Recent debates about ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the perceived repositioning of such categories have had potentially profound implications for opera. British artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s video installation Killing Time (1994) provides a useful starting point from which to explore these polemics. By juxtaposing images of mundane daily life with a soundtrack drawn from Strauss’s Elektra, Taylor-Wood seems to present opera and ‘the everyday’ as irreconcilable. Yet, the perception of opera as highbrow has by no means been a historical constant in Britain. This article considers the extent to which opera may be regaining the ‘entertainment status’ it enjoyed for a period during the late nineteenth century, or whether its perception as an ‘elite’ product is more deeply ingrained in British culture than ever before. Killing Time’s critique of opera and the commentary it offers on voice, art as redemption, and the politics of participatory art are analysed and contrasted with the representation of opera in a more ‘popular’ medium, a reality television series in which members of the public were trained as opera singers. The article concludes that, while popular culture seems able to embrace opera, the more uneasy relationship today is that between opera and other forms of ‘high art’.

In 1823, Alessandro Manzoni engaged a continuing debate over the merits of ‘Aristotelian’ unities of time and place with his Lettre à M. C*** sur l'unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie, a manifesto that synthesises and amplifies earlier polemics by Berchet, Pellico and Visconti. Dramatic expression, coherence and realism, Manzoni argued, are best served by giving priority to unity of action while ignoring the traditional restrictions of time and setting. Although discontinuities might occur between adjacent scenes, the focus on cause and effect and the exclusion of unrelated incidents would provide a coherence that had previously depended on physical and temporal proximity. Manzoni suggested that formal preconceptions be set aside and the action allowed to shape dramatic design. Characters could be introduced throughout a play rather than together in the first act, their motivations and goals allowed to evolve as the situation unfolds. These shifts would encourage writers to cultivate motifs other than love intrigues, which had traditionally held sway because they took little time to develop. In particular, historical plays could enact all important events instead of only the climax, and depict true causes and resolutions rather than ones invented to fit conventional constraints.

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.

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.

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.

Two King's Bench lawsuits in The National Archives of the UK contain new information about the activities of castrati working in mid-eighteenth-century London. Monticelli v. Sackville (1748) confirms Horace Walpole's testimony that singers employed by the Earl of Middlesex's opera company received enormous salaries. Manfredini v. Geminiani (1751) preserves details of a contract of employment between singer and impresario that went disastrously wrong for both parties. An account of the London careers of the main protagonists is supplied to contextualise the new information.

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.

‘First performed in 1840 and praised by Liszt for its orchestration and workman-ship, the score does not deny Meyerbeerian influence. The present recording, which sounds as if it has been taken from a live performance in the theatre, has a first-class cast and is altogether fascinating.’ The object of this encomium is La vestale by the Italian composer Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870), the first commercial recording of which was issued on CD in 1989. The quotation, taken from a leading record magazine, seems representative of the response that recordings of Mercadante's works can currently expect: scarcely a single review fails to mention Meyerbeer's positive influence on Mercadante. But how far is one in fact justified in linking these two composers?

On 13 March 1797, Cherubini's Médée was given its première at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. The opera was designed to be a tragédie lyrique with all the trappings: only the hostility directed towards young composers (Cherubini, but also Méhul and Le Sueur) during the Terror and the Directory had prevented its performance at the city's first theatre, the Académie Royale de Musique (briefly re-christened the Théâtre de la République et des Arts after the Revolution). Although Cherubini's opera followed the conventions of opéra comique (most important, of course, the use of spoken dialogue), it also bore significant traces of late eighteenth-century opera seria dramaturgy. This generic eclecticism placed Médée in the midst of an aesthetic tangle, an early manifestation of nineteenth-century opera's strained but still powerful connection to eighteenth-century conventions.

Siena 1880. During his penultimate trip to Italy, Richard Wagner stayed for nearly two months in the neighbourhood of Siena. He was completing the orchestration of Parsifal, and went one day to visit the cathedral. Hardly had he got inside when he dissolved into tears, exclaiming ‘this the Temple of the Grail’. And indeed, if you look at the stage designs for the third act of Parsifal as they were prepared for the first performance at Bayreuth in 1882, you will find that the Temple of the Grail does in fact open on to a fairly faithful reconstruction of the interior of this city's exceptionally beautiful cathedral.

