Scholarship on Monteverdi’s Orfeo has frequently considered Orpheus’s failure to persuade Charon during his grand aria-oration, ‘Possente spirto’, in terms of style and performance. In the eyes of academics such as the Accademia degli Invaghiti (for whom Orfeo was first composed), however, these issues would have been viewed as secondary to the goal of offering moral instruction, in keeping with the Ciceronian maxim, ‘instruction is the first goal, followed by the movement of the mind, and the delight of the senses’. After assessing the compatibility of my ‘academic’ reading of Orfeo with those that have focused on the subject of music and its power, this article considers the Invaghiti’s practice and philosophy of oratory, as well as Monteverdi’s knowledge of this art. The reasons for Orpheus’s failure as an orator are then considered through a comparative analysis of ‘Possente spirto’ and the other full oration from Orfeo, La Musica’s Prologue, as well as further ‘musical orations’ from Monteverdi’s catalogue. This analysis is based primarily on the teachings of the Ancients, as interpreted in the writings of Academy member Stefano Guazzo – in particular his dialectic on ‘civil conversation’ – as well as the model presented in academy member Pompeo Baccusi’s oration, ‘In defence and praise of women’, given for the Invaghiti in 1571.

Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.

I propose that certain ‘Japanese’ elements of Puccini's Madama Butterfly have cultural analogues that support a reading of the opera as more profoundly authentic than has usually been argued. My discussion begins with the house, the most basic scenic component of the opera, and develops via a number of interrelated issues: the Japanese home as the center of the life cycle, Puccini's choice of the home as his single set, and finally, Butterfly's ‘Vigil’ as the central event in an unfolding home-based life-cycle that raises issues of ritual and ceremony corresponding to values of the geisha culture.

The operatic diva, a singer of strange songs, and too often a turbulent, unkind girl, haunted the nineteenth-century imagination, as evidenced by the musical tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and numerous retellings of those tales in theatre, ballet and opera. Each adaptation of Hoffmann's ‘Rat Krespel’, ‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘Don Juan’ reflects an ambivalent attitude towards women performers, whose potent voices make them simultaneously desirable and fearsome. How do these stories about female singers contrive to contain and manage the singing woman’s authority? And how does the prima donna's voice repeatedly make itself heard, eluding and overcoming narrative attempts to shape or contain its turbulent noise?

Let me begin with an excerpt from ‘Rat Krespel’ (1818), which might serve as a parable for relationships between female singers and male music lovers in the Romantic imagination. Krespel, a young German musician, travelled in Italy and was fortunate enough to win the heart of a celebrated diva, Angela, whose name seemed only appropriate to her heavenly voice. Unfortunately, her personality was less than heavenly, and when she was not actually singing he found her violent whims and demands for attention very trying. One day, as he stood playing his violin:

[Angela] embraced her husband, overwhelmed him with sweet and languishing glances, and rested her pretty head on his shoulder. But Krespel, carried away into the world of music, continued to play on until the walls echoed again; thus he chanced to touch the Signora somewhat ungently with his arm and the fiddle bow.

With a diverse and colourful cast of animals, birds, insects and human villagers, Příhody lišky Bystroušky (known in English as The Cunning Little Vixen), is one of Leoš Janáček's most popular, if peculiar, operas. Though nowadays Bystrouška is typically characterised as a charming portrayal of the continuous renewal of life in nature, this idea emerged only gradually from a tangle of competing and occasionally contradictory views in which, however, the complexity of the moral laws by which the opera's inhabitants live was frequently central. By tracing the history of the opera's stagings in the Czech Republic; drawing out themes that developed in the journalistic and critical discourse around those performances; and reading the opera's music and stage action closely, this article argues that the amoral codes of Bystrouška's world not only inhere in the story, its text, and even, perhaps, in the idea of nature's cycle of life itself, but that at certain times in the opera they are also given expression through particular correlations and disjunctions between the opera's music and the physical actions and gestures of the singers on stage.

