Anniversary years always prompt revaluation as well as celebration, and the centenary of Verdi's death in 2001 was no exception. The conference for which the articles in this issue were written came at the end of a year packed with Verdi celebrations in both opera houses and academic settings. In terms of performance, a handful of ostentatious critical failures in 2001 sparked new debate about two old issues – the pros and cons of revisionist staging in general, and the degree to which contemporary productions should be faithful to what we can glean of the composer's intentions. These edgy, sometimes irreverent productions prompted the critic for the New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross, to declare that Verdi should be exempt from the rigours and indignities of Regietheater. While the abstraction of Wagnerian drama might reward updated settings spiked with flashes of contemporary social critique, he suggested, Verdi's operas work because the composer ‘meant every word’ and because their dramatic force is propelled by unadulterated emotion and sharp juxtapositions, qualities too direct and ‘site-specific’ to tolerate stagings that draw out hidden contexts or ironize dramatic conventions. In what quickly began to sound like a back-handed defence, Ross pronounced: ‘To the analytical mind such music can look crude, even vulgar on the page. Only in live performances, when the momentum begins to build and the voices become urgent, does it catch fire. But how do you go about analyzing momentum and urgency?’

‘Fu qualche cosa d’incredibile …': ‘it was something unbelievable, something new, unprecedented’. Thus wrote Marianna Barbieri-Nini, the singer who created the role of Verdi's Lady Macbeth, in reference to the famous Act I duet between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Indeed, this duet seems to have been one of the most effective pieces in the opera for nineteenth-century audiences. Verdi himself wrote about it as one of the ‘two principal numbers’ of the opera, together with the sleepwalking scene, upon which the opera's dramaturgy depended. The reception of this piece at the 1847 première was stupendous. Antonio Calvi cites it as one of the opera's three excellent pieces, in which ‘maestro Verdi has arrived at Shakespeare’s sublimity'. The duet's opening section (‘Fatal mia donna’), according to various press releases during the opera's first few runs, was regularly encored three, four, even five times an evening. Abramo Basevi waxed eloquent over the piece, calling it ‘the culminating number of the opera’, ‘a true flash of Verdian genius’. And by the time the revised version was premièred in Paris in 1865, this duet had become entrenched in the repertory in a way the entire opera had not: one reviewer noted that the Act I duet ‘has always been considered the best duet Verdi has ever written’.

‘Nothing is but what is not’. These words uttered by Macbeth after his bizarre first encounter with the three weird sisters could serve as a motto for the whole of Shakespeare's tragedy; for ‘the Scottish play’, as the superstitious have called it for centuries, is ruled by uncertainty, the questionable, the netherworld, where the only thing that is absolute is evil. It is about ambiguous forces that violate ife's natural order – witches, ghosts, a moving forest, an invisible dagger – what we call the macabre, what Freud called the uncanny, and what Verdi called ‘un genere fantastico’. Shakespeare constructs a world of binary opposites where boundaries, as Marjorie Garber has observed, are ‘continually transgressed, and marked by a series of taboo border crossings’.

The dramatic climax of Byron's poem The Corsair comes when Gulnare, a harem slave, seizes a weapon to free herself and Conrad, the pirate whom she loves, from the prison of their common enemy the Pasha Seyd.

It all started with voices – voices not meant to be heard. Verdi's demand that at crucial moments in Macbeth the performers stifle vocal expression is by now famous. Again and again he urged that the duet and sleepwalking scene be sung ‘sotto voce’, ‘with mutes’, that the singers should speak more than sing, that their voices should sound ‘harsh’, ‘stifled’, ‘hollow’, ‘veiled’. Verdi's wilful insistence that his singers not sing has been understood as part of the composer's struggle to curb the excesses of primo ottocento opera and invest it with a new psychological depth. Gilles de Van, for example, argues that the suppression of the voice in Macbeth creates a shadowy subjective interiority, and claims further that the decision represents a shift in Verdi's aesthetic orientation from ‘melodrama to music drama’. De Van understands Verdi's inward turn as a renunciation of the kind of extroverted display upon which melodrama relies, as a ‘turning point, the beginnings of a dramaturgy of interiority that does away with the superb transparency of traditional melodrama and marks Verdi’s new awareness of the aura of confusion and ambiguity that can inhabit the human soul'.

‘La sventurata rispose’ [the poor wretch answered]. This sentence, among the most famous of Italian literature, appears in chapter 10 of Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, first published in 1827 and revised in 1840), where it functions as stitches trying to heal the deep wound caused by a radical surgical intervention, the excision of pages and pages devoted to a description of seduction. In the best Gothic tradition, the first version of the novel, entitled Fermo e Lucia (1821–23), contained a long account of the seduction of the Nun of Monza by a young libertine, but religious and, apparently, aesthetic considerations convinced Manzoni to cut this episode and replace it with those three words. The rhetorical figure of reticence, so prominent in chapter 10 of I promessi sposi, dominates the tradition of Italian ‘high’ Classicist and Romantic literature, which seems to have considered seduction unfit as a literary theme, to be left to the gutter of the popular novel.

