When Alexander Grechaninov's opera Sister Beatrice on a text by Maurice Maeterlinck premiered in Moscow in 1912, it promised to bring together two conceptual worlds, those of symbolist aesthetics and the Russian Orthodox liturgy. Critics who hoped that Grechaninov's experience as a composer of sacred music would help bring alive the ‘unheard music’ of Maeterlinck's symbolist ‘Miracle Play’, however, were sorely disappointed. The opera drew scorn from critics for its overly concrete musical rhetoric, while conservative commentators levelled claims of blasphemy. In this article, I consider the two scenes depicting miracles in Sister Beatrice to demonstrate how it negotiated these competing perspectives, employing insights from religious philosophy as well as symbolist aesthetics. Drawing on new archival evidence, I also demonstrate how church and state censors co-participated with composers and critics debating whether and how the sacred might be displayed on stage and in sound.

Franz Lehár's 1928 Berlin operetta Friederike boasts an unusual subject: a romantic incident in the early life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Weimar Berlin is usually considered as a haven for experimentation between high and low culture, a bifurcated view which has dominated German studies, but in this article I argue that Friederike is best considered as an example of the middlebrow. I examine the many sources which contributed to Friederike, from Goethe to Wagner to contemporary plays; analyse the score's stylistic allusions and the performance of star tenor Richard Tauber; and finally turn to Lehár's rhetorical positioning of his work on the Berlin theatrical scene. I argue that operetta scholarship itself has traditionally been ill-equipped to deal with Lehár's late works and operetta more generally, and that middlebrow studies’ nuanced consideration of questions of art, commerce and prestige can contribute more widely to operetta and Weimar historiography.

Alva Belmont and Elsa Maxwell's Melinda and Her Sisters (1916) is a little-known work promoting women's suffrage, which was publicly performed only once in New York City. It was advertised as an operetta, a decision which minimised its overt stylistic and functional similarities to other genres of popular musical theatre from the period, namely, musical comedy and pageantry. Framed through Jeffrey Kallberg's concept of genre as a ‘gesture of labeling’, this article asks what could be gained – artistically, financially and politically – by Belmont and Maxwell's invocation of operetta and by their disavowal of other appropriate genre alternatives. I argue that the strategy reflects their fundraising priorities, the attitudes of their intended audience, and the social, political and artistic climates that constrained women's activities. This case study offers genre as a productive lens through which to interpret gynocentric musical production and performance.

Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti created a stepping stone towards his own brand of serious but accessible music theater. While he dedicated the opera in seven scenes to Marc Blitzstein, that path was paved by the formal innovations of Kurt Weill. A comparative analysis of Trouble in Tahiti with Lady in the Dark reveals that Bernstein derived essential impulses from Weill's musical play, although the few statements he made about his music indicate ambivalence and competition, particularly with regard to Weill's American works. As Bernstein's female protagonist, Dinah, struggles to define herself vis-à-vis the institution of marriage, the themes of psychoanalysis, Hollywood glamour and the use of song as a meta-dramatic topic emerge as common threads. Select harmonies, instrumentation and rhythmic devices further evince debts to the precursor of Weill. But while Liza of Lady in the Dark finds her musical cure, Dinah does not meet with personal fulfilment.

Like many modernist engagements with the theme of outsider identity, Alexander Zemlinsky's 1921 opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) finds its dramatic nexus in the disabled body. In opera, such bodies are not only (historically) texted but also (presently) performed, with modern stagings offering a form of mediation between the historical and contemporary. With reference to two productions of Der Zwerg, this article unpicks aspects of the representation and performance of disability on the operatic stage. I first explore disability's simultaneous exaggeration and disappearance as a result of the problematic practice of ‘disability mimicry’. The effects of this practice and its proximity to issues of authenticity and embodiment are only made more tangible in the context of live performance, where attempts to embody disability's physicality are often sensationalised and unconvincing at best. However, disability can be, and is, represented in myriad ways. While disability mimicry can engender modes of perceiving disability from a voyeuristic perspective, these productions in fact make use of processes of ‘enfreakment’ to present disability through modes of theatrical production and aesthetic choice. This raises pertinent questions about why and by what means the disabled body is mobilised (or not) on the operatic stage, highlighting, moreover, disability's tendency to indicate meaning in registers beyond the body.

The operas of Per Nørgård (b. 1932) embody a search for hidden wisdom and spiritual transcendence characteristic of artists who came to maturity during the 1960s. Gilgamesh (1972) and Nuit des hommes (1996) can be perceived as mirror images that embody visions of universal harmony and discord, and of spiritual wholeness and disintegration. This article analyses Nørgård's use of mythic paradigms and Jungian archetypes to structure the operas. It also examines Nørgård's use of dialectical polarities, including creation and death, the human and the divine, and self and others. In particular, it discusses two concepts derived from the work of Joseph Campbell, the ‘hero's journey’ and the ‘cosmogonic cycle’, linking them to Jung's theory of individuation. While Gilgamesh embodies a successful realisation of the hero's journey, the characters in Nuit des hommes become directionless wayfarers in a hostile world.