This article explores a slice of the careers of two ‘rival’ coloratura singers – the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson and the French soprano Caroline Miolan Carvalho – during the period 1867 to 1870, and considers the internationalisation of singing careers, women's choices and negotiation of their career paths, and fortunes made and lost. With both singers employed at the Paris Opéra from November 1868 onwards as Gounod's Faust went into rehearsal, the focus falls on the ‘Battle of the Marguerites’ in the Parisian press in spring 1869, which raised heated questions of dramatic and vocal interpretation and style, often linked to cultural stereotypes, as well as artistic legitimacy and stature. Through examination of previously overlooked archival financial and legal records, this article also reveals for the first time that Miolan Carvalho was indentured to the director of the Opéra Emile Perrin during this period.

Catherine Tofts, ‘the first English prima donna’, was the female lead in the all-sung operas in the Italian style performed on the London stage from1705, but little has previously been known about her early life or musical training. This article draws on various sources, including her father's will, a petition she wrote in 1704 and Delarivier Manley's Memoirs of Europe to show that her family background was Scottish and that she grew up in the household of Bishop Gilbert Burnet. It names possible singing teachers and lovers, and shows that she did not leave the stage in 1709 because of mental instability, as has been assumed, but because of debt and the consequent need to escape from her creditors. The end of her career shows the difficulties faced by a leading English singer when Italians, particularly the castrati, came to dominate the operatic scene in London.

The theme of transformation (Verwandlung) plays a significant role in the work of Richard Strauss, from his Tod und Verklärung (1889) to his Metamorphosen (1945). This article examines two Strauss operas where transformation is a central aspect of the libretto: Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/16), libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Daphne (1937), libretto by Joseph Gregor. Though each opera focuses on transformation, this concept is interpreted and realized in entirely different ways. For Hofmannsthal, Verwandlung is a journey outward to a new level of existence, attaining a new sense of humanity. For Gregor, transformation is an inward movement, joining nature, and becoming divine in the German-Romantic sense of the term.

One of the tasks of opera scholarship, broadly defined as an interdisciplinary enterprise, should be to include within its purview areas of investigation that have received little attention in purely musicological research. While it is obvious that libretto studies might form one such focus, there is a broader area that should not be ignored. This is the historical and cultural situation of opera and its reception, a subject usually excluded in formalist analyses and studies of musical sources or performance practice, often with the implicit assumption that the ‘aesthetic world’ of opera is self-contained or has nothing to do with the ‘real world’. Even if one does not subscribe to contemporary theory's penchant for subsuming art and history into textuality, the interactions between opera and its cultural context are many-sided and complex, and deserve full scholarly attention.

Through investigating the production and reception of Death in Venice (1973), this essay considers the ways Britten and his audiences responded to the fraught discourse surrounding opera in the twentieth century. If the genre as a whole often threatened to fall on the wrong side of contemporaneous aesthetic oppositions – between abstraction and immediacy, the intellectual and the visceral, the high and the low – early critics of this particular work tended to translate its visual spectacles and musical rhetoric into more rarefied terms. Taking my cue from elements of contradiction and ambivalence in this sublimating criticism, I will examine how Britten's opera resists the very suppressions it promotes. I will suggest that, in simultaneously staging and confounding oppositions at the heart of contemporary operatic discourse, Death in Venice offers a powerful case study of the way composers, directors, critics and audiences responded to and overcame the terminal illness with which opera had been diagnosed in the middle third of the twentieth century.

Benjamin Britten's television opera, Owen Wingrave, first broadcast on the BBC on 16 May 1971, is probably the least known of his sixteen operatic works. Based on an equally obscure tale of the same name by Henry James, it concerns the last scion of a military family who decides to abandon his calling and embrace pacifism. After fierce family opposition and disinheritance, Owen agrees to spend the night in a haunted room in the family mansion of Paramore – a room in which an ancestor was found dead ‘without a wound’ after accidentally killing his son while disciplining him. Several hours later, his body is discovered – dead, without a wound, like that of his forbear. Despite the compeffing nature of the story, Owen Wingrave has never found a secure place in the Britten canon, largely owing to a lingering dissatisfaction aroused by the ending. In what follows, I should like to explore this dissatisfaction and propose a context within which to approach the opera.

