inventive depiction of its characters' vacant subjectivities. Donizetti's opera can be seen to stretch primo Ottocento operatic conventions to their limits, in the process undoing the traditional correspondence between interior expression and self-definition.

It has often been suggested that a renewed fascination with Verdi’s Don Carlos coincided with the advent of Regieoper (or radically revisionist staging) in Germany over the past few decades. However, Don Carlos already counted among the most frequently revived operas in German-language theatres during the first half of the twentieth century. This article argues that neglect of this rich performance tradition is linked both to a German-centred narrative of the history of operatic production, which constructs the 1930s and 1940s as a gap in the development of ‘avant-garde’ direction, and to an over-emphasis on the visual side in recent academic discourse on operatic staging. These attitudes are challenged by a close look at selected German productions of Don Carlos from the 1920s to 1940s. Treatment of the opera's most difficult scenes – the mystical elements of the auto-da-fé finale and the dénouement – reveals striking continuities between the Weimar and Nazi eras, as well as conceptual affinities to some of the most acclaimed recent stagings. These findings call for a more historically grounded approach to operatic production.

Franz Schreker's opera Der ferne Klang is usually discussed using the term ‘phantasmagoria’, as a guiding thread. This article argues that this term names not one but two phenomena: as used by Theodor W. Adorno in his analysis of Wagner, the term denotes the repression of musical production in order to create a music without origin. In a lesser-known piece Adorno uses the term slightly differently, in a sense pioneered first by his friend Walter Benjamin. This second sense is interested in the repression not of musical production, but of the acoustic means of production that conspire to create a unified, synaesthetic experience (rather than an aesthetic object). This second sense, the denial of any sense data outside of the one experience to be had in an opera house, is exceedingly fruitful when applied to Der ferne Klang, since its hero is questing for the titular sound which is located in that very space the aural phantasmagoria has to pretend does not exist. Reading Schreker's opera keeping both senses of the term in mind may allow us to overcome Adorno's own somewhat negative assessment of Schreker's modernism and to locate within the opera a certain self-consciousness of phantasmagoric production.

For a brief period in his career, Verdi wrote operas about compromised or ‘fallen’ women, women condemned for their sexuality: not only Lina in Stiffelio and Violetta in La traviata, but also – if we take into account the way their men regard them – Lida in La battaglia di Legnano, Luisa in Luisa Miller and Leonora in Il trovatore. These women suffer or die. Gilda also dies, in Rigoletto, ultimately a victim of her sexual availability. This essay examines Verdi's contribution to ‘the undoing of women’ and relates it speculatively to his experience as Giuseppina Strepponi's lover around the same time.

The subject of this article is the failure of the Stalinist Soviet opera project. Although similar proposals had appeared years before, the project was inaugurated in 1936, and its realisation was placed in the hands of the State Committee for Artistic Affairs. The archival materials discussed in the article (including transcripts of the Committee's meetings) demonstrate that even publicly acclaimed productions were seen as failures by these senior bureaucrats. On the one hand, there were demands for realism and contemporary topics, and on the other, for monumentality and elevated musical language; these demands proved to be in deep conflict with each other. In addition to this crippling problem, it soon became apparent that any treatment of a contemporary topic was bound to become unacceptable before long, given the ever-shifting political landscape. While novels and films were certainly under close scrutiny, many operas were subjected to so many demands for revision that they never saw production at all. The article's central claim is that the 1939 Soviet reworking of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar as Ivan Susanin fulfilled the state's needs much better than any newly created Soviet opera could have, resulting in the effective curtailment of the project by 1946.

Premièred at Glyndebourne in October 1994 and subsequently performed in the UK, Austria, Germany and Holland, The Second Mrs Kong was the result of a collaboration between the American writer Russell Hoban and British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The opera's reception has tended to emphasise the disparity between Hoban's diverse and eclectic interests, which emerge not only in the libretto but also in his novels and essays, and Birtwistle's more introspective and linear approach. Possible connections between Hoban's aesthetics and Birtwistle's music have generally been disregarded. I argue, however, that the opera's main aesthetic concerns – namely, the mediation of images through ideas and the workings of image-identification in diverse media – are shaped by a productive exchange between librettist and composer. The clearest expression of this interaction is the love between Kong, who embodies ‘the idea of’ King Kong from the 1933 RKO film, and Pearl, a character drawn from Vermeer's iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The representation of these visual icons in The Second Mrs Kong is inflected by Birtwistle's own views on images, by his attempts to find musical analogues for visual techniques, as revealed especially in his sketches, and by his lively engagement with Hoban's ideas.