This article examines the conception and subsequent reception of Jaromír Weinberger's 1927 opera Schwanda the Bagpiper in the context of various expressions of nationalism, anti-Semitism and Jewish identity politics throughout the interwar period. It takes into consideration the many historical, political and musical junctures before and during the opera's trajectory. While remaining rooted in nineteenth-century Czech nationalism, Weinberger sought to blend a plurality of cultural expressions, thus responding to the transitory state of nationalism during the interwar period. This is evident in the dialectics of the work – including its music, its libretto by Miloš Kareš and the first production. In this way, Schwanda and its divergent reception represents young Czechoslovakia's liminalities in relation to nationalism and the complexities of the new multi-ethnic state, especially with regard to its minorities. The article thus offers insights into the phenomenon of nationalism, which at the time of the opera's conception was inescapably co-constructed with anti-Semitism, and demonstrates Schwanda's importance as part of larger histories of European music and opera.

This article explores contemporary representations of wartime sexual violence on the operatic stage. Rape and the threat of rape loom over many operas in the canon, but even those operas that do not thematise rape may have sexual violence introduced to them in performance. Through analysis of four twenty-first century productions, I consider how the idea of sexual violence works in these wartime stories. Staging the implicit or explicit sexual violence in canonic operas can, in the best cases, allow for nuanced commentary on the subject in our cultural moment. But putting sexual violence on stage is controversial and can pose real risks to audience members. Instead of dismissing the proliferation of depictions of rape in wartime opera productions as mere scandalmongering, I explore specific representations through a feminist ethical framework, and ask: What do we risk and what might we gain by putting rape on stage in these operas?

In this article I argue that the longstanding practice of depicting Italian Americans as opera lovers stems from a tradition associating Italian immigrants with mechanical music devices. As a growing number of Italian unskilled labourers entered the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were stereotyped as street musicians, and especially as organ grinders, in mainstream popular culture. Beginning in the 1900s, recording manufacturers strove to make home phonographs appealing to the middle class by breaking the chain of mechanical, social and racial associations that connected the phonograph with earlier musical devices such as the barrel organ, and with those who played them. Because of the prominent marketing role that record labels assigned to Italian opera, this commercial strategy had important consequences for the genre as well as for Italian immigrants, who leveraged opera's renewed visibility and audibility into an effective vessel for social and political empowerment.

Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars was a celebrated site-based and technetronic musical performance that sought to bring opera into various communities in Los Angeles, many of which were economically disadvantaged. In the process, this opera set off a firestorm of protests that ultimately resulted in confrontations with community members, protests that would test the very premise of the dissemination of opera and performance outside spaces of privilege and in communities of colour. Informed by the concept of transit-oriented performance, this article analyses some ways in which neoliberalism is distorting opera's modern-day resonances.

In 2017, on the debut of the soprano Hui He in the role of Aida at the Hong Kong Opera, a Japanese finance and business website published a short article to introduce its readers to Verdi's monumental opera and more general issues of cultural appropriation and whitewashing related to it. What caught my attention, however, was the headline. Short and concise, it grasped an aspect that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: ‘Opera Hong Kong's new production of “Aida” in October will feature a Chinese soprano playing an African princess singing in Italian’. The headline writer was probably more intrigued by the multicultural quirkiness of this event and ignored, for the sake of the readers, its cultural and historical implications. In fact, the article itself succeeded in depicting this event as a proper, if not extreme, moment of transcultural encounters by mingling different cultures – the Ethiopian heritage of the protagonist of the opera, the musical aura of Italian operas and the Chinese nationality of the soprano Hui He, opposed to the location of the Hong Kong opera evoked by a Japanese magazine – under the unifying authority of Verdi's Aida. This article seemed to consciously invoke a multicultural dimension built around the perceived prestige of Aida and all the debates on imperialism that, from Said to Drummond and Locke, have become attached to it. Verdi's music is safely placed at the centre of a wide transcultural discourse which, rather than undermining the cultural ‘authority’ of Italian opera, reaffirms it even more strongly as a proper vehicle of ‘global uniformity’, as Christopher A. Bayly would define it.

The Doctor of Myddfai (1995), Peter Maxwell Davies's third full-scale opera and his first collaboration with David Pountney, is a work that occupies an important position within the composer's output for the opera house and theatre. However, whereas a significant amount of scholarly attention has been afforded to Davies's music-theatre works of the 1960s and the operas Taverner (1962–8) and Resurrection (1986–7), The Doctor of Myddfai has been somewhat neglected by comparison. This article examines the opera from two perspectives. The first addresses the work's dystopian setting and argues that key issues highlighted in the libretto – especially in relation to certain political concerns and environmental anxieties – have a strong contemporary resonance. The second focuses on the opera's articulation of Welsh identity, particularly through the use of Welsh folklore, native landscape and place, and indigenous musical signifiers. The intersection of these two elements – the work's celebration of Welshness and its dystopian qualities – imbues the opera with an intrinsic yet highly productive sense of tension and opposition: characteristics that drive the work towards its compelling conclusion.

Sergei Prokofiev's operatic career exhibits a multitude of exceptional successes and failures, political and cultural idiosyncrasies and compromises, and bold convictions and uncertainties. Prokofiev considered himself an opera composer and showed his affinity for it from an early age, completing his first opera by age nine and continuing his work in the art form for the remainder of his life and career. Each opera takes on vastly different subjects, topics and time periods, evidence of his diverse selection of libretto sources. For his mature works, Prokofiev adapted literary works from Russia's nineteenth-century greats (Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy), a Russian twentieth-century symbolist author (Bryusov) and two socialist-realist authors (Katayev and Polevoy). He adapted two other operas from the eighteenth century with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comic opera libretto for The Duenna and Carlo Gozzi's fiaba L'amore delle tre melarance.