This seminar was the last of three on the theme ‘Power Mise en Scène: Opera, Aesthetics and Politics in the 18th Century’, organized by Jørgen Langdalen, Erling Sandmo, Eystein Sandvik and Ståle Wikshåland, all members of the musicology and history faculties at the Universitetet i Oslo. The project was funded by the university as well as the Norwegian Research Council. Ellen Rosand, who could not be there this time round, has been the seminar's guest professor. The original project description starts from the unarguable premise that the eighteenth century saw profound changes in the nature and exercise of power, and that music was an inextricable part of these changes. It sets out the overarching goal of studying music as more than a secondary ‘reflection’ of political culture, and politics as more than simply ‘context’ for the music, and of examining the mechanisms by which the political and the aesthetic interpenetrated. The 2008 seminar included considerable time for general discussion of the project manifesto, but this year's version was devoted to papers, each of which received a formal response from another member of the seminar before the floor was opened for general discussion.

This seminar emphasized the ‘power of staging’ as well as ‘the staging of power’. Participants were asked to address the ways in which power might be inscribed in the circumstances of aesthetic events, including instrumental music. In its reference to subjectivity the seminar rubric also opened the door to work describing both the responses of listeners/spectators and the processes of performance in a world that was moving from court-sponsored to bourgeois musical entertainment.

Among the speakers who emphasized the staging of power, the historian James Johnson (Boston University) took as his subject civic ritual during Carnival, principally in Venice, in the centuries up to and including the eighteenth. His paper, ‘Ritual Killing and Civic Identity in Early Modern Venice’, provided a decidedly anti-Bakhtinian view of Carnival ritual, stressing the aristocratic control of events, the participation of all classes, the symbolic and actual blood-letting, the symbolic and actual punishment of scapegoats, and the triumphal sense of communal renewal and bonding that resulted from that ritual violence. Live Hov (Universitetet i Oslo), in ‘Opera as Public Entertainment: A Special Case of Sovereignty’, discussed the unusual conditions of operatic staging in eighteenth-century Rome: the use of musical stage works to mark occasions of papal sovereignty and the power of visiting monarchs, the exclusion of women performers from the stage and the consequent reliance on castrati to perform female as well as male roles. Jørgen Langdalen spoke on ‘The Power of Melody: Keiser's Art of Invention and Mattheson's Melodienlehre’, using Louis Marin's concepts of transparency and opacity to analyse word-setting and melodic style in an aria from Keiser's Croesus. This formed part of an argument that in early eighteenth-century Hamburg opera had the power to merge the courtly with the public.

Two papers discussed the staging of power in operas around the time of the French Revolution. Erling Sandmo spoke on ‘Despots, Triangles and Bass Drums: Orientalism on the Operatic Stage in Gustav III's Stockholm’. His argument was that thanks to the long-standing alliance of Sweden with the Ottoman Empire, the representation of Turkish characters and subjects on the Swedish stage was peculiarly ambiguous. Jessica Waldoff (College of the Holy Cross) spoke on ‘Staging Rebellion in a Revolutionary Age: Fire and Water in Mozart's Last Operas’. Considering La clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflöte as anti-revolutionary works preoccupied with benevolent rule overcoming insurrection without bloodshed, she focused on the moments of rebellion, often in C minor, in which the real threat lay in passions getting out of control. In ‘Solar Power: Haydn's Tageszeiten Symphonies and the Poetics of Solar Time’ Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) read Symphonies 6, 7 and 8 as staging both natural and temporal power by describing the position of the sun at dawn, midday and dusk. The theme of the sun relates to the astronomical interests of the Esterházy court and also emphasizes the traditional mythological link between rulers and Apollo, the sun god.

Five of the papers emphasized the power of staging. Georgia Cowart (Case Western Reserve University), in ‘The Staging of the Audience in the Era of Louis XIV’, showed how the on-stage representations of theatrical audiences embodied the fortunes and powers of the theatre in the different eras of Louis XIV's reign, from the bumptious folk whom a ballet transformed into a harmonious whole in Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme to the miserable audience finding a closed theatre in Louis Lully and Jean de Campistron's Orphée. These metatheatrical audiences also tracked the move from royalist opera to opera designed for something more like a ‘general public’. Eystein Sandvik, in ‘Nationalism, Revolutionary Wars, and the Battle over Haydn's Creation’, showed how this astonishingly successful work fed into different conceptions of national identity and power in Germany and France in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Erling Gulbransen (Universitetet i Oslo), speaking on ‘Staging the King: Readings of Wagner's Tristan’, argued that King Marke is shut out of the action of the work by the power of music that he cannot hear or comprehend, and, further, that staging itself becomes powerless in the face of the music, so that with Tristan the ‘staging of the king’ in opera comes to an end.

