The 1844 Teatro Victoria in Valparaiso, Chile, can be considered the first purpose-built opera house in the Andean region of the Americas. Managed by impresario Pietro Alessandri, it became the centre of an early operatic scene in the South Pacific and a model for theatres built during the following decades. In this article, I discuss the Teatro Victoria as an opera house and the way in which it functioned on the borders of what was then a new global operatic scene. Latin American research on opera has focused mostly on singers and performances, rather than on the workings of the opera houses and the operatic scene. This article discusses the rationale behind the development of the Teatro Victoria project, some of the strategies underpinning its success and the notion of this particular opera house as a projection of certain ideas of ‘Italian culture’ and networks. The article shows, first, that the successful reception and appropriation of Italian opera in this period was not necessarily guaranteed, and it differed across the Americas. Second, that local brokers and host communities had key roles in shaping that reception, which can easily be perceived as a passive one when looked at only from the perspective of the singers or the music itself.

Offenbach's first commercially performed dramatic work, the opéra comique Pépito, premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Variétés on 28 October 1853. This article examines it from historical and musical perspectives. First, I argue that its production at the Théâtre des Variétés is an example of what Mark Everist has called ‘the politics of genre’, in this case the attempts by managers of Parisian boulevard theatres to circumvent the hierarchical system of genre imposed on them by the government. Offenbach may have been directly complicit by offering an opéra comique to a theatre that was legally not allowed to perform the genre and by supplying a musical element – ‘local colour’ – as part of the political strategy by which the manager of the Variétés sneaked the opéra comique past the authorities. The subterfuge did not work, however: I argue that Pépito was recognised by audiences as an opéra comique primarily through the character of its music. A discussion of the score, and the musical competence of the original cast and orchestra of the Variétés, allows a partial reconstruction of the actual sound of the first performance of Pépito. Finally, I consider the later history of Pépito, and in a postscript suggest that a faint memory of Offenbach's Spanish opéra comique may have resurfaced twenty-two years later when Georges Bizet, who became part of Offenbach's circle in the late 1850s, was composing his own Spanish opéra comique, Carmen.

Der Rosenkavalier is an opera that foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing and ultimately death for the aging Marschallin, and a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie, in which the temporal intersects with the eternal. It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's relation to historical time and the idea of musical progress, as the composer supposedly retreated from the modernity of Salome and Elektra to a more conservative idiom. The temporal qualities manifested in Der Rosenkavalier invite comparison with another work from this period that similarly foregrounds the concept of time, Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. In this self-styled ‘novel of time’, Mann raises a number of problems concerning the human limitations on perceiving time and its artistic representation, especially with regard to music. Disputing the contention of the narrator of Mann's novel that music cannot ‘narrate time’, I show that Strauss's music in fact exemplifies music's capacity to express ‘the historical in time’, using Der Rosenkavalier as a case study for addressing the philosophical problem of temporal representation in art. I argue that Der Rosenkavalier – both Hofmannsthal's text and Strauss's music – is in several significant ways ‘an opera about time’ – the temporal and the eternal, the historical and what I call the ‘metahistorical’.

Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (Ognennyi angel) has remained comparatively little studied among his operatic works, interpreted primarily as a parody of Russian symbolist beliefs and practice. In the last few years, however, new biographical information has emerged about the period during which Prokofiev wrote The Fiery Angel that points to ways of reconsidering the opera's compositional history and legacy. Furthermore, recent scholarship on the application of narrative theory to opera studies presents new methods for examining how opera might incorporate a narrative point of view. Combining these lines of inquiry, this article scrutinises Prokofiev's two complete versions of Angel (1923 and 1927) in the context of the composer's conversion to Christian Science during the intervening period. It argues that the 1927 version privileges its central character's point of view, as he experiences a process of spiritual awakening similar to the composer's own.

We might start with the Index, often a good indicator of a book's flavour, its local habitation. First up is ‘Abbate, acoustics, acting, Adler, Adorno’, a reassuring miscellany; later on, the German-speaking collective of ‘Schopenhauer, Schreker, Schubart, Schumann-Heink’ awakens memories of time past. ‘Ventilation systems, Verdi, vitalism’, however, turns on the landing lights for a distinctly new approach, while ‘hygiene [both mental and moral], hyperacusis, hyperaesthesia acoustica, hypnosis, hysteria’ ushers in another region entirely: medicine, pathologies. Starting at the end, we are thus prepared: a sense of anticipation is allied to hopes of intriguing surprises in the offing. And such expectations are on the whole justified. In spite of its title – that fence-sitting conjunction – this collection is a worthy and serious attempt to write new chapters in musicology's revolving challenge to the internalist preoccupations of its past.