Unlike the opera parodies performed at the Comédie-Italienne in the 1690s and collected by Evariste Gherardi, Dancourt's Angélique et Médor and Renaud et Armide were performed during the première runs of their target operas – Lully's and Quinault's Roland and Armide, respectively. Undoubtedly prompted by Lully's opera monopoly and the draconian restrictions on music and dance that affected the musical repertory at the Comédie-Française, Dancourt's parodies take a tongue-in-cheek view of the madness of opera in general, while specifically satirizing the themes, characters, and operatic situations found in Roland and Armide.

Permeable boundaries form the musical ‘thread’ of Don Giovanni– a compositional strategy fundamental to the opera's character. Customary cadential borders get omitted or blurred; material heard early in the opera prominently returns; and all the accompanied recitative-set piece pairs act as ‘composite pieces’ – scenes in which musical material as well as dramatic function bind the accompanied recitative and aria or duet together and fuse them into one entity. ‘Permeability’ is heightened in Don Giovanni due to the supernatural elements of the plot, the title character's refusal to to submit to society's strictures, Gluck's association with the story, and Mozart's propensity for musical one-upmanship. Yet it is by no means unique to that work. Studying the relationships between accompanied recitatives and adjacent numbers reveals a ‘middleground’ of musical continuity that lies between long-range tonal plans and the motivic and tonal unities of individual numbers. Hence these passages challenge, as well as complement, some of our underlying assumptions about operatic form, and urge us to expand our definition of a ‘number’.

Parma's lavish commemoration of the centennial of Verdi's birth took to an extreme the post-Unification trend to memorialize great figures of Italy's past. This essay examines the encyclopedic nature of the commemoration in the context of the local and national political climate. Its reception and display were symptomatic of contemporary changes in the physical sites of politics, sharing features with later, more overtly nationalist exhibitions and suggesting a symbiotic relationship between culture and ideology. The reception history of the monument to Verdi built on this occasion, however, warns against historical generalizations, underlining the contingency of the interactions between art, politics and ideology, and demonstrating that current concerns with nationalism often obscure more than they clarify.

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District became extraordinarily infamous after its damnation by Pravda in 1936. The amount of violence and sex in the opera distinguishes it from the Leskov novella on which it was based, and seems to have underpinned Stalin's disapproval. The complex relation between Shostakovich's detailed representation of sexuality and his portrait of Katerina, the opera's tragic heroine, mirrors the social tensions of the sexual revolution and the conservative backlash of the 1920s and 1930s. The writings of feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) about the new Soviet woman display striking similarities to Shostakovich's portrayal of his female characters and offer a context for his approach.