This article explores Verdi's death as a ‘media event’, tracing the unfolding news from the earliest reports of his imminent demise up to the monumental commemorations held 30 days afterwards. Throughout this time, news media helped to define a period of so-called national mourning. Yet a broader range of media (including the telegraph, tram and railway) played an important role in demarcating the geopolitical scope of this collective grief. As a point of comparison, Verdi's death is considered in relation to the assassination of King Umberto I – a recent incident, of greater magnitude, which had provoked a spell of national mourning only months into the new century. Echoes of Umberto's assassination can be heard in responses to Verdi's death, linking both events to a common historical and political moment. This new context for understanding Verdi's final moments not only seeks to illuminate the manifold interactions between public and persona in Liberal Italy but also raises questions about the construction of auditory experiences in national mourning and the sensory dimension of the nation state's lugubrious politics.

Rameau's Platée owes much more to Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs than the frog chorus. The main character in The Frogs, Dionysus, may well have been the inspiration for many of the traits of the nymph Platée. Both rule over wetlands and their inhabitants, and both are subjected to extensive mockery. While Dionysus is a divine patron of the theatre, Platée is a visual metaphor for opera. Dionysus, disguised as Heracles, fails to measure up to the hero, exhibiting cowardly behaviour and physical weakness, just as Platée fails to speak and act as a satisfactory operatic heroine, the model for which is, arguably, Lully's Armide. The parodic elements in the debate between Aeschylus and Euripides over the nature and function of tragedy resonate with the parody of tragédie lyrique which lies at the heart of Rameau's opera.

Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West, premièred in New York, 1910, represents what we might call a photographic turn in the later Puccini. For one, its mise-en-scène was given textual status equivalent to that of libreto and music. The opera's first costumes and sets were crafted for the Metropolitan Opera House from stills of the source play, The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco. What is more, the circulation of photographs and eventually a staging livret ensured that La fanciulla looked the same in every iteration. In this model, authorship and performance become acts of remediation between layers of machine-generated souvenirs. Both The Girl and La fanciulla bear the marks of their mediated nature: The Girl suggests a fragile third dimension through the use of panoramas and scrims; during its famous Act I sunset La fanciulla moves from a realist sound-world towards a fantasy one, the latter marked by disembodied humming from a tenor chorus and even a new instrument, the fonica, designed by Puccini to be sounded by electricity. This essay suggests that the purported resistance of Puccinian opera to revisionist staging has its roots in critiques of realism's ‘statistical’ universe, and the perceptual modes held to be available to mass-consumed art.

What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behaviour at London's eighteenth-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary. This article sets out to document as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theatres, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience's general behaviour, the beginnings in London of a ‘listening’ audience, and the performance of music between the acts. It concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium, and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.

Responses to Korngold's 1920 opera Die tote Stadt have long been filtered through the lens of his later Hollywood career. To do so, however, not only risks misunderstanding the relationship between these two different spheres of the composer's output, but also ignores the opera's complex positioning within the gender discourses of early twentieth-century Vienna. This article offers a corrective to the clichéd view of Korngold the ‘pre-filmic’ opera composer by arguing that, in its treatment of the characters Marie and Marietta, Die tote Stadt draws on a tradition of ‘strangling blonde’ imagery from the nineteenth century in order to critique the gender theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903), which were still current in the 1920s. As such, in its concern with the nature of femininity, Die tote Stadt also draws our attention to the modern woman who had just entered the composer's life, Luise (Luzi) von Sonnenthal.

This essay charts the contours of a ‘second practice’ in Puccini's corpus. Whereas his operas from the 1890s are fuelled by a longing for unmediated access to empirical reality, his later works unleash a variety of distant sounds that unsettle the aesthetics of verismo opera. These sounds, which draw on the ontology of wireless transmission just as surely as his earlier works do on that of phonographic transcription, find their fullest expression in Suor Angelica. The notorious Marian apparition that concludes that opera has long been mocked and explained away, and no wonder: for, if we attempt to take the miracle seriously, we may (like Puccini himself, in the years following Madama Butterfly) begin to doubt whether modernism ever was an art of confidence and disenchantment.

This essay explores how the soprano Caroline Carvalho (née Marie Félix-Miolan, 1827–95) perpetuated and extended the art of coloratura singing in the mid-nineteenth century. Creator of roles in sixteen operas, including five by Gounod, Carvalho achieved ‘superdiva’ status (Rutherford) by cultivating her voice – her ‘mécanisme prodigieux’ – to handle coloratura on a scale that explicitly invoked and rivalled the instrumental virtuosity of Paganini. In premièring the title role of Victor Massé's La Reine Topaze (1856), the soprano sang a variations aria based on the Carnival of Venice folk song and took one of the violinist's variations as a springboard to her own dazzling pyrotechnics. By allying her voice with the musical inventiveness of Paganini, who had achieved deific renown and artistic authority, Carvalho thereby acquired enough authority to catalyse a new genre, the valse-ariette. The popularity of a little-known aria that Gounod arranged for Carvalho, ‘Ah! Valse légère’ (based on the waltz chorus, ‘Ainsi que la brise légère’, from Act II of Faust, 1859), spurred a vogue for vertiginous waltz ariettes. Carvalho's association with this genre suggests even greater creative agency and indicates a shift in coloratura's signification from instrumentality to dance and the expressive body.