This issue of Cambridge Opera Journal is devoted to Venice, opera, dance, and in particular the work of the late Irene Alm, Associate Professor of Music at Rutgers University. Alm's premature death in October of 2000 at the age of forty-four was deeply mourned by numerous friends, colleagues, and students, who had come to love her extraordinarily generous spirit, humour, grace, and discerning intellect. Her death also represents an incalculable loss to musicologists and dance historians.

This article shows how central dance was to the experience of opera in seventeenth-century Venice. The first part provides an introduction to the use of dance in Venetian opera and the primary sources – libretti, scores, treatises, and various eyewitness reports. The second section summarizes the extraordinary variety of subjects and style of the dances. A third section treats the musical sources, describing stylistic features of the dance music, as well as providing important insights as to how to identify which vocal or instrumental excerpts would likely have been danced.

This article proposes that dance was a central way in which Venetians reinvented the ancient world on the operatic stage. Focusing on Niccolò Bartolini's preface to Venere gelosa (1643) and his use of dance in that opera, this article explores how Venetian balli became a locus for expressing otherwise inexpressible passions and desires – ecstatic Bacchic rituals, the goat-dances of Pan, or the erotic games of nymphs and satyrs – that were integral to the early modern reception of antiquity. It concludes with a consideration of the balli in La Calisto (1652), demonstrating the significance of the dances for understanding the work as a whole.

Starting in 1697 a series of operatic works set in Venice during Carnival season appeared on the stage of the Paris Opéra, a phenomenon that marked a major shift in repertoire from a period that had been dominated by the Lullian tragédie en musique. This article investigates the implications of the sudden French fascination with things Venetian and explores the multiple agendas Venice served within the world of French opera.