Alva Belmont and Elsa Maxwell's Melinda and Her Sisters (1916) is a little-known work promoting women's suffrage, which was publicly performed only once in New York City. It was advertised as an operetta, a decision which minimised its overt stylistic and functional similarities to other genres of popular musical theatre from the period, namely, musical comedy and pageantry. Framed through Jeffrey Kallberg's concept of genre as a ‘gesture of labeling’, this article asks what could be gained – artistically, financially and politically – by Belmont and Maxwell's invocation of operetta and by their disavowal of other appropriate genre alternatives. I argue that the strategy reflects their fundraising priorities, the attitudes of their intended audience, and the social, political and artistic climates that constrained women's activities. This case study offers genre as a productive lens through which to interpret gynocentric musical production and performance.

The operas of Per Nørgård (b. 1932) embody a search for hidden wisdom and spiritual transcendence characteristic of artists who came to maturity during the 1960s. Gilgamesh (1972) and Nuit des hommes (1996) can be perceived as mirror images that embody visions of universal harmony and discord, and of spiritual wholeness and disintegration. This article analyses Nørgård's use of mythic paradigms and Jungian archetypes to structure the operas. It also examines Nørgård's use of dialectical polarities, including creation and death, the human and the divine, and self and others. In particular, it discusses two concepts derived from the work of Joseph Campbell, the ‘hero's journey’ and the ‘cosmogonic cycle’, linking them to Jung's theory of individuation. While Gilgamesh embodies a successful realisation of the hero's journey, the characters in Nuit des hommes become directionless wayfarers in a hostile world.

This article explores contemporary representations of wartime sexual violence on the operatic stage. Rape and the threat of rape loom over many operas in the canon, but even those operas that do not thematise rape may have sexual violence introduced to them in performance. Through analysis of four twenty-first century productions, I consider how the idea of sexual violence works in these wartime stories. Staging the implicit or explicit sexual violence in canonic operas can, in the best cases, allow for nuanced commentary on the subject in our cultural moment. But putting sexual violence on stage is controversial and can pose real risks to audience members. Instead of dismissing the proliferation of depictions of rape in wartime opera productions as mere scandalmongering, I explore specific representations through a feminist ethical framework, and ask: What do we risk and what might we gain by putting rape on stage in these operas?

In 2017, on the debut of the soprano Hui He in the role of Aida at the Hong Kong Opera, a Japanese finance and business website published a short article to introduce its readers to Verdi's monumental opera and more general issues of cultural appropriation and whitewashing related to it. What caught my attention, however, was the headline. Short and concise, it grasped an aspect that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: ‘Opera Hong Kong's new production of “Aida” in October will feature a Chinese soprano playing an African princess singing in Italian’. The headline writer was probably more intrigued by the multicultural quirkiness of this event and ignored, for the sake of the readers, its cultural and historical implications. In fact, the article itself succeeded in depicting this event as a proper, if not extreme, moment of transcultural encounters by mingling different cultures – the Ethiopian heritage of the protagonist of the opera, the musical aura of Italian operas and the Chinese nationality of the soprano Hui He, opposed to the location of the Hong Kong opera evoked by a Japanese magazine – under the unifying authority of Verdi's Aida. This article seemed to consciously invoke a multicultural dimension built around the perceived prestige of Aida and all the debates on imperialism that, from Said to Drummond and Locke, have become attached to it. Verdi's music is safely placed at the centre of a wide transcultural discourse which, rather than undermining the cultural ‘authority’ of Italian opera, reaffirms it even more strongly as a proper vehicle of ‘global uniformity’, as Christopher A. Bayly would define it.