Recent Monteverdi scholarship has set great store by the composer's last work for the new ‘public’ opera houses of Venice, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643). The problematic status of the sources for Poppea – at least some of its music is not by Monteverdi – and a rather prurient fascination with its supposed amoral excess have provided ample scope for scholars to play their textual and critical games, often with impressive results. But this has deflected attention from Monteverdi's first Venetian opera, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640), written to a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro. Once a cause of some debate – Wolfgang Osthoff carried the torch in the 1950s – Il ritorno d'Ulisse is now seen as a much less complicated work. We have only one manuscript of the score – A-Wn MS 18763 – the uncertain provenance of which has caused scant musicological anxiety; nor have the surviving copies of the libretto, with their divergent readings, excited much recent comment from scholars. Thus the text is seemingly secure. Moreover, the supposed ‘moral’ of Il ritorno d'Ulisse – ‘the rewards of patience, the power of love over time and fortune’ — seems unproblematic, nay predictable, perhaps tedious. Even Ellen Rosand's noble attempt to inject a fly in the ointment by focusing on the seemingly minor character of Iro, the social parasite, has scarcely troubled complacent critical comment on an essentially straightforward opera with an essentially straightforward message.

‘From Nino and Semiramide, rulers of Assyria, was born a son who carried the name of his father, and so resembled his mother that the people could distinguish them only by means of masculine and feminine clothing.’ Thus begins the argo-mento to the libretto La Semiramide, produced in Venice at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo for the 1670–71 season. The gender ambiguity described in the argomento is evident in the portrait of Semiramide from the frontispiece of that libretto (see Fig. 1). She sits alone at her dressing table, adorning her hair with roses in anticipation of her lover's arrival. She admires herself in the mirror, eternal symbol of female vanity. Her bare breasts and navel contrast strikingly with the metal shield that girds her chest. A high-topped military sandal is displayed prominently beneath the folds of her skirt. Prior to assuming the male disguise that she will wear for much of the opera, Semiramide is already pictured in a manner that is warlike and sexually dangerous, challenging and seductive. This mixture of male and female attributes is critical to her new guise as a Venetian heroine.

[Liszt] was not only a musical genius, but could probably have achieved the heights in another profession too. When a diplomat at the Berlin court once asked him, ‘What would become of you if you suddenly lost your hands?’ he replied composedly: I could still be the world's greatest diplomat’.

A common feature of Cherubini's Parisian operas of the 1790s is the displacement of one or more of the protagonists. They are out of sorts with their environment, experiencing a need to escape that prevents the traditional unity of place from focusing the drama. The heroine of Lodoïska (1791) is imprisoned in a tower; in Eliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard Florindo travels to Mont St Bernard to forget his beloved Eliza, who pursues him and saves him from suicide. For the heroine of Médée (1797), Corinth represents unhappiness: she returns to her former home only to take revenge. In Les deux Journées (1800), Armand and Constance flee Paris to save their lives; even in the comic opera L'Hôtellerie portugaise (1798) the central location serves merely as a rendez-vous for the two lovers on their way to evade the wicked plans of Donna Gabriele's stepfather. These operas do not, in other words, unfold in reassuring environments where characters feel at home; nor are there neutral backgrounds that enable the drama to concentrate on personal interaction. What is more, although placing protagonists in such unhappy circumstances is widespread in late eighteenth-century opera, and ‘rescue operas’ in particular, it is at least arguable that Cherubini exploited their restlessness in a uniquely successful manner.

Although there have been a few revivals of Verdi's Stiffelio since its first modern performance in 1968, including an important 1985 production at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the opera has received until now only limited attention. With two stagings by major theatres in 1993 (London's Covent Garden in January and New York's Metropolitan Opera in October), the situation has changed markedly. Those of us who know Stiffelio well have tried to temper our enthusiasm, avoiding excessive claims and acknowledging some of the work's dramaturgical problems. But it should come as no surprise that an opera exquisitely poised between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto is likely to be worth rehearing, particularly when the work was withdrawn from circulation by its author for reasons having to do primarily with censorship of its libretto (in which the wife of a Protestant minister commits adultery) rather than with intrinsic artistic merit.

‘First performed in 1840 and praised by Liszt for its orchestration and workman-ship, the score does not deny Meyerbeerian influence. The present recording, which sounds as if it has been taken from a live performance in the theatre, has a first-class cast and is altogether fascinating.’ The object of this encomium is La vestale by the Italian composer Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870), the first commercial recording of which was issued on CD in 1989. The quotation, taken from a leading record magazine, seems representative of the response that recordings of Mercadante's works can currently expect: scarcely a single review fails to mention Meyerbeer's positive influence on Mercadante. But how far is one in fact justified in linking these two composers?