This essay explores how the soprano Caroline Carvalho (née Marie Félix-Miolan, 1827–95) perpetuated and extended the art of coloratura singing in the mid-nineteenth century. Creator of roles in sixteen operas, including five by Gounod, Carvalho achieved ‘superdiva’ status (Rutherford) by cultivating her voice – her ‘mécanisme prodigieux’ – to handle coloratura on a scale that explicitly invoked and rivalled the instrumental virtuosity of Paganini. In premièring the title role of Victor Massé's La Reine Topaze (1856), the soprano sang a variations aria based on the Carnival of Venice folk song and took one of the violinist's variations as a springboard to her own dazzling pyrotechnics. By allying her voice with the musical inventiveness of Paganini, who had achieved deific renown and artistic authority, Carvalho thereby acquired enough authority to catalyse a new genre, the valse-ariette. The popularity of a little-known aria that Gounod arranged for Carvalho, ‘Ah! Valse légère’ (based on the waltz chorus, ‘Ainsi que la brise légère’, from Act II of Faust, 1859), spurred a vogue for vertiginous waltz ariettes. Carvalho's association with this genre suggests even greater creative agency and indicates a shift in coloratura's signification from instrumentality to dance and the expressive body.

Byron was determined from the start that Manfred should not be performed on stage. Writing from Venice in spring 1817 he told his publisher, John Murray, that: The thing I have sent you will see at a glimpse - could never be attempted or thought of for the stage . . . I composed it actually with a horror of the stage - with a view to render even the thought of it impracticable, knowing the zeal of my friends, that I should try that for which I have an invincible repugnance - viz. - a representation.

The age of Louis XIV was an age of contrasts. It was fond of spectacle and ostentation, typified in the great fêtes of Versailles, yet it is rightly known as ‘l'époque classique’, characterised by order and decorum. Its greatest playwright was Jean Racine, whose eleven tragedies had only the barest of sets, presented one action in one place during a maximum of twenty-four hours, chose subjects from history or mythology that featured only mortal characters in easily believable situations, relegated violence and other unseemly behaviour to the wings and to descriptions (récits), and used a limited, noble vocabulary to explore the depths of the human condition and to create poetry of extraordinary beauty. However, in 1673, during the peak of Racine's career, Quinault and Lully created French opera (tragédie lyrique), which, while also using a limited, noble vocabulary, featured spectacular sets and costumes for each act, allowed subplots (even comic ones in the first three operas), staged battles, storms and divine interventions, eschewed historical characters, and presented simpler situations and characterisations in order to leave time for music and dance.

‘If music is a language, who is speaking?’ asked Edward T. Cone on the first page of The Composer's Voice (1974), later turning to such questions as ‘does a vocal persona [whether protagonist of a song or character in an opera] know he is singing?’ And does that persona hear the accompaniment? Cone's answer then was that ‘Consciously, he neither knows that he is singing nor hears the accompaniment; but his subconscious both knows and hears’.

One of the contemporary production books for Don Carlos thus austerely sums up the Philippe–Posa duet in Act II (of the five-act version); its none-too-subtle indication of grand themes handled seriously is one that has consistently driven the piece's reception. As so often, Verdi himself encouraged the trend – most significantly by treating the duet to more substantial revision than any other major piece in his entire output. Some drastic cutting occurred even during rehearsals, so that the supposed Urfassung predates the first performance. What is commonly referred to as the ‘original’ version corresponds, then, to the music performed at the 1867 Paris première. This was substantially refashioned for Naples in 1872 (with Italian text only), and given an even more thorough overhaul in 1884. The four versions have been much discussed: indeed, revisions such as these were one of the proving grounds on which Verdi (and thus his admirers) became musicologically respectable. Where would we stand today without those four versions and their many Verdian copains? Possibly on some other, less comfortable podium.

During the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, Elizabethan culture was insistently invoked as a source of solidarity and renewal. Through the trope of ‘New Elizabethanism’ members of the press and public reimagined Britain's future on the foundations of a most productive period in its past. This article traces forms of ‘New Elizabethanism’ and other complex negotiations between modernity and the past in the music presented for the Coronation. Its central focus is the debate surrounding Britten's Gloriana, an opera based on the life of Elizabeth I, commissioned for the Coronation Gala by the Arts Council. The opera and the debate it inspired reveal both the stakes placed in the Elizabethan period and a marked anxiety about the status of the past in the remaking of the present – an anxiety that arguably plagued the Coronation as a whole.