In the course of his insightful analysis of Act II of Un ballo in maschera, Harold Powers recurs to two critics of earlier generations who hyperbolically describe how, to cite his more measured summary, ‘the drama has turned into music as the opera was being composed. The music is the drama for an audience habituated to its conventions, its style, its genres’. Powers first quotes Gabriele Baldini, who describes the libretto of Il trovatore as ‘a phantom libretto, which became completely engulfed by the music and, once the opera was finished, disappeared as an individual entity’, and then the earlier Bruno Barilli, in whose view ‘the grotesque libretto is only the causal element that provokes the explosion, after which it collapses, annihilated – a confused scattering of rhymes, syllables, babblings – to vanish forever without a trace’. Although Powers and other more recent scholars tend to pay operatic words greater respect, I begin with an invocation of views that might seem anathema to a scholar of texts for the inspiring idea that the text can be ‘annihilated’ as one moves to another level of the work. In what follows, I intend to annihilate both text and music in order to dissolve to a yet higher level of analysis and to recuperate a specific history in which Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, I maintain, participates.

The scene upon which I focus here – the final duet – was a late addition to the list of primal scenes for this conference. The Don Carlos scenes on the original list were the Posa–Philippe duet and the Quartet, and thus we almost had a session on Don Carlos without the Prince of Spain. Perhaps this is not surprising. Carlos has not fared well in recent writing about the opera.

One of the contemporary production books for Don Carlos thus austerely sums up the Philippe–Posa duet in Act II (of the five-act version); its none-too-subtle indication of grand themes handled seriously is one that has consistently driven the piece's reception. As so often, Verdi himself encouraged the trend – most significantly by treating the duet to more substantial revision than any other major piece in his entire output. Some drastic cutting occurred even during rehearsals, so that the supposed Urfassung predates the first performance. What is commonly referred to as the ‘original’ version corresponds, then, to the music performed at the 1867 Paris première. This was substantially refashioned for Naples in 1872 (with Italian text only), and given an even more thorough overhaul in 1884. The four versions have been much discussed: indeed, revisions such as these were one of the proving grounds on which Verdi (and thus his admirers) became musicologically respectable. Where would we stand today without those four versions and their many Verdian copains? Possibly on some other, less comfortable podium.

In June 1867 Ismail Pasha, the new Viceroy of Egypt, arrived in Paris to represent his country at the Exposition universelle. The Egyptian pavilion, erected on a large corner of the Champs de Mars, featured a marvellous collection of architectural spaces that included a pharaoh's temple, a mediæval palace ‘richly decorated in the Arabic style’, and a modern-day bazaar showing all manner of merchants and artisans at work. If the temple, designed by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, was intended to display artefacts from the most remote corners of Egypt's history, other spaces transported spectators directly to the present, offering what one French commentator called ‘a living Egypt, a picturesque Egypt, the Egypt of Ismail Pasha’. An enormous panorama of the Isthmus of Suez, created by the Suez Canal Company with the help of M. Rubé, set designer from the Opéra, drew long queues of paying customers. Elsewhere visitors could gaze at authentic Egyptian peasants, or Bedouins on white dromedaries, all the races governed by the Viceroy ‘personified by individuals selected with care’, as the critic Edmond About put it. Most dazzling of all was the exhibit within the refabricated royal palace, where the Viceroy himself was the featured attraction: poised on a divan in a bedroom painted to look exactly like the place of his birth, he smoked a hookah and daily received guests from the best Parisian society. The whole sumptuous spectacle, About would conclude, ‘spoke to the eyes as well as to the mind. It expressed a political idea’.

Idealized mother figure, great protectress, unsurpassed magician, devoted wife of Osiris: the goddess Isis assumed multiple roles in ancient Egyptian mythology. Verdi's Aida reflects this polysemy. Concordant with its general attention to Egyptological detail (though not without inaccuracies even by the standards of the day), Auguste Mariette's early synopsis for the opera refers to Isis only once, at the beginning of Act III when Aida awaits Radames: ‘May Isis, protectress of love, guide him to her who wants to belong only to him’.

After years spent reflecting on Western imperial practices, critic Edward Said wrote that Giuseppe Verdi's Aida is ‘a kind of curatorial art’, a work

whose rigorous and unbending frame recall[s], with relentless mortuary logic, a precise historical moment and a specifically dated aesthetic form, an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience.

‘Scandal’, ‘uproar’ and ‘sensation’ are words that are often used by critics when writing about operatic stagings of directors Hans Neuenfels and Peter Konwitschny. Neuenfels' 1981 staging of Aida in Frankfurt/Main aroused a veritable furore, as did his interpretation of Nabucco (Berlin, 2000); similar reactions greeted Konwitschny's Graz Aida (1994) and his Hamburg Don Carlos (2001). Neuenfels and Konwitschny continually undermine traditional concepts of operatic staging: the provocative statements advanced by their powerful images regularly elicit bewildered reactions.

In his recent book on Hamlet, Stephen Greenblatt writes:

What there is again and again in Shakespeare, … is a sense that ghosts, real or imagined, are good theatre – indeed, that they are good for thinking about theatre's capacity to fashion realities, to call realities into question, to tell compelling stories, to puncture the illusions that these stories generate, and to salvage something on the other side of disillusionment.

What makes Bernard Shaw, for us, the most perfect of Wagnerites is that he did not mince words when he judged the master to have taken a wrong turn. Such a turn came in Das Rheingold, and Shaw was quick to expose it, even though he had just spent a chapter elaborating the profound political allegory he discerned in the work:

In the midst of these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and blood-curdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in the matter.