Alexander Zemlinsky's one-act opera A Florentine Tragedy (1917), based on Oscar Wilde's play of the same title, features an erotic triangle – a woman, her husband and her lover – that erupts into violence, murder and a shocking dramatic reversal at the end. Throughout the drama, the character of the woman is a passive mirror in whose eyes the male characters see their own idealised images. The marginalised subject-position of the woman, however, reveals the pivotal role of the feminine in the narcissistic constructions of male desire and the male self. At the same time, however, this reading enables an interpretation of the drama as a project for conceptualising another marginal subjectivity: that of the homosexual male. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's and Kaja Silverman's theories, the article explores first the complex dynamics of the triangle at the centre of the drama, and then the implications of a Freudian triangular model of male homosexual subjectivity as constituted through narcissistic object-choice. The homoerotic subtext of Wilde's play is revealed partly through the ambiguities of the woman's position in her connections with each of the men, a role that is seen more clearly in terms of their bonds with each other. This subtext is also implicit in the typically Wildean eroticisation of commerce and commercialisation of eros, through which the men engage in relations highly nuanced by erotically inflected language. Most intriguing is the way the male homosocial reading of the drama is supported by the motivic-dramatic structure of Zemlinsky's opera, as suggested by a new interpretation of the ambiguous musical motifs of ‘love’ and ‘death’ that permeate the opera's most crucial scenes.

Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, singers famous for their 1720s London rivalry, were not necessarily the warring protagonists history has made them out to be. While opera historians have long acknowledged the role audience factions played in creating the rivalry, the contribution made by the opera company itself has not been considered. Working from the premise that the Royal Academy shaped its operas around this important aspect of its stars' public personae, I focus on Handel's Admeto (1727) to examine both the way opera was structured to take account of the rivalry and the concomitant play with the singers' identities provided in the work. I argue that, in employing the miniature portrait and female disguise as its two central plot devices, and in the theatricality of its music, Admeto explores notions of authenticity and identity, female mutability, and anxiety and disavowal.

The score of Kurt Weill's Zeitoper, Der Zar läßt sich photographieren (1928), is void at its centre: the musical and dramatic climax, the ‘Tango Angèle’, only exists as a gramophone recording, played on stage, while the orchestra falls silent. Just as the perennial themes of love and death are relentlessly updated in this farcical opera into their anti-metaphysical modern-day equivalents – sex and political assassination – so the music avails itself of modern media to bring across its McLuhanesque point: the medium is the message. The sound medium matters in two ways: first, the gramophone emphatically teleports the tango – a fashionable and sexually loaded dance – into the realm of opera; second, the recorded performance constitutes its exclusive musical reality. As if to underscore this point, parts and score of the ‘Tango Angèle’ were lost shortly after Weill produced the recording for the première: only the recording remained. This article reconstructs the nexus between popular music, modern sound media and operatic aesthetics in Weimar Germany: while the recording is an expression of Zeitoper's demand for radical up-to-dateness, the sound of the record, paradoxically, locks it forever in 1928. A relatively obscure work nowadays, Der Zar remains perhaps the most far-reaching response to the Opernkrise of the mid-1920s, reconfigured here as a crisis of musical writing.

With the exception of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Soviet opera in the 1930s has been relatively little studied. Yet this was an era in which opera was vigorously promoted as an ideal Soviet form after more than a decade of criticism from radical proletarian groups. This article considers three main aspects of Soviet operatic culture in the 1930s. First, opera's emotional power was valued as a way to mobilise mass opinion and the opera house was increasingly seen as a highly ideological site. Second, whilst most of the work in founding a Soviet repertory was carried out at Leningrad's Malyi Opera Theatre, Moscow became increasingly involved as the decade continued. Third, Soviet opera was highly dependent on adaptations of socialist realist novels. This phenomenon of ‘transposition’ is seen here as an attempt to invest scores with an unimpeachable political message. Moreover, transposition was an ideal method of regulating ambiguous literary texts by condensing their cardinal features in dramatic form. Although the story of Soviet opera was largely one of failure, its study sheds important light not only on the development of the Russian operatic tradition, but also on the dynamics of Stalinist culture.