Taking the opening solo song from the Florentine intermedi of 1589 as its focus, this article engages with questions regarding musical ownership, authorship, and the culture of print as it relates to musico-theatrical performance. The song, ‘Dalle più alte sfere’, was performed by the Florentine court’s prima donna Vittoria Archilei and the version she ostensibly sang appeared two years later in a commemorative print. While calling into question rigid distinctions between performer and composer during this period, the article nonetheless suggests that Archilei likely ‘composed’ the song, for which there are conflicting attributions. Evidence for this assertion includes disjunctions between the song as it appeared in print, its likely mode of ‘composition’, and the song’s realisation through the process-oriented act of live performance. These issues stand in stark relief to the likely incentives for publishing the Medici-commissioned music: harnessing the possibilities of print technology, the Florentines could effectively distill – and thus claim as their own – a primarily Roman/Neapolitan-associated performance practice, at the same time as attempting to rival the female-centred musical traditions of competing courts.

Ferdinand Hérold's 1827 ballet-pantomime La Somnambule, written for the Paris Opéra, is generally remembered today only as a source for Bellini's 1831 opera La sonnambula. However, Hérold's work – which also inspired a series of popular vaudevilles on the same theme – illustrates the strong, voyeuristic appeal of the trance phenomenon at the end of the Bourbon Restoration. It can be viewed as encapsulating wide-ranging contemporary ideas about the relationship between sleepwalking, mesmerism, madness and the supernatural. The aims of this article are twofold. First, it seeks to introduce important nuances into the received and often generalised claims usually made about the containing nature of trance scenes in nineteenth-century theatre, positing an alternative model to that of the unhinged heroine of Italian opera familiar from recent feminist writing on opera. Second, it illuminates the musical practices specific to late Restoration Paris that were so crucial to the aesthetic – and the success – of these sleepwalking heroines. A web of visual and musical allusions conjured up an entranced figure who, although related to the Italian operatic madwoman, has a personality and social implications all her own.

This essay does two things, one of them analytical, the other more sociological. The former consists in a dramaturgical analysis of Verdi's Macbeth. The discussion is not entirely conventional insofar as its impetus was pragmatic: this section lays out some of the dramaturgical thinking that went into preparations for a new production of Verdi's work slated for San Francisco Opera in the Autumn of 2004. Alas, in the Autumn of 2003 the production was abruptly cancelled. This (non-)event led to the essay's sociological aspiration: a consideration of how and why that cancellation came about. In addition to reviewing Pamela Rosenberg's unusually ambitious, experimental and controversial regime at San Francisco Opera, the essay also speculates on the relationship between a nascent critical dramaturgy and the prospects for innovation on the operatic stage in the United States at this historical moment.

From 1807 to 1864, Parisian music drama was governed by a system of licences that controlled the repertory of its three main lyric theatres: the Opéra (variously Académie Royale, Nationale and Impériale de Musique), the Théâtre-Italien and the Opéra-Comique. Between 1838 and 1840, the Théâtre de la Renaissance gained a licence to put on stage music, and quickly succeeded in establishing a reputation for energetic management, imaginative programming together with artistically and financially successful performances. It could do this only by exploiting what were effectively newly invented types of music drama: vaudeville avec airs nouveaux and opéra de genre. The invented genres however brought the theatre into legal conflict with the Opéra-Comique and Opéra respectively, and opened up a domain of jurisprudence –associated with repertory rather than copyright – hitherto unsuspected.

For Adorno, the graphic reproduction of operatic performance means that the primary scene of audition has shifted as well: from the theatre – and the telic determinations towards which the natural history of the theatre tends – to the living room, where people gather to listen to what they no longer concern themselves to perform. The phonograph allows the vagaries and vulgarities of the visuality of (operatic) performance to be held off or back by an auditory experience whose condition of possibility and whose end is the illusory recovery of something literary – and thus essentially visual. What remains is to begin an attempt to see and hear what might be gained by moving through the opposition of the denigration of the recording in the discourse of performance and the denigration of performance in the discourse of ‘classical’ musicology. This attempt is made by way of the 1993 recording of Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, starring Jessye Norman as the opera's single character, Die Frau, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the baton of James Levine. It is an attempt that has required reading with and against Adorno – which is to say, listening to and for the sound that works in and against him.

This article addresses the long-controversial dating of the cadenza with flute in the mad scene of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. New manuscript sources indicate that the famous cadenza dates not from the first half of the nineteenth century, as musicologists had assumed, but from 1889, when it was added to the opera for Nelly Melba’s performances at the Palais Garnier, Paris. The cadenza was most likely composed by Melba’s teacher Mathilde Marchesi to showcase the light voice and virtuosic technique of her student. Once introduced, the cadenza with flute decisively altered the impact and reception of the mad scene. In the first two decades after the opera’s 1835 première, the mad scene had not been particularly popular, perhaps because it contravened contemporary Italian taste for mad scenes featuring docile, virginal heroines. By the fin de siècle, however, the mad scene was regarded as the highlight of the opera, the excesses of the cadenza resonating with the new vogue for violent and hysterical heroines on the operatic stage.

