Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In the New York Times of 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that. I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?

A natural starting point for a critical reading of Verdi's Rigoletto might be the protagonist's ‘Cortigiani, vil razza dannata’ in Act II: an utterance around which much of the emotional intensity of the opera is centred. Rigoletto's outburst can be discussed to great advantage in terms of current musicological fashion, as it alters conventional forms in fascinating and provocative ways, and to great dramatic effect. Yet such an approach presupposes that the key to understanding operas lies in their Great Moments – those passages of intense musical expression that tend to be quoted in movies and television commercials. Of course these moments are a crucial aspect of our delight, and can be a rich source for interpretative ventures. But there is more to opera: various levels of meaning invite our exploration and enjoyment; hermeneutic ‘secrets’ lurk behind seemingly ‘trivial or irrelevant’ passages, and can lead to new perspectives on familiar works.

From Flaubert to Richard Strauss, male artists in late nineteenth-century Europe were fascinated by the figure of Salome. This fascination, indeed, amounted to a genuine craze. One representation sparked another: J.-K. Huysmans fantasised about paintings by Gustave Moreau; Oscar Wilde expanded on Huysmans; Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Wilde. Fine editions of Wilde's Salome with Beardsley's illustrations remained cult objects well into the twentieth century. In general, the Salome craze, like the science and medicine of its day, sought to legitimise new forms of control by men over the bodies and behaviour of women. The present paper revisits this well-known episode in cultural history with two distinct aims in mind, one interpretative, the other methodological. The interpretative aim is to offer a feminist approach to the fin-de-sièclecompulsion to retell the Salome story with lavish attention to misogynist imagery - those quivering female bodies and gory male heads. The methodological aim is to find a meeting ground for literary criticism and musicology as both disciplines aspire to become vehicles of a more comprehensive criticism of culture.

This article addresses the long-controversial dating of the cadenza with flute in the mad scene of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. New manuscript sources indicate that the famous cadenza dates not from the first half of the nineteenth century, as musicologists had assumed, but from 1889, when it was added to the opera for Nelly Melba’s performances at the Palais Garnier, Paris. The cadenza was most likely composed by Melba’s teacher Mathilde Marchesi to showcase the light voice and virtuosic technique of her student. Once introduced, the cadenza with flute decisively altered the impact and reception of the mad scene. In the first two decades after the opera’s 1835 première, the mad scene had not been particularly popular, perhaps because it contravened contemporary Italian taste for mad scenes featuring docile, virginal heroines. By the fin de siècle, however, the mad scene was regarded as the highlight of the opera, the excesses of the cadenza resonating with the new vogue for violent and hysterical heroines on the operatic stage.

The traditional story reception historians tell of Wagner in France is really a centralist story about Wagner in Paris. This article reverses the direction in light of the fact that seven French regional towns presented Lohengrin on publicly funded stages in 1891 before the directors of the Paris Opéra dared follow suit. Since the work's ‘job’ in the regions was to prove to Paris that Wagner stagings did not necessarily bring rioting with them, the focus is more on previews than on the usual (and logical) reception material of reviews. In addition, via its multi-centre approach and a sideways glance at a parallel phenomenon – the reception of Victorien Sardou's Thermidor – the article integrates reception study into a broader-based cultural history rather than treating it in potentially more limited fashion as an approach in and of itself.

Paisiello's Nina ‘is sentimental comedy at its worst…. Its sentimentality is to modern ears perfectly unbearable, and we cannot understand how the whole of Europe was reduced to tears by these infantile melodies.’ Edward Dent's opinion might well be shared, though perhaps less frankly expressed, by more than one musicologist of following generations. Yet the fact remains that eighteenth-century Europe was indeed reduced to tears by operas on the story of Nina: an attempt to ‘thicken’ our understanding of that cultural phenomenon is the aim of the present essay. In its first part – focusing on Marsollier's and Dalayrac's Nina, the source for Paisiello's opera – I try to reconstruct a web of relationships between the practices of psychiatry emerging in the late eighteenth century and the theatrical and aesthetic cultures of the time. In the second part, aspects of Paisiello's setting are read as a composer's effort to create an operatic language responsive to the culture of ‘sensibility’ shared by eighteenth-century humanists and physicians.

The 1859 revival of Gluck's Orphée, reworked for the occasion by Berlioz, was one of a series of operatic résurrections staged at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris during the Second Empire. Starring Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) in the title role, it was the first major revival of Gluck's opera since the 1820s and attracted considerable attention in the press and elsewhere. Critics and others were fascinated by Viardot's dramatic presence on stage, producing images (both in pictures and words) of her Orpheus that are often striking in their awareness of time past. Indeed, ambivalence about the past and its artefacts might be said to haunt the reception of a work – and performer – many designated as the epitome of the classique. Contextualising this Orphée within the changing meanings of the term classique in the mid-nineteenth century, the article focuses on a particularly revealing moment in the transition between an operatic culture based on new works and one ever more reliant on revivals of acknowledged masterpieces.

The tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez is today remembered for his invention of the ‘C from the chest’, first presented to Parisian audiences in 1837. This has retrospectively been mythologised as the origin-point of modern tenor technique, though recent research has thrown the exact nature and significance of Duprez’s achievement into doubt. Nonetheless, one context in which Duprez was understood as revolutionary was in the scientific work of two Lyonnais doctors, Paul Diday and Joseph Pétrequin, whose 1840 essay ‘Mémoire sur une nouvelle espèce de voix chantée’ offers a unique perspective not only on what Duprez sounded like, but also on developments in the understanding of the physiological phenomenon of singing itself. Placing this work in the context of earlier medical writings on the voice, and of the authors’ subsequent debate with the singing teacher Manuel Garcia Jr., suggests that the late 1830s were a period of flux in the history of the understanding of singing, one in which long-held certainties were being questioned. Duprez thus arrived in Paris at a unique moment. The changing conceptual background shaped the understanding of Duprez’s voice even