This article explores the importance of the Casa Sonzogno publishing house for the Italian operetta market from the second half of the nineteenth century until the eve of the First World War, including its offshoot company Casa musicale Lorenzo Sonzogno. The article focuses particularly on Casa Sonzogno’s policies of importation, translation and intermedial adaptation of foreign (mainly French) light music-theatre works, especially in the context of the wider social, economic and technological environment of Milan at the turn of the twentieth century, and considers Sonzogno’s concorsi for young composers. The article then addresses the experimental activities of the Casa musicale Lorenzo Sonzogno (1909–15), notably across opera, operetta and cinema. Casa Sonzogno’s centrality to the establishment of an Italian operetta market, I argue, both highlights the crucial role of publishers in the Italian operetta industry, and offers an alternative theatrical history to familiar narratives focused on Casa Ricordi and Italian opera.

Between October 1954 and May 1955 RAI, the Italian public broadcaster, transmitted its first operetta season on television, promoted by Radiocorriere, the RAI house weekly, in terms of ‘a world coming back’. Yet this comeback did not have the lasting impact that was evidently desired: Italian television would never again pay such close attention to operetta, and the 1954–5 ‘operetta season’ remains an intriguing one-off. This neglected encounter between mass media and music in twentieth-century Italy has rich historiographical potential, which the article explores. Among other issues, studying the 1954–5 RAI operetta season helps us better understand not only the deep connections between postwar Italian culture and its fascist past – still a contentious matter – but also the complex discursive, technological and affective interactions between a mass medium tirelessly promoted as new and a form of popular entertainment that was already perceived as hopelessly out of date.

The debut of a Japanese exhibit at the 1867 Exposition Universelle prompted a new enthusiasm for Japan (dubbed japonisme) that soon gripped artistic and literary circles in Paris. Camille Saint-Saëns's one-act opera La princesse jaune, which premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1872, emerged at the height of this fervour. At first glance, it might seem that La princesse jaune simply followed the trend. Yet, on closer examination it is possible to understand its story of an infatuated young artist as a playful, subversive commentary on japonisme. This article thus poses the question: How might we understand La princesse jaune as a parody? To answer this, I begin by considering its protagonist as a mockery of the elitist and exclusive japoniste subcultures that emerged in the wake of the Exposition. Borrowing from William Cheng's concept of ‘opera en abyme’, I then consider the opera's dream sequence, examining how its shifting diegesis highlights the fragile and ephemeral nature of the Orientalist dream. Ultimately, I argue that reading La princesse jaune as a parody allows us not only to reframe the work within Saint-Saëns's œuvre, but also to reassess its place within the wider contexts of nineteenth-century operatic Orientalism.

Is it surprising that three recent publications dealing with women in opera prominently refer to a book from 1979? Maybe not when this book is Catherine Clément's L'opéra ou la défaite des femmes (Opera, or the Undoing of Women, English translation by Betsy Wing, 1988). Clément's reading of women characters in the standard operatic repertoire from Mozart to Puccini quickly became a ‘classic’ within feminist opera studies and influenced much of the scholarly debate in the 1980s and 1990s. The monographs by Marcie Ray, Kimberly White and Monica A. Hershberger, all presenting results from their doctoral research and beyond, give revealing insights into where we stand today when dealing with women in opera. Several thematic and methodological approaches in all three books provide indications of the current issues of debate.

The story of soprano and opera impresaria Emma Carelli (1877–1928) has often been recounted as the tale of a successful prima donna who rather abruptly turned to opera management in order to assist her husband, Walter Mocchi, in his entrepreneurial ventures. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished primary sources – including Carelli's scrapbooks, critics’ reviews and a set of letters she wrote to the impresario, critic and agent Adolfo Re Riccardi – my article demonstrates that Carelli's choice was entirely self-motivated and the product of her unique set of individual attributes. The significance of Carelli's journey can best be understood by situating the singer and impresaria within her contemporary social landscape and by examining her personal story through the lens of women's history. Such a perspective unveils the strategies that she adopted to enact a stirring ideal of femininity in opposition to the values of the liberal state in early twentieth-century Italy.

This article reconsiders two of Rossini's exoticist farces, L'italiana in Algeri (1813) and Il turco in Italia (1814), in the light of recent theoretical studies in tourism. These operas appeared at the juncture between the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and nineteenth-century mass tourism, and they became implicated in multiple layers of tourist experience. Travellers from faraway countries went to see productions in Italy, yet the operas tell stories of journeys between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. These operas were an object of the tourist gaze even as they perpetuated that gaze through imaginary encounters with exotic others. In the article, I explain the role of Italian opera in tourism at the turn of the eighteenth century and suggest ways in which tourist theory might help us understand Stendhal's operatic encounters, which in turn form part of the documentary basis of my study. I conclude that Rossini and his librettists upended many of the established hierarchies of tourism in these works, offering a fascinating critique of the tourist gaze in the process.