We have long been accustomed to think in terms of opera ‘stars’, and thus it should not overstrain the imagination to extend the astronomical analogy when dealing with operatic history: to speak of comparisons in magnitude, of orbits, or of suns and their satellites. A particularly useful notion in interpreting with reasonable accuracy evidence surviving more than a century and a half is that of parallax: the apparent displacement of an object caused by an actual change in point of view. A shift caused by the passing of years can intro-duce comparable distortions. My case in point involves the early Italian careers of two operas: Lucia di Lammermoor, making its way much more slowly at first than Belisario, which took off auspiciously but soon fell behind in terms of number of productions and performances. I select these two operas because, in spite of individual differences, they share the same composer and librettist, the same impresario commissioned them and only a little more than four months separates their first performances. Lucia's premiére took place at the San Carlo, Naples, on 26 September 1835; Belisario's the following 4 February at La Fenice in Venice. They emerged, therefore, into much the same climate of sensibility.

The day following the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), Voltaire observed in a letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville that the opera's libretto was by the abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, and he added with characteristic irony that it was ‘worthy of the abbé Pellegrin’. As we know, Voltaire was not alone in his sentiments. Few poets were reviled with the relish one finds in criticism of Pellegrin. Doomed to be a less-than-perfect poet in a literary culture, Pellegrin was forced by circumstance to do something few of his time could understand or accept: he earned a living writing poems on commission. This made him a faiseur. a hack who pursued art for money rather than inspiration, a paid servant who, improbably, sought to move in the very social circles that employed him. It is emblematic of Pellegrin's situation and his reputation that in 1774, twenty-nine years after his death, Voltaire did write noëls when the marquise du Deffand requested them, but complained that it was ‘une rude commission’ and compared his lot to Pellegrin's. Chastened, the marquise apologised. Pellegrin's artistic destiny would seem to have little to do with diat of die urbane and widely admired Voltaire, but I will argue that, in spite of this, the two shared some similar attitudes and experiences regarding the emplotment of tragedy and tragic opera, and further, that these shared views may have had a direct bearing on Rameau's development as a composer.

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.

And so yet again we are to consider the Russianness of Russian music. Is there some peculiar shortcoming afflicting Russian music that prevents us from discussing it except in terms of nationality? Although Richard Taruskin has asked why we cannot simply take Russian music out of the surrounding nationalist discourse in order to examine it per se, such an approach may require, even as a precondition, a radically revisionary account of the music's highly mythologised history. So much critical' writing, so many articles, monographs and textbooks of the last 150 years cannot blithely be set aside: they continue to feed programme and liner notes, encouraging and reinforcing audiences' fond belief in an intrinsic Russianness that mysteriously subsists beneath every note of this perennially popular repertoire.

This article examines the political and cultural circumstances leading to the Italian premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s posthumous opera L’Africaine at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in November 1865. Meyerbeer’s death in May 1864 and the French premiere of his last opera the following year combined to produce a striking moment of transnational cosmopolitan sentiment that built on the composer’s reputation for writing music that had the capacity to communicate across national and political boundaries. Shortly after the Unification of Italy, Bologna was keen to capitalise on these emotions and used the Italian premiere strategically in order to position itself as one of the cultural capitals of the new Italian nation state.

In his autobiography, John Adams mused that his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, challenges directors and conductors owing to its ‘abstracted treatment’ of time and space. This abstraction also challenges scholars. In this article, I bring the cross-disciplinary field of sound studies into the opera house to demonstrate that Adams's obfuscation of operatic space–time is achieved primarily through the use of a spatialised electroacoustic sound design. Drawing on archival materials and new interviews with director Peter Sellars and sound designer Mark Grey, I outline the dramaturgical, epistemological and hermeneutic ramifications of sound design for opera studies and advocate for disciplinary engagement with the spatial dimensions of electroacoustic music generally, and within opera specifically.

Suzanne Cusick has recently argued that the musical processes of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna purge Ariadne of passion and desire in order symbolically to make her a good wife. Written for the 1608 marriage of Francesco Gonzaga to Margherita de Savoy, the lament, according to Cusick, reflects Renaissance marriage and gender ideologies that were determined to silence women and put them in their place. Ariadne has dared to choose her own mate and therefore must suffer. Her fate is dramatised by her uncharacteristically long lament, which enacts the transformation women experienced as they gave up their own desires to the constraining institution of marriage. Cusick's argument is in line with recent critical tendencies to read early modern culture in terms of the opposition between passive female silence and active male desire.