Among the more remarkable events of recent intellectual history is that Edward Said, famous avant-garde literary critic, passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, has begun to write about music. Moreover, not just about any kind of music, but about classical music in the élite (and canonical) European tradition – the symphonies of Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the chamber music of Schubert and Brahms. Several years ago Said took over the music column in The Nation magazine, and more recently he has published a book, Musical Elaborations, based on a series of invited lectures at the University of California at Irvine.

Although the term ‘verismo” emerged in both literature and opera during roughly the same period (in novels and spoken theatre around the 1870s, in opera around the 1890s), the modern tendency has been to regard this as a coincidence of little consequence. However, it is perhaps worth returning to the question in light of recent studies in literary verismo, some of which offer new perspectives and even contribute to a re-definition of operatic verismo. I shall start, then, from the hypothesis that a new comparison between these two types of verismo may lead to a common definition.

By a stroke of coincidence the critic Théodore de Wyzewa found himself sitting next to Jules Massenet during a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in August 1886. Massenet's behaviour made a deep enough impression on Wyzewa for him to share it with readers of Le Figaro several years later. ‘He quivered feverishly, became short-breathed, and his large, sombre eyes sparkled in the dark. And when the opera was over, I heard him say to someone in the corridors of the theatre “Ah! I am anxious to return to Paris to burn my Werther!”’ Wyzewa published his piece on the day of Werther's Paris première. In a city where Wagner stagings had recently become all the rage, this was hardly a ringing endorsement; but Wyzewa had a more important point. Massenet provided a prime example of an ill that had descended on French composers, all too many of whom had sacrificed native qualities in vain, sterile imitations of Wagner. Pale beside the ‘enchanted treasure of dream and fantasy’ (‘le trésor enchanté du rêve et de la fantaisie’) in Wagner's textures, such imitations had taken on a merely formulaic character.

In 1903, Otto Weininger, twenty-three, Viennese, Jewish, and an imminent suicide, published his misogynist manifesto Sex and Character and created an international sensation. ‘One began’, reported a contemporary, ‘to hear in the men's clubs of England and in the cafés of France and Germany – one began to hear singular mutterings among men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared.’ Weininger's new gospel tied the spiritual progress of the human race to the repudiation of its female half. Women, said Weininger, are purely material beings, mindless, sensuous, animalistic and amoral; lacking individuality, they act only at the behest of a ‘universalised, generalised, impersonal’ sexual instinct. For humanity to achieve its spiritual destiny, men – particularly ‘Aryan’ men, who had not suffered a racial degeneracy that made the task impossible – must achieve the individualistic supremacy first revealed by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In order to do this, they must both rid themselves of the femininity within them and reject their sexual desires for the women around them.

It is a commonplace that the poetry best suited to an operatic libretto has fewer pretensions, and more transparency in the range of interpretations that can be placed upon it, than ‘literary’ poetry. Otherwise, it will scarcely bear the weight of the music, much less contribute to the great emotional climaxes that justify opera for many listeners in the first place. And some might mistrust a libretto that is too ‘literary’ or too complicated, for metaphysical and other subtleties are not easily projected across the footlights. No one was more acutely aware of this ‘unliterary’ relationship between words and music in opera than W. H. Auden. Writing in 1948, he stated: ‘Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry.’

During the last hour we spoke about the transformation of opera into music drama, and I explained the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. So that nobody has any excuses, I'll write on the blackboard once more the names of

Richard Wagner

Richard Strauss

Now we come to a new chapter. You'll remember that I read to you from Wagner's texts. They always dealt with gods and heroes and curious concepts like forest murmur, magic fire, knights of the Grail, etc., which you found rather strange. Then there were some difficult thought processes, which you were unable to follow, and also certain things that you could not yet comprehend and are as yet none of your business. None of this was of much interest to you't want to go to sleep. You want to hear music you can comprehend without special explanation, music you can readily absorb and sing with relative ease. … Nowadays there are matters of greater interest to all, and if music cannot be placed in the service of society as a whole, it forfeits its right to exist in today's world.

At the end of the last century opera started to shed elements of its many-sided and hybrid character. Of course there are numerous exceptions, but in general the genre becomes tighter, the expansive five-act form that triumphed at Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century is rejected and several elements, such as the ballet, dismissed as distractions. Musical structures, influenced – among other things – by Wagner's leitmotif system, become denser and even large scores exhibit an exceptional thematic homogeneity. Most striking, all those bandits, pirates, gods and gypsies make way for more conventional figures in mundane urban and rural settings. The fantastic is displaced by the domestic – or, if the old stage-figures survive, they do so, as I will suggest below, in an altered and diluted form that makes them proper subjects for ‘play’.