Two other papers focused on the power of modern stagings, or restagings, of earlier works. Alessandra Campana (Tufts University), in ‘That Subversive Movement of Comedy: Filmic Remnants of Così fan tutte’, considered two uses of Così in Terence Davies' film adaptation (2000) of Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth. The nature of the comedy in Così, Campana argued, is tested by the insertion of its music into this movie, as is the conventional formulation that when the music goes its own way in a film, it tends to perform a utopian function. Nila Parly (Københavns Universitet) studied the power of performance in relation to or at odds with staging in ‘Doing the Diva Dying: The Performative Power of Isolde's Lovedeath’. She took as material her own response to Waltraut Meier's performances of the Lovedeath in the 1999 Harry Kupfer production in Berlin and her students' responses – along with those of the participants present at the Oslo seminar – to a very close-up DVD filming of Meier in the Peter Konwitschny production staged in Munich in 1998.

Of five papers focusing on the politics of subjectivity, three dealt specifically with opera in the time of Mozart. Ståle Wikshåland explored ‘The Truth of Fiction: Mozart's Staging of Love in Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte’, arguing that Mozart could stage issues of political power more powerfully in opera buffa than ever was done in opera seria because, rather than representing subjectivity symbolically, his music induces subjective states and dramatizes changes in those states. Erik Steinskog (Københavns Universitet) spoke on ‘Mozart avec “Kant avec Sade”: Don Giovanni and (the Ethics of) Radical Evil’. Questioning a variety of readings of Don Giovanni from the Enlightened to the postmodern, Steinskog located an ethical dimension of the opera in the second-act finale, arguing that in that scene two versions of subjectivity meet. Don Giovanni moves beyond the pleasure principle, refuses the law of the father and, by choosing evil, becomes an ethical hero. Anna Cullhed (Uppsala Universitet) explored subjectivity in an unset libretto by a Swedish poet contemporary with Mozart in ‘The Stage of Imagination: Bengt Lidner, Subjectivity, and Drama as Text’. Lidner's preface to his libretto of Medea reveals a poet imagining not just an operatic setting of his work, but a hardly existing Swedish public, largely female, that would be ready to accept his construction of Medea as a woman driven to murder her children to prove her passionate devotion to her straying husband.

Two papers dealt with subjectivity in music mostly not operatic. Scott Burnham (Princeton University), in ‘Supernatural Mozart’, explored a number of purple patches in works of Mozart from the Requiem and Ave Verum Corpus to the Don Giovanni overture, the Dissonance Quartet and the String Quintet in D major, k593, finding language to connect describable musical procedures with ineffable subjective effects. In my paper (Mary Hunter (Bowdoin College)) I spoke about ‘Playing Second Fiddle in Beethoven's String Quartet, Op. 59, No. 2: Whose Subjectivity?’. This explored early nineteenth-century reviews of string quartet performances, which make it clear that a work's subjectivity was understood to be channelled through the first violinist, with the other players essentially ‘accompanying’. However, both Beethoven's music and A. B. Marx's commentary moved in the direction of reformulating the power structure of the parts (and thus the players) as a more fluid and complex set of interactions.

Two papers spoke from outside the immediate frame of the conference. Leo Treitler (City University of New York) began the seminar with ‘Reflections and Questions about the Project Description’, which gave focus to the whole event: a survey of ideas from various disciplines suggesting that the eighteenth century in Europe gave birth to a concept of the person as a dynamic centre of awareness, as communicating a subjectivity set against both nature and society and pre-eminent over the social roles that that person performs. Lydia Goehr's (Columbia University) paper, ‘Opera and the Instruments of Power’, reminded us that opera's beginnings re-enacted the ancient paragone, or the contest between the arts for power and status. She went on to examine the power of music in opera, and to ask what happens when the cosmic idea of music as an inaudible and invisible principle (as found in the harmony of the spheres) ‘descends’ from the heavens to the earthly realms of audible praxis.