‘If forced to choose, I would prefer Monsieur Zola widi wings than Monsieur Zola on all fours.’ So groused Anatole France about the apparent new turn in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle taken by die publication of Le Rêve in 1888. Because the gritty surface of La Bête humaine (1890) followed closely upon the delicate folds of Le Rêve, France's critical quandary was soon resolved. Yet ever since the publication of Le Rêve even critics much more congenial to Zola than France have remarked upon the unusual place in die Rougon-Macquart of this tale about a virginal heroine set adrift in the small provincial town of Beaumont.

The French legislation of 6 January 1864 which deregulated spoken and lyric theatre nationwide showed little sensitivity to the distinctive financial ecology of regional theatre. Its effects were precisely the opposite of those its architects intended, and caused most disruption to the very constituencies the legislation was intended to help. Comparative analysis of the immediate aftermath of this ‘liberté des théâtres’ reveals a state of near chaos across France. Town councils oscillated between abandoning to the market their traditions of theatre as artistic social service, and pouring in yet more taxpayers' money just to maintain the status quo. Opera, as the most expensive art form, was the immediate casualty, ceding considerable ground to a vigorous entertainment sector based around the operetta repertory (including opéra-bouffe) and the café-concert chanson.

Since 2000 a notable trend has emerged in the way in which Italian comic operas by composers from Donizetti to Puccini are staged. In British and American productions, such works are consistently updated to the mid-twentieth century, usually the 1950s. This article explores what such stagings – and their implied intertextual references to wider representations of the era in popular culture – can tell us about the reception of opera today and the ways in which opera is used to create romanticised notions of historical time. Specifically, the article considers the implications for Puccini historiography of updating Gianni Schicchi, an opera whose Renaissance setting might at first glance seem essential. Considering changing attitudes towards historicism from the nineteenth century to the present, the article proposes that ‘retro’ mid-twentieth-century stagings of Gianni Schicchi compel us to hear the opera itself in new ways and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about Puccini's place in music history.

One of the tasks of opera scholarship, broadly defined as an interdisciplinary enterprise, should be to include within its purview areas of investigation that have received little attention in purely musicological research. While it is obvious that libretto studies might form one such focus, there is a broader area that should not be ignored. This is the historical and cultural situation of opera and its reception, a subject usually excluded in formalist analyses and studies of musical sources or performance practice, often with the implicit assumption that the ‘aesthetic world’ of opera is self-contained or has nothing to do with the ‘real world’. Even if one does not subscribe to contemporary theory's penchant for subsuming art and history into textuality, the interactions between opera and its cultural context are many-sided and complex, and deserve full scholarly attention.

With a diverse and colourful cast of animals, birds, insects and human villagers, Příhody lišky Bystroušky (known in English as The Cunning Little Vixen), is one of Leoš Janáček's most popular, if peculiar, operas. Though nowadays Bystrouška is typically characterised as a charming portrayal of the continuous renewal of life in nature, this idea emerged only gradually from a tangle of competing and occasionally contradictory views in which, however, the complexity of the moral laws by which the opera's inhabitants live was frequently central. By tracing the history of the opera's stagings in the Czech Republic; drawing out themes that developed in the journalistic and critical discourse around those performances; and reading the opera's music and stage action closely, this article argues that the amoral codes of Bystrouška's world not only inhere in the story, its text, and even, perhaps, in the idea of nature's cycle of life itself, but that at certain times in the opera they are also given expression through particular correlations and disjunctions between the opera's music and the physical actions and gestures of the singers on stage.

What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behaviour at London's eighteenth-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary. This article sets out to document as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theatres, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience's general behaviour, the beginnings in London of a ‘listening’ audience, and the performance of music between the acts. It concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium, and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.

While the political impact of Italy's 1936 Ethiopian invasion has long been recognized, its cultural history has only recently come under scrutiny. This paper investigates one musical legacy of Mussolini's colonial project by means of a case study of Alfredo Casella's Il deserto tentato (The Attempted Desert, 1937). Performed on the first anniversary of the Empire's founding and dedicated to ‘Mussolini, fondatore dell'Impero’, the work depicts the arrival of a group of Italian airmen in Ethiopia and their welcome by the indigenous peoples. I set the text against contemporary propaganda such as speeches, visual imagery and popular song, exploring tropes central to fascist imperialist rhetoric: virility, civiltà and aeronautical prowess. The opera's integration of historical musical references into a modern musical setting not only represents the theme of endowing the Ethiopian people with a history, in this case embodied by the Italian musical past, but also exemplifies a contemporary desire to make the past present in everyday fascist life. The historiography of Casella's work, what is more, characterized by the same ‘missing debate’ as the broader discussion of Italian colonialism, raises questions about the effects of Italy's ‘memory wars’ on accounts of twentieth-century Italian music history.

