In this article I explore how public acts of defiant silence can work as forms of historical evidence, and how such refusals constitute a distinct mode of audio-visual attention and political resistance. After the Austrians reconquered Venice in August 1849, multiple observers reported that Venetians protested their renewed subjugation via theatre boycotts (both formal and informal) and a refusal to participate in festive occasions. The ostentatious public silences that met the daily Austrian military band concerts in the city's central piazza became a ritual that encouraged foreign observers to empathise with the Venetians’ plight. Whereas the gondolier's song seemed to travel separate from the gondolier himself, the piazza's design instead encouraged a communal listening coloured by the politics of the local cafes. In the central section of the article, I explore the ramifications of silence, resistance and disconnections between sight and sound as they shape Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, which premiered at Venice's Teatro la Fenice in 1851. The scenes in Rigoletto most appreciated by the first Venetian audiences hinge on the power to observe and overhear, suggesting that early spectators experienced the opera through a mode of engagement born of the local material conditions and political circumstances.

Theodor Adorno thought Parsifal unique, in many respects incongruous when compared with Wagner's earlier operas and music dramas. In a 1956 essay, ‘Zur Partitur des Parsifal’ (‘Concerning the Score of Parsifal’), he noted the ‘continually strange newness’ of Wagner's last work, concluding: ‘From out of the waning of his original inventive powers, Wagner's force produces the virtue of a late style; a style that, according to Goethe's dictum, withdraws from appearance’. More recently, Werner Breig paused appreciatively over Adorno's remark about the ‘continually strange newness’, but pursued a different argument. Breig claims that Parsifal was recapitulatory, stylistically homogeneous with the earlier works, and he is supported by Wagner's assertion to Cosima that he had written ‘nothing new’ since Tristan (CWD II, 26 March 1879), a conviction redolent of one the composer had earlier expressed (albeit in entirely different circumstances) in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 2 May 1860: ‘I can now only repeat myself … I have no other significant characteristics to offer’. Breig summarises his position in the Wagner Handbook: ‘The musical structure of Parsifal contains no fundamentally new elements, but rather follows directly upon the achievements of the Ring and Tristan’, thus nodding to the Wagner who cheerfully confessed having ‘take[n] up the old paint pot’ of the Tristan style for Act II of Parsifal (CWD II, 5 April 1878).

What is music in opera? In Monteverdi's Orfeo, his first opera, music is arguably the protagonist, whether La Musica in the prologue, whose ritornello guides Orfeo to and from the Underworld, or embodied in the legendary singer himself, who uses his musical prowess to charm the guardians of Hell. In Il ritorno d'Ulisse, however, there is no such protagonist, no single embodiment of musical power. In the largest sense, of course, and in contrast to straight drama – the plays of Euripides, Shakespeare or Calderon may have some music in them but are essentially spoken – all of Il ritorno d'Ulisse, all of most operas, is music. But in Monteverdi's sense (and in the librettist Badoaro's), that music is divided into ‘speech’ and ‘song’ – or, speech-like and musical utterances.

August in the Restoration, like Augusts before and since, was a time for those who could afford it to escape the hot, dirty streets of Paris to head for the country. With this in mind, Ludovic Vitet, music critic of Le Globe, broadcast an appeal in his Bulletin musical on 1 August 1829 (cloudy and unseasonably cool): Have patience, you poor dilettanti who have rushed back from the countryside; and those of you who have put off your departure to be present at the first performance of this marvel, don't think that you have yet reached the end of your suffering.

This issue of Cambridge Opera Journal is devoted to Venice, opera, dance, and in particular the work of the late Irene Alm, Associate Professor of Music at Rutgers University. Alm's premature death in October of 2000 at the age of forty-four was deeply mourned by numerous friends, colleagues, and students, who had come to love her extraordinarily generous spirit, humour, grace, and discerning intellect. Her death also represents an incalculable loss to musicologists and dance historians.

Aida famously inaugurated the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1908, but the musical history of the city is also linked to two earlier productions of the piece: its debut in Cairo in 1871, and another legendary performance, in Rio de Janeiro in 1886. This article retraces the steps of five Italian musicians who played in the orchestras of the Cairo or Rio productions before moving to Buenos Aires, and thereby formed part of the vast Italian emigration to Argentina in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Once there, Pietro Melani, Tomaso Marenco, Giovanni Grazioso Panizza, Italo Casella and Ferruccio Cattelani radically transformed the concert life of the city through their musical activities, not least through their introduction of a wide range of orchestral and chamber music repertoire. By reconstructing their trajectories, I argue for a stronger focus on international networks in thinking about the history of Italian opera at this time and for a greater attention to the contributions of performers who would later fall into obscurity. In addition, I suggest that the insignificant attention given to such figures even in Argentinean narratives would seem to indicate the persistence of a historiography that plays down the contributions of European immigrants in the musical history of the city and the nation.

Starting in 1697 a series of operatic works set in Venice during Carnival season appeared on the stage of the Paris Opéra, a phenomenon that marked a major shift in repertoire from a period that had been dominated by the Lullian tragédie en musique. This article investigates the implications of the sudden French fascination with things Venetian and explores the multiple agendas Venice served within the world of French opera.

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’.