This essay addresses the materiality of voice in opera production, proposing a shift away from methodological models that posit voice as silent and disembodied towards one in which the body figures central. Comparing the voice in opera with the voice of the performative utterance, the article assesses the relevance of performativity to opera studies. A distinction between Derrida's critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and the presence of performance leads to a discussion of the ‘force’ of the vocal utterance and its relationship to the real via Shoshana Felman's The Scandal of the Speaking Body. The central argument is that voice upsets the model of distanced reason upon which enlightened subjectivity depends.

When African-American entertainer Josephine Baker first arrived in Paris in 1925, her dancing to the ‘jazz hot’ of La Revue nègre was, famously, perceived as ‘primitive’. But her 1934 performances in Offenbach’s La Créole completed the construction – and tested the limits – of a complex redefinition of Baker as French. Substantially revised, the operetta in effect staged her own assimilation, a new black character serving as a foil for the ‘creole’ Josephine and marking her as ‘in-between’. If most observers saw Baker’s transformation as an affirmation of France’s civilising mission, the few dissenters paradoxically risked insisting on her difference in terms of an essentialised blackness. Recognising both personas as ‘performative’ relocates Baker’s agency. It helps move beyond fixed racial categories to dynamic cultural processes: ‘creolisation’.

This study of the ending customarily appended to Giacomo Puccini's unfinished Turandot offers a new perspective on its genesis: that of its principal creator, Franco Alfano. Following Puccini's death in November 1924, the press overstated the amount of music that he had completed for the opera's climactic duet and final scene. In fact, Puccini's manuscripts were so disjointed that Arturo Toscanini, the conductor chosen to lead the première, drafted the reluctant Alfano to fashion them into a viable conclusion. While occupied with this assignment, Alfano spoke with the writer Raymond Roussel about his plans for the opera's completion. This long-forgotten interview, absent from previous studies of Turandot's conclusion, reveals a strategy that would inevitably fall foul of Toscanini's expectations. Rejecting Alfano's first attempt for its extensive original composition, Toscanini forced changes on the conclusion that undermine both its musical coherence and dramatic logic. I assess Alfano's original ending in light of his frustration with Puccini's sketches, as well as the generally deleterious result of Toscanini's interventions. While neither conclusion represents an ideal solution, a judicious conflation of the two versions offers the best chance of reconciling a suitable denouement with the musical character of Puccini's finished score.

I am happy to strive to add an appoggiatura – if my comments might be considered a minor bridge towards a deferred conclusion – to the very stimulating set of articles by Michelle Duncan, David Levin and Fred Moten that appear in this issue. It struck me that these three articles can be read as imbroglio in that they offer contest, or dissonant engagement, more than seamless convergence. Indeed, by underscoring the complexities that haunt our habits of reception in ‘artistic’ practice, these essays further the passion and urgency in listening closely to less audible aspects in any cultural production including opera.

Although widely perceived as untraditional and unpatriotic, Sondheim’s 1991 Assassins is neither; it is in fact based securely on themes and strategies developed within the mainstream tradition of the American musical. In both respects, it shows particular affinity to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, a relationship that becomes especially evident when considering the latter’s basis in Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs. The author examines related background, dialogue and individual songs from each musical, the latter including ‘Pore Jud’, ‘Lonely Room’ and ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ from Oklahoma!, and ‘Everybody’s Got the Right’, ‘The Ballad of Booth’, ‘Gun Song’, ‘Unworthy of Your Love’, ‘Another National Anthem’ and the book depository scene from Assassins. Yet Assassins departs from the mainstream in one important respect: by failing to foreground adequately a sympathetic viewpoint (despite the addition of ‘Something Just Broke’), the show seems to place its dominant characters in opposition to the audience, who represent its real protagonist, the American people.

This article examines the new finale by Luciano Berio for Puccini's Turandot, commissioned by the Festival de Musica de Gran Canarias and prèmiered in 2002. This finale constitutes a priviledged point of view from which to revisit not only the composer's life-long engagement with musical works of the past, but also his theatrical aesthetics, thrown into sharp relief by the particular challenges of this endeavour. Berio's compositional process is carefully reconstructed, from his interventions on the libretto to his respectful yet creative use of the numerous sketches left behind by Puccini. Particular attention is then paid to Berio's choice of reminiscences from earlier scenes of the opera, as well as to his citations from Wagner's Tristan, Mahler's Seventh Symphony and Schönberg's Gurrelieder. A separate section is devoted to Berio's most original contribution: a long orchestral interlude at the moment when Calaf kisses Turandot. The article concludes with a detailed scrutiny of Berio's orchestration.

The title of this issue, ‘Performance Studies and Opera’, optimistically announces a conjunction between two disciplines that have previously had surprisingly little to do with each other, despite substantial common ground. The three articles gathered here, however, bear marks both of the excitement sparked by the novelty of bringing the methods of performance studies to bear on opera (significantly, the reverse process, operatic theory used to interpret other modes of performance, remains almost unimaginable) and a caution occasioned by their authors' sensitivity to the difficulties involved in any such translation.