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.

The opera house in Leipzig opened its doors in 1693. Operas had been performed in central Germany for quite some time but they were primarily confined to courts. With the founding of the opera, Leipzig, home of an important trade fair, provided an additional musical attraction that could entertain merchants coming for the fair. While the year 1693 marks the beginning of regular opera performances in Leipzig, the preceding decades saw an increased interest in dramatic genres in the realms of both secular and sacred music. The connection between these dramatic works and the opera house are not just circumstantial. Some of the key players in the opera business in Leipzig were involved in these earlier pieces as well, especially the poet Paul Thymich, the first librettist for the Leipzig opera, who provided the majority of texts for the drammi per musica, Singspiels and sacred cantatas.

The backgrounds of opera singers have received little systematic study and this article attempts to help redress this situation through analysis of a collective biography of 344 British and Irish-born performers active in the century from 1850. It argues that certain areas, notably London and Wales, made a particularly significant contribution to the operatic profession and notes that certain other patterns of regional under- and over-production are discernible. While singers from a broadly defined middle class were numerically dominant within this sample, this study stresses the unexpectedly strong contribution from those born into the lower-middle and working classes. Such performers were able to build on skills honed in the amateur musical sphere partly as a result of an expanding state-funded higher education system, but also due to an extraordinary variety of forms of patronage. The ‘popular’ social tone of singers, however, is shown to have done little to challenge perceptions of opera as an elitist cultural form.