This article examines an example of what might be called ‘nested’ reception – the representation of one work of art within another – in the shape of Gounod's Faust, performances of which were depicted in media ranging from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels to the long-running comic strip Les Aventures de Tintin. In particular, it considers the reception issues raised by the last of these, in which the opera's persistence in the surrounding culture is represented by repeated (and often unexpected) performances of the ‘Jewel Song’ by the diva La Castafiore. Part repository of opera cliché and part creative commentary on Faust's place in a shrinking and stagnating repertory, the passages featuring Castafiore may also pose questions for musicologists: not just about the materials we use to recuperate and represent historical echoes, in the broadest sense, of opera, but also about the historical and critical models we use to interpret them.

Between the initial conception in 1848 of a project on the Siegfried legend comprising a single work, Siegfried’s Tod, and its subsequent expansion in 1851 with the addition of Der junge Siegfried as a ‘prequel’ about the hero’s early life, Richard Wagner turned against Giacomo Meyerbeer in public denunciations in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (1850) and Oper und Drama (1850–1). Changes in the treatment of the Mime–Siegfried relationship between 1848 and 1851 as well as similarities between Wagner’s characterisations of Meyerbeer and his portrayal of Mime in the 1851 sources suggest that Wagner’s animosity towards his former mentor informed a new conception of the dwarf. The troubled Mime–Siegfried relationship that crystallised in 1851 allowed Wagner to give symbolic, aesthetic form not only to his criticisms of Meyerbeer as man and artist but also to his own new creative path. That Meyerbeer by 1851 had come to represent to Wagner the personal and artistic deficiencies of all Jews necessarily also means that Wagner’s projection of Meyerbeer into Mime in Der junge Siegfried carried with it a more generally anti-Jewish message, as is frequently asserted in the literature.

Recent debates about ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the perceived repositioning of such categories have had potentially profound implications for opera. British artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s video installation Killing Time (1994) provides a useful starting point from which to explore these polemics. By juxtaposing images of mundane daily life with a soundtrack drawn from Strauss’s Elektra, Taylor-Wood seems to present opera and ‘the everyday’ as irreconcilable. Yet, the perception of opera as highbrow has by no means been a historical constant in Britain. This article considers the extent to which opera may be regaining the ‘entertainment status’ it enjoyed for a period during the late nineteenth century, or whether its perception as an ‘elite’ product is more deeply ingrained in British culture than ever before. Killing Time’s critique of opera and the commentary it offers on voice, art as redemption, and the politics of participatory art are analysed and contrasted with the representation of opera in a more ‘popular’ medium, a reality television series in which members of the public were trained as opera singers. The article concludes that, while popular culture seems able to embrace opera, the more uneasy relationship today is that between opera and other forms of ‘high art’.

This article aims to illuminate the meanings and aesthetic effects generated by scenes of staged opera in video games. It also explores the images of opera transmitted to the huge audiences that games address. Three dimensions of the opera-game encounter are discussed. First, Tosca in Hitman: Blood Money and The Beggar’s Opera in Assassin’s Creed III are used to examine the treatment of violence and the discourse of popular appeal in games and opera. Second, the arias sung by women in Final Fantasy VI and Parasite Eve illustrate how a melodramatic mode of expression represents a confluence of the aesthetic priorities of the two media. Finally, The Beast Within’s meditation on Wagner reveals how opera sequences aim to engage players by conjuring phantasmagorias through a unifying and enrapturing spectacle.

This essay explores how the soprano Caroline Carvalho (née Marie Félix-Miolan, 1827–95) perpetuated and extended the art of coloratura singing in the mid-nineteenth century. Creator of roles in sixteen operas, including five by Gounod, Carvalho achieved ‘superdiva’ status (Rutherford) by cultivating her voice – her ‘mécanisme prodigieux’ – to handle coloratura on a scale that explicitly invoked and rivalled the instrumental virtuosity of Paganini. In premièring the title role of Victor Massé's La Reine Topaze (1856), the soprano sang a variations aria based on the Carnival of Venice folk song and took one of the violinist's variations as a springboard to her own dazzling pyrotechnics. By allying her voice with the musical inventiveness of Paganini, who had achieved deific renown and artistic authority, Carvalho thereby acquired enough authority to catalyse a new genre, the valse-ariette. The popularity of a little-known aria that Gounod arranged for Carvalho, ‘Ah! Valse légère’ (based on the waltz chorus, ‘Ainsi que la brise légère’, from Act II of Faust, 1859), spurred a vogue for vertiginous waltz ariettes. Carvalho's association with this genre suggests even greater creative agency and indicates a shift in coloratura's signification from instrumentality to dance and the expressive body.