Premièred at Glyndebourne in October 1994 and subsequently performed in the UK, Austria, Germany and Holland, The Second Mrs Kong was the result of a collaboration between the American writer Russell Hoban and British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The opera's reception has tended to emphasise the disparity between Hoban's diverse and eclectic interests, which emerge not only in the libretto but also in his novels and essays, and Birtwistle's more introspective and linear approach. Possible connections between Hoban's aesthetics and Birtwistle's music have generally been disregarded. I argue, however, that the opera's main aesthetic concerns – namely, the mediation of images through ideas and the workings of image-identification in diverse media – are shaped by a productive exchange between librettist and composer. The clearest expression of this interaction is the love between Kong, who embodies ‘the idea of’ King Kong from the 1933 RKO film, and Pearl, a character drawn from Vermeer's iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The representation of these visual icons in The Second Mrs Kong is inflected by Birtwistle's own views on images, by his attempts to find musical analogues for visual techniques, as revealed especially in his sketches, and by his lively engagement with Hoban's ideas.

In the early part of this century Italian musical critics were bemoaning the decadence of the national lyric stage. No inspired figure had come forth to claim the mande of Verdi; new Italian opera was becoming artistically irrelevant. In an effort to reclaim a ‘lyric spirit’ from Wagnerian Germany, Gabriele D'Annunzio ‘rediscovered’ the early seventeenth century as the birthplace of opera. Specifically, he fashioned Monteverdi – ‘il divino Claudio’ – as visionary proto-lyricist, a nostalgic move seconded by many other Italian authors through the 1920s and 30s.

London composers competed for a music prize in 1701, setting William Congreve's libretto on the judgment of Paris, a beauty contest among Juno, Pallas and Venus. Paris, contest judge, exiled prince and amorous shepherd, prefers Venus, placing love above Juno's promised empire and Pallas's martial success. This essay reveals the general political meanings of the judgment of Paris myth, shows how the tale had been used to critique Charles II and James II, examines the political beliefs of the sponsors and librettist, and demonstrates how music by John Eccles, Daniel Purcell and John Weldon supported the politics of Congreve's libretto.

Printed stage-direction books, so-called livrets de mise-en-scène, count among the most important sources for the history of staging of nineteenth-century French opera. Their function was to document the then-current condition of a Paris production, and to serve as a model for provincial or foreign theatres. In this essay, a comparison of two such livrets for Auber's Fra Diavolo from Paris, by Vieillard Duverger and Louis Palianti, shows that the staging of successful works underwent significant changes over time. One cannot, however, assume that a published stage manual indicates the chronological fixity of a production. Indeed, directors even in the nineteenth century did not aim at an ‘‘objective” reproduction of a staging, but rather at an innovative, lively, and ever-changing music theatre within the framework of contemporary operatic aesthetics.

Opera seria underwent more change in the latter part of the eighteenth century than is commonly recognized, but the nature of the change often had as much to do with practical considerations as with aesthetic ideology. This essay focuses on Turin's Teatro Regio, which in the 1760s imported two particularly innovative operas, Sofonisba and Oreste, and retained some ‘‘progressive” features while discarding others. This essay demonstrates the importance of extra-musical factors in decisions regarding production.

According to conventional wisdom, East German censorship of The Trial Of Lucullus (1951) required that composer Paul Dessau and librettist Bertolt Brecht completely overhaul the opera before it could be re-premièred later that year as The Condemnation Of Lucullus. However, archival sources prove that the two versions are virtually identical, suggesting that the attendant controversy was adroitly managed by East German officials to appease both internal/Soviet and the external/Western audiences. Analysis of several versions of scene 8 demonstrates that Dessau revised far more before the first première than after, and examines his use of musical style to symbolize sociopolitical status.

At the climax of his account of a night of drunken adventure, Albert Herring, who has at last thrown off conventional restraints, suddenly breaks off: ‘a nightmare example of drunkenness, dirt, and worse…’. At which point the Glyndebourne production of a few years ago had Albert produce from his shirt an outsize pair of women's bloomers. The visual aid was presumably deemed necessary because the text does not make clear what inference we are to draw. The nature of Albert's desire is left open, and at least one early reviewer recognised that there might be a less conventional understanding of the superficially hilarious romp that Albert Herring presents. More recently, Philip Brett has trenchantly argued that the opera is a parable of the ‘coming out’ of a young gay man set against the oppression of small-town respectability, a view I believe to be in essence correct. There may, however, be room for a more detailed study of those elements in the text that enable us to affirm it with confidence.

This article explores new conceptions of voice in late eighteenth-century Italy as expressed in discourses connected with opera reform. Inspired by the convergence of Enlightenment epistemologies of feeling and neoclassical aesthetics, certain progressive singers and literati sought to rebrand the singing voice as an agent of moral and political edification. Here, this ideology-laden project is traced through two conflicting representations of singer-poets, both of whom wield the power of lyric song to achieve political ends. First, the article unpacks Giuseppe Millico's narrative of his performance as Gluck's Orfeo (published in Naples in 1782), in which the singer argues for voice as audible interiority and, as such, a warrant of political subjectivity. It then turns to a reading of Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico's libretto for Giuseppe Sarti's dramma per musica Alessandro e Timoteo (Parma, 1782), in which voice transforms into an instrument of anti-absolutist critique. The article concludes by considering how these two modes of voice were imagined, together, as capable of revivifying Italian culture.

