During the Paris Commune of 1871, four spectacular concerts took place at the Tuileries Palace. Although the musical genre most often associated with the Communards is popular song, these Tuileries concerts primarily featured instrumental works and operatic numbers. Indeed, during much of their short reign the Communards sought to nurture elite music, in particular through attempts to control the Paris Opéra and its repertory. This article treats the Tuileries concerts as a starting point for understanding the Commune's brief direction of the Opéra, exploring ways in which the movement's attitude towards elite music at both venues engaged with a number of its central preoccupations. It suggests that Communards, often depicted as merely destructive, were anxious to rehabilitate their reputation and legitimise their status through the appropriation of high culture.

During March 1588, Maria d'Aragona, the Marchesa of Vasto, sponsored a set of four intermedi at her palazzo in Chiaia, Naples. The centrepiece of the entertainment was the intermedio entitled ‘Queen Cleopatra on her Ship’. This article explores d'Aragona's role as sponsor of the entertainment, particularly in relation to her interest in the historical figure of Cleopatra. Drawing on sources that informed perceptions of the Egyptian queen during the early- to mid-Cinquecento, it will be shown that within a performance context governed by a strong-willed female patron, the often negatively depicted Cleopatra could be cast as a positive role model, particularly for d'Aragona-related noblewomen who themselves had experienced strong female mentorship and enjoyed the relative autonomy of widowhood. D'Aragona's decision to cast the Neapolitan virtuosa Eufemia Jozola as Cleopatra reinforced the female-orientated nature of the intermedio, and sheds new light on mid-Cinquecento Neapolitan performance practice.

Once Wagner's most popular opera, Lohengrin has suffered scholarly neglect in the post-war period. This essay re-engages with the work from the novel perspective of game theory analysis. Centring on Elsa's breach of the Frageverbot, it offers a close epistemological study of the opera's main characters. As an alternative to traditional interpretations of the heroine's fatal decision, we propose a complex and psychologically more compelling account. Elsa asks the forbidden question because she needs to confirm Lohengrin's belief in her innocence, a belief that Ortrud successfully erodes in Act II. This interpretation reveals Elsa as a rational individual, upgrades the dramatic significance of the Act I combat scene, and, more broadly, signals a return to a hermeneutics of Wagnerian drama.