This chapter offers the most detailed English-language examination to date of the institutions that shaped musical life under Italian fascism, with comparative insights into their German Nazi counterparts. In Italy, the corporative system, formalised in 1934, sought to regulate labour and cultural production through a hierarchy of corporations, confederations and unions. Central to this structure was the Sindacato nazionale fascista musicisti, which worked to improve musicians’ socioeconomic conditions and secure their representation on opera-house boards. Despite resistance from major institutions such as La Scala, legislation in 1936 ensured the Sindacato’s formal influence. In Germany, the creation of the Reichskulturkammer and Reichsmusikkammer under Joseph Goebbels rapidly centralised cultural control, excluding Jews and political opponents while providing professional security to compliant musicians. Across both regimes, musicians navigated a reciprocal relationship with political power, accepting varying degrees of regulation in exchange for financial support, institutional recognition, and opportunities to shape cultural policy.

Critics like Allean Hale have referred to speeches of Tennessee Williams’s characters as arias, and this chapter pursues the analogy to consider how the Romantic maximalism of opera might help us better understand Williams’s theatrical project. While Williams himself denied that his work should be considered campy, this chapter considers how his major and minor plays operate at the intersection of a wide variety of modes and aesthetics: camp, the carnivalesque, the Gothic, and the decadent. It explores as well the ways that New Orleans itself, with its embrace of the strange, the crazed, and the queer, served as a compelling aesthetic resource for Williams.

This introduction presents a historical and conceptual overview of the monograph, particularly the longer history of discourses connecting Italian opera, Italy and italianità, and ideas surrounding the Old World and the New World. Milan and Liberal Italy (1861/70–1922) are introduced first in the context of Italy’s unification and the wider social and technological transformations that defined the Second Industrial Revolution. New York and Buenos Aires are then considered together, exploring their changing position in the global operatic circuit from the 1870s onwards and the theatrical infrastructure in both cities, before the methodological approach of the monograph and an overview of the individual chapters are outlined.

Barred from many employments, Jewish artists entered the music industry and produced a twentieth-century canon of Tin Pan Alley hits, show tunes, and jazz standards combining light opera, sophistication, and Black music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat (1936) set a new paradigm: its “Ol’ Man River” blends minstrelsy, classical music, and spirituals. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) fused European influences with blues, foxtrot, ragtime, and jazz. His “I Got Rhythm” (1930) is among history’s most influential jazz compositions, and his jazz opera Porgy and Bess (1935) boldly depicts Black experience. Gershwin’s union of lowbrow-highbrow, Jewish and African American music created a radical multicultural art. Although recent scholars accuse Gershwin, Kern, and others of cultural exploitation, many Black jazz artists embraced their music. Even Duke Ellington, who denounced Porgy and Bess, eventually recorded it and imitated Gershwin’s chord progressions and rhythms.

In 1920, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso accepted a lucrative contract to sing at ten opera performances in Cuba, most of them in Havana’s recently built theater across from the Parque Central. When Caruso arrived in the island, he found a tense political climate: sugar prices had plummeted in the international market, and unemployment and economic crises had led protesting workers to the streets. During his final performance of Verdi’s Aida, a bomb exploded in the theater, sending the audience and musicians into a panic. After the explosion, Caruso’s reaction became the subject of much literary speculation. This chapter explores the accounts of Caruso and the bomb given by Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mayra Montero, and contrasts them to Caruso’s own version of the events.

This chapter reviews some of Maconchy’s most celebrated staged vocal works to tease out her tendency to inflect these works politically. Turning briefly to The Three Strangers (1957), The Departure (1961), The Birds (1967–68), as well as other collaborations with librettist Anne Ridler, the chapter examines transformations the composer expresses at simultaneous registers – whether poetic, thematic, or structural. The chapter further compares the political messaging in these works with her teacher Vaughan Williams’s ‘morality’ opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which sets much of the same symbolism extended throughout Maconchy’s oeuvre.

Music festivals have long been a significant forum in which to introduce new repertoire. In the United Kingdom well established events such as the Three Choirs, Norfolk and Norwich festivals or the London Proms season offered a synthesis of well-known works and premieres. The changing environment for the Arts in post-war Britain witnessed an expansion of festival activity. These initiatives were supported partly by the Arts Council and were encouraged by a desire to make music, old and new, accessible to a world starved by conflict. Elizabeth Maconchy takes an important role in the story of the festival. Her impressionistic orchestral suite The Land, the impact of war upon performance of her work, her experimental forays into opera, a fascination for narrative inspired by her own Celtic background and that of other countries, and her commitment to community music-making reveal much about her extensive contribution to twentieth-century festival culture.

Europe’s recovery and reconfirmation were brought about by a growing and increasingly urbanized population as well as by technological advancements and the “Columbian Exchange” that gave Europe access to American riches. Even as the balance of economic power shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the humanistic ideology first developed in Italy spread throughout the region and stimulated the emergence of new theatre forms. The theory and practice of commedia erudita (developed from the study of Roman comedy) and commedia dell’arte (Europe’s first fully professional theatre form) were brought together in the spoken theatre that filled new niches for urban commercial theatre in the leading cities of Spain, England, and France. The study of Greek tragedy, meanwhile, prompted the emergence of opera in Italy, even as royal courts in France and England glorified themselves with ballet and court masques, respectively.

In the mid-nineteenth century, opéra de salon dominated residential entertainment in Parisian salons. As these short, comedic operas were adapted for household receptions, librettists and composers faced a choice: adhere to staging conventions or adapt their works to fit the idiosyncrasies of residential space. Focusing on the salon of Anne Gabrielle Orfila, who was a proponent of opéra de salon and who hosted at least ten unique productions, this study examines how opera was adapted to salon space. It shows how stage action was not always contained by a single room, with scenes often spanning adjacent rooms. This affected audience seating and shaped the dramatic experience. The study also considers the significance of salon décor as it harmonized with or competed with the opera scenery. At a time when spectacle and elaborate designs prevailed at the Paris Opéra, opéra de salon presented a contrasting model that challenged theatrical conventions.

In this chapter, I explore a selection of musical games performed at seventeenth-century French literary salons, where members of a coterie quoted recitative, parodied airs, and reimagined entire opera scenes. Though musical conversations were ephemeral, the outlines of the social practices can be reconstructed through a combined study of various types of sources. Letters crystallize conversations interwoven with opera fragments, while plays depict galant men courting women by interspersing sung quotations from contemporary operas into conversations, repurposing voguish spectacles as declarations of love. Manuscript chansonniers preserve parodies of complete opera scenes, substituting operatic characters with recognizable contemporary figures and refashioning the verse. By fostering spaces where participants ascended social hierarchies through their witty abilities as conversationalists, salon hosts transformed opera into an interactive social practice.

This chapter explores the “joint” musical education of the two siblings Fanny and Felix, taking as its point of departure the educational backgrounds of the parents which differentiated little by gender in terms of approach and content, but certainly in the intended paths for the two children. Felix was destined to become a professional composer, and the genres in which he was groomed were thus the “public” ones (opera in particular) while Fanny was expected to excel in the “small” genres: piano pieces and songs.

An examination of Meredith Monk’s 1976 opera Quarry in the context of her other works of music theater and film, as well as selected music compositions from the full span of her career. The analysis reads the opera alongside scholarship on the "post-memory" generation (characterized by its distance from the Holocaust), as well as on photography, monuments and "counter-monuments," and other memorial art.