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.

Each year for the past decade, the French vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants has visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In that time, three of their productions stand out as particularly significant: Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys (1989 and 1992), Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Medée (1994) and Hippolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1997). This trilogy of landmarks in the history of French opera was presented in fully staged productions conceived by stage director Jean-Marie Villegier and conductor William Christie.

In his trilogy of masterpieces composed to texts by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart radically changed the musical and theatrical nature of Italian opera. The dramma giocoso became a true ‘comedy in music’ through the use of psychological realism: a vivid representation of life in continuous transformation and in all its naked immediacy is now the real protagonist of the story, an all-embracing totality within which each character represents a separate feature. This influx of a non-rationalist sense of life into the classical proportions of sonata form (whose tonal relationships and free approach to thematic development controlled the vocal set pieces) made for an explosive mixture. Even before his collaboration with Da Ponte, Mozart himself seemed well aware of his uniqueness: ‘I guarantee that in all the operas which are to be performed until mine [L'oca del Cairo] is finished, not a single idea will resemble one of mine.’

Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto is based on a complex web of sources – writings by Calvino, Barthes, Kafka, Auden, Shakespeare and others – themselves intricately interrelated through games of citation and revision. Linking all these texts is a scene in which a male artist is confronted by a voice outside of his control. This scene is re-enacted – unexpectedly – at the climax of Berio's work. In this new context the unruly voice sounds like a revenant from a form long presumed dead: pure opera and absolute madness.

Ernst Krenek's opera Karl V presents an ingenious interpretation of the life of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, which argues not only dramatically but also musically for the contemporary political significance of the Emperor's life. This was no forced pairing of music and politics, for Krenek had found that the historical and theological problems raised by the Emperor's ‘justification’ at the end of his life bore a striking resemblance both to the aesthetic dilemmas he was then having to face as a composer and issues common to the wider struggle for national identity and political legitimacy in Austria after World War I. This essay introduces these themes in the work, and Krenek’s rationalisations of the way he presents them. It considers their implications for our understanding of the history of serialism in music more generally, and for an aspect of Krenek's compositional development that has perplexed later commentators: the apparent stylistic gulf between this opera and Jonny spielt auf.

The Houghton Library at Harvard University holds a copy of the 1685 livret for Roland by Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully that has been marked up in three different seventeenth-century hands. The meanings of these markings cannot be conclusively deciphered until further corroborative sources come to light, but they seem to refer to declaimed performances of Quinault's text. The purpose of the current article is to propose possible interpretations of these annotations, guided by seventeenth-century theory of the oratorical pitches (tons) and eighteenth-century links between the Académie royale de musique and the Comédie française.

What makes Bernard Shaw, for us, the most perfect of Wagnerites is that he did not mince words when he judged the master to have taken a wrong turn. Such a turn came in Das Rheingold, and Shaw was quick to expose it, even though he had just spent a chapter elaborating the profound political allegory he discerned in the work:

In the midst of these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and blood-curdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in the matter.

It all started with voices – voices not meant to be heard. Verdi's demand that at crucial moments in Macbeth the performers stifle vocal expression is by now famous. Again and again he urged that the duet and sleepwalking scene be sung ‘sotto voce’, ‘with mutes’, that the singers should speak more than sing, that their voices should sound ‘harsh’, ‘stifled’, ‘hollow’, ‘veiled’. Verdi's wilful insistence that his singers not sing has been understood as part of the composer's struggle to curb the excesses of primo ottocento opera and invest it with a new psychological depth. Gilles de Van, for example, argues that the suppression of the voice in Macbeth creates a shadowy subjective interiority, and claims further that the decision represents a shift in Verdi's aesthetic orientation from ‘melodrama to music drama’. De Van understands Verdi's inward turn as a renunciation of the kind of extroverted display upon which melodrama relies, as a ‘turning point, the beginnings of a dramaturgy of interiority that does away with the superb transparency of traditional melodrama and marks Verdi’s new awareness of the aura of confusion and ambiguity that can inhabit the human soul'.

This article examines the relationship between Milan's 1906 Exposition and a celebrated revival of Verdi's La traviata (1853). An event of national and international importance, the Exposition was notable for its focus on Italy's global presence, and in particular Italy's relationship with Latin America. The Traviata production, meanwhile, comprised the first Italian staging of Verdi's opera in period costume, performed at La Scala by a quintessentially modern, celebrity ensemble to mark the Exposition's opening. This article explores the parallels between the Exposition and the production, to investigate the complex, shifting position of Milan (and Italy) within the transatlantic cultural and operatic networks of the time; and more broadly, to examine the role of operatic staging in shaping understandings of global space within the mobile operatic canon of the early twentieth century.

The title of this issue, ‘Performance Studies and Opera’, optimistically announces a conjunction between two disciplines that have previously had surprisingly little to do with each other, despite substantial common ground. The three articles gathered here, however, bear marks both of the excitement sparked by the novelty of bringing the methods of performance studies to bear on opera (significantly, the reverse process, operatic theory used to interpret other modes of performance, remains almost unimaginable) and a caution occasioned by their authors' sensitivity to the difficulties involved in any such translation.