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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article explores operatic costumes from a perspective of cultural exchange, with a focus on Giuseppe Sarti, first director of the permanent opera theatre in Copenhagen. Sarti's Danish audience had almost no prior exposure to opera and little understanding of Italian. After a disastrous first season, he took measures to realise more successful productions of Italian opera in a context of migration, notably by focusing on the costumes to bypass language differences. I argue here that the theatrical costumes commissioned by Sarti were crucial tools for transmitting and adapting the operatic genre to its new context, functioning as visual signifiers and as body technology. They represented the audience's first encounter with the character and conveyed crucial information about dramaturgy.

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.

Three hundred years after his death in 1687 Jean-Baptiste Lully's reputation is entering a new phase. Only a minority of opera-goers today have had the opportunity of seeing one of Lully's operas performed in the theatre. French music, always a degree less accessible to a non-French public than the music of its Italian and Austro-German neighbours, remains the last corner of the seventeenth-century repertory to make a popular appeal to twentieth-century audiences. There are indications, however, in the appearance of a new collected edition, in the small output of new recordings, and in the greater volume of scholarly investigation associated with the tercentenary, that the distinctive sound of Lully's music will soon become at least as familiar as that of his contemporaries Purcell and Cavalli. And familiarity will surely engender popularity: the music needs no special pleading.

I have a picture by Mondrian in front of me. It is made of up of a wide range of different, discrete rectangular shapes. The paint has been applied precisely. The colors are varied and striking and contribute to the overall impression of exactness in the detail and variety in the general. There are no people in the picture. It reminds me of a Handel opera. More or less any Handel opera.

Through brief case studies of burlesques of Ernani, Il trovatore and La traviata written for nineteenth-century London, this essay makes a preliminary examination of the nature of Victorian operatic burlesques, why they existed, and how they functioned artistically and sociologically. My larger purpose is threefold: to investigate the manner in which burlesque interpreted the foreign art form of Italian opera in a culture self-consciously identified as English, to consider how these works traversed class differences in an evolving socio-cultural milieu, and to ask how we might understand the these works in relation to the cultural codes of Victorian London.

What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behaviour at London's eighteenth-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary. This article sets out to document as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theatres, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience's general behaviour, the beginnings in London of a ‘listening’ audience, and the performance of music between the acts. It concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium, and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.

Opera is a genre that prizes interior expression. How then does it cope with characters who are defined by reticence and inscrutability? Donizetti's 1837 opera Roberto Devereux thematises these issues – a reflection, in part, of the nineteenth century's growing anxieties over public self-expression. Engaging with contemporary 1830s criticism, this article focuses on two numbers in the work that were identified as problematic by early audiences, arguing that their perceived failure is a consequence of the work's inventive depiction of its characters' vacant subjectivities. Donizetti's opera can be seen to stretch primo Ottocento operatic conventions to their limits, in the process undoing the traditional correspondence between interior expression and self-definition.

The operas of Per Nørgård (b. 1932) embody a search for hidden wisdom and spiritual transcendence characteristic of artists who came to maturity during the 1960s. Gilgamesh (1972) and Nuit des hommes (1996) can be perceived as mirror images that embody visions of universal harmony and discord, and of spiritual wholeness and disintegration. This article analyses Nørgård's use of mythic paradigms and Jungian archetypes to structure the operas. It also examines Nørgård's use of dialectical polarities, including creation and death, the human and the divine, and self and others. In particular, it discusses two concepts derived from the work of Joseph Campbell, the ‘hero's journey’ and the ‘cosmogonic cycle’, linking them to Jung's theory of individuation. While Gilgamesh embodies a successful realisation of the hero's journey, the characters in Nuit des hommes become directionless wayfarers in a hostile world.

In a recent number of 19th-Century Music, Allan Atlas offered a complex analytical reading of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, hinging on a pair of keys forming what he called ‘crossed tonal areas’. The tonality G flat major in the second-act trio ‘Io so che alle sue pene’ plays a crucial role in Atlas's reading, and he had to account for the fact that the trio was originally conceived a halfstep higher, in G major, and was so performed at the première in Milan. He asked:

can we assign a significant role to the Gb of the trio when it represents not Puccini's original – and presumably well-reasoned – intention, but what might be little more than a compositional accident necessitated by the practicalities of performance, and a specific one – Brescia, May 1904 – at that?

And in his footnote 13 to the foregoing, Atlas listed six studies discussing halfstep transpositions, three in Verdi and three more in Puccini.

It is sometimes remarked that Wagner's prose works would not be of much interest if their author had not also turned his creative energies in a very different direction. What is not often observed, however, is the influence this truism has exerted on critical approaches to the theoretical writings. A tacit consensus dictates that these texts be seen as marginalia, ancillary documents whose value lies in the light they shed on immeasurably more important achievements. We have inherited the prose works in the form of useful gnomic tags: Gesamtkunstwerk, ‘endless melody’, ‘deeds of music made visible’ – fragments of text extracted from their context and pressed into service as authoritative pronouncements about the operas. More extensive analysis has usually been concerned with the relation between the written theories and the works they are understood to describe. There is a powerful hierarchy implicidy at work: text (theory) is subservient to music (practice); the former is at best an interpretative tool.

We publish here, in slightly altered versions, three lectures given by Pierluigi Petrobelli in Autumn 1988 as Chair of Italian Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. The terms of the Chair, established in 1928, state that the person entrusted with the post should ‘lecture in illustration and interpretation of Italian culture’.

For my part, I cannot cease admiring the intelligence with which Monsieur Piccinni has led the audience from sentiment to sentiment, from interest to interest; how he has graduated the effect of his music – how one feels not only each scene but also its connection with the general tone of the subject; how all the airs, all the recitatives, all the ballets, all the choruses tend to refer to the whole, how all these individual groups eventually form a total group in which everything agrees, everything is true, in which each detail sets off those surrounding it. That is worthy to be called genuine dramatic music.