The history of singer and famed tragedienne Susanna Cibber (1714–66) demonstrates the influences of the British theatre and the culture of sentiment on Handel’s oratorios. Throughout Cibber’s long career, audiences lauded the ‘natural’ qualities of her performances, conflating her onstage and offstage identities as both deeply moving and holding great potential for moral instruction. In the late 1730s and early 1740s this presumed symbiosis was challenged by a highly publicised sex scandal that had profound effects on Cibber’s roles in the spoken theatre. At the same moment, Handel began crafting parts for Cibber in Messiah, Samson, Hercules and Belshazzar in ways that showed awareness of the new complexity of her image. This article both illustrates the nature of Cibber’s evolving public identity and explains Handel’s revisions of pre-existing parts for her. It shows that Handel recognised the challenges of Cibber’s troubled public image and continued to highlight her greatest skills, setting her the task of harnessing the power of sympathy, drawing audiences in by appealing to them as fellow men and women of sensibility.

Marschner's villains occupy an important place in the history of operatic style, forming a bridge between characters such as Dourlinski or Pizarro and Wotan or the Dutchman. His villains may also be understood against the background of early nineteenth-century pathology, and particularly the syndrome of ‘monomania’. Marschner's music, which partially ‘heroicizes’ the villains in keeping with the contemporary rise of the sympathetic villain, parallels efforts to redefine the nature of madness. Marschner's operas could thus simultaneously construct and undermine the hegemony of bourgeois values, and become a vehicle through which composers, performers, and audiences could explore the contradiction between social/sexual order and the fantasy of deviance.

A notorious adultery scandal involving Guillaume Kornman (a co-founder and sponsor of the French mesmeric society) and Beaumarchais, who defended Kornman’s unfaithful wife, should be considered one of the main sources of inspiration for Così fan tutte. A pamphlet war between the two broke out in 1787, when Salieri was living with Beaumarchais in Paris. Significantly, the earliest sources of the opera – Salieri's first unfinished setting of La scola degli amanti, Da Ponte's original libretto, and Mozart's autograph – all spell the name of Guglielmo as ‘Guilelmo.’ A study of this real-life Parisian drama helps to clarify several dramatic and musical elements of the opera, including the use of mesmeric references, which is more pervasive than previously recognized. In this new light, the opera appears to offer a political response to the radical ideas on the regulation of sexual and social matters disseminated by Kornman's mesmeric circle.

In January 1954 Leonard Bernstein began work with Lillian Hellman on a musical version of Voltaire’s Candide. A first draft of the show was complete by the end of the year but was subsequently revised with new lyricist Richard Wilbur, eventually opening for previews in October 1956 and on Broadway that December. From the beginning, Candide was intended as political satire. Both Bernstein and Hellman leaned to the left politically and were embroiled in McCarthyism during the early years of the Cold War; Candide was their indictment of ‘puritanical snobbery, phony moralism, inquisitorial attacks on the individual, brave-new-world optimism, [and] essential superiority’, as Bernstein himself explained. Voltaire’s critique of Enlightenment optimism is here deployed against the ideological certainties of Eisenhower’s America. Yet the letters, scripts and scores that document the genesis of Candide indicate that playwright and composer struggled with its meanings and, even more, with their own intent. Of particular interest as a site of that struggle is the Eldorado episode, a passage of central yet ambiguous significance in Voltaire’s conte. Although Hellman and Bernstein may have first been attracted to Candide for its political potential, changes to the Eldorado episode, involving a complete reworking of the second act, shifted the focus of Candide away from satirical critique and towards a romantic plot more typical of the Broadway musical.

Walther von Stolzing's songs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg have not attracted much critical interest, in part because of their deceptive appearance as straightforward diegetic music or stage songs. But in addition to comprising an extended ‘musical joke’ illustrating the hero's desire-driven progress towards musical competence, these songs also pursue a historicising agenda, replacing the Meistersingers' pre-modern rule-driven poetics of imitation with a modern aesthetics of inspiration.

Since 2000 a notable trend has emerged in the way in which Italian comic operas by composers from Donizetti to Puccini are staged. In British and American productions, such works are consistently updated to the mid-twentieth century, usually the 1950s. This article explores what such stagings – and their implied intertextual references to wider representations of the era in popular culture – can tell us about the reception of opera today and the ways in which opera is used to create romanticised notions of historical time. Specifically, the article considers the implications for Puccini historiography of updating Gianni Schicchi, an opera whose Renaissance setting might at first glance seem essential. Considering changing attitudes towards historicism from the nineteenth century to the present, the article proposes that ‘retro’ mid-twentieth-century stagings of Gianni Schicchi compel us to hear the opera itself in new ways and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about Puccini's place in music history.

The scene upon which I focus here – the final duet – was a late addition to the list of primal scenes for this conference. The Don Carlos scenes on the original list were the Posa–Philippe duet and the Quartet, and thus we almost had a session on Don Carlos without the Prince of Spain. Perhaps this is not surprising. Carlos has not fared well in recent writing about the opera.

When ‘la mesta’ (the sad one) intones ‘Salce!’ from the lonely heath within the Willow Song, she creates a situation at once compelling and artificial — a song within a song within an opera: