Although the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s comic opera Platée predated the Querelle des bouffons by several years, it raised questions that were at the centre of the debate that shook the Paris Opéra in the early 1750s. Commentators had difficulty situating Platée within the French operatic tradition; and many identified it as a work derived from Italian models. The opera’s music and libretto, mentioned in many of the letters and pamphlets written during the Querelle, clearly struck a nerve. Platée challenged the aesthetic status of French opera by foregrounding aspects of the French language to which participants in the Querelle, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, objected: the silent ‘e’, the presence of diphthongs and an overabundance of consonants. In the end, by undermining the traditional poetic framework through which operatic works were understood in the mid-eighteenth century, the debate on Platée during the Querelle opened up new possibilities for discourse on music.

For a brief period in his career, Verdi wrote operas about compromised or ‘fallen’ women, women condemned for their sexuality: not only Lina in Stiffelio and Violetta in La traviata, but also – if we take into account the way their men regard them – Lida in La battaglia di Legnano, Luisa in Luisa Miller and Leonora in Il trovatore. These women suffer or die. Gilda also dies, in Rigoletto, ultimately a victim of her sexual availability. This essay examines Verdi's contribution to ‘the undoing of women’ and relates it speculatively to his experience as Giuseppina Strepponi's lover around the same time.

Alexander Zemlinsky's one-act opera A Florentine Tragedy (1917), based on Oscar Wilde's play of the same title, features an erotic triangle – a woman, her husband and her lover – that erupts into violence, murder and a shocking dramatic reversal at the end. Throughout the drama, the character of the woman is a passive mirror in whose eyes the male characters see their own idealised images. The marginalised subject-position of the woman, however, reveals the pivotal role of the feminine in the narcissistic constructions of male desire and the male self. At the same time, however, this reading enables an interpretation of the drama as a project for conceptualising another marginal subjectivity: that of the homosexual male. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's and Kaja Silverman's theories, the article explores first the complex dynamics of the triangle at the centre of the drama, and then the implications of a Freudian triangular model of male homosexual subjectivity as constituted through narcissistic object-choice. The homoerotic subtext of Wilde's play is revealed partly through the ambiguities of the woman's position in her connections with each of the men, a role that is seen more clearly in terms of their bonds with each other. This subtext is also implicit in the typically Wildean eroticisation of commerce and commercialisation of eros, through which the men engage in relations highly nuanced by erotically inflected language. Most intriguing is the way the male homosocial reading of the drama is supported by the motivic-dramatic structure of Zemlinsky's opera, as suggested by a new interpretation of the ambiguous musical motifs of ‘love’ and ‘death’ that permeate the opera's most crucial scenes.

The score of Kurt Weill's Zeitoper, Der Zar läßt sich photographieren (1928), is void at its centre: the musical and dramatic climax, the ‘Tango Angèle’, only exists as a gramophone recording, played on stage, while the orchestra falls silent. Just as the perennial themes of love and death are relentlessly updated in this farcical opera into their anti-metaphysical modern-day equivalents – sex and political assassination – so the music avails itself of modern media to bring across its McLuhanesque point: the medium is the message. The sound medium matters in two ways: first, the gramophone emphatically teleports the tango – a fashionable and sexually loaded dance – into the realm of opera; second, the recorded performance constitutes its exclusive musical reality. As if to underscore this point, parts and score of the ‘Tango Angèle’ were lost shortly after Weill produced the recording for the première: only the recording remained. This article reconstructs the nexus between popular music, modern sound media and operatic aesthetics in Weimar Germany: while the recording is an expression of Zeitoper's demand for radical up-to-dateness, the sound of the record, paradoxically, locks it forever in 1928. A relatively obscure work nowadays, Der Zar remains perhaps the most far-reaching response to the Opernkrise of the mid-1920s, reconfigured here as a crisis of musical writing.

With the exception of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Soviet opera in the 1930s has been relatively little studied. Yet this was an era in which opera was vigorously promoted as an ideal Soviet form after more than a decade of criticism from radical proletarian groups. This article considers three main aspects of Soviet operatic culture in the 1930s. First, opera's emotional power was valued as a way to mobilise mass opinion and the opera house was increasingly seen as a highly ideological site. Second, whilst most of the work in founding a Soviet repertory was carried out at Leningrad's Malyi Opera Theatre, Moscow became increasingly involved as the decade continued. Third, Soviet opera was highly dependent on adaptations of socialist realist novels. This phenomenon of ‘transposition’ is seen here as an attempt to invest scores with an unimpeachable political message. Moreover, transposition was an ideal method of regulating ambiguous literary texts by condensing their cardinal features in dramatic form. Although the story of Soviet opera was largely one of failure, its study sheds important light not only on the development of the Russian operatic tradition, but also on the dynamics of Stalinist culture.