Although the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s comic opera Platée predated the Querelle des bouffons by several years, it raised questions that were at the centre of the debate that shook the Paris Opéra in the early 1750s. Commentators had difficulty situating Platée within the French operatic tradition; and many identified it as a work derived from Italian models. The opera’s music and libretto, mentioned in many of the letters and pamphlets written during the Querelle, clearly struck a nerve. Platée challenged the aesthetic status of French opera by foregrounding aspects of the French language to which participants in the Querelle, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, objected: the silent ‘e’, the presence of diphthongs and an overabundance of consonants. In the end, by undermining the traditional poetic framework through which operatic works were understood in the mid-eighteenth century, the debate on Platée during the Querelle opened up new possibilities for discourse on music.

Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.

By a stroke of coincidence the critic Théodore de Wyzewa found himself sitting next to Jules Massenet during a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in August 1886. Massenet's behaviour made a deep enough impression on Wyzewa for him to share it with readers of Le Figaro several years later. ‘He quivered feverishly, became short-breathed, and his large, sombre eyes sparkled in the dark. And when the opera was over, I heard him say to someone in the corridors of the theatre “Ah! I am anxious to return to Paris to burn my Werther!”’ Wyzewa published his piece on the day of Werther's Paris première. In a city where Wagner stagings had recently become all the rage, this was hardly a ringing endorsement; but Wyzewa had a more important point. Massenet provided a prime example of an ill that had descended on French composers, all too many of whom had sacrificed native qualities in vain, sterile imitations of Wagner. Pale beside the ‘enchanted treasure of dream and fantasy’ (‘le trésor enchanté du rêve et de la fantaisie’) in Wagner's textures, such imitations had taken on a merely formulaic character.

Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.

In the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.

The Pantheon Opera remains among the least known of the major theatrical ventures in eighteenth-century London. It came into being amidst the conspiracies that flourished after the King's Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Conceived as a kind of English Court Opera, the Pantheon was backed at enormous expense by the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury. It struggled through the 1790–91 season, accumulating ruinous debts, and then on 14 January 1792 it too burned to the ground, just four nights into its second season.

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District became extraordinarily infamous after its damnation by Pravda in 1936. The amount of violence and sex in the opera distinguishes it from the Leskov novella on which it was based, and seems to have underpinned Stalin's disapproval. The complex relation between Shostakovich's detailed representation of sexuality and his portrait of Katerina, the opera's tragic heroine, mirrors the social tensions of the sexual revolution and the conservative backlash of the 1920s and 1930s. The writings of feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) about the new Soviet woman display striking similarities to Shostakovich's portrayal of his female characters and offer a context for his approach.

Those fortunate enough to have seen the recent production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys mounted by Les Arts Florissants will remember the sumptuously staged realm of sleep in Act III, during which costumed lute and recorder players appeared alongside the singers and dancers. Although conductor William Christie and director Jean-Marie Villégier made no attempt to reproduce the original seventeenth-century staging, they did adhere to Quinault's instructions for this scene to the extent of making musicians prominently visible. Atys is not exceptional in calling for stage musicians: Lully regularly included instrumentalists among the dramatis personae of his tragédies en musique, the genre on which he lavished most of his creative energies after 1672, and the practice is even more evident in the thirty or so ballets he composed for Louis XIV's court during the preceding two decades. The phenomenon of on-stage instrumentalists – much more extensive than the use of the banda in nineteenth-century Italian opera – has been studied only for the information it affords about the development of Lolly's orchestra or the iconography of French Baroque opera. This article is concerned rather with why instrumentalists appeared on stage at all, what they represented, how they functioned as characters, and the impact they had on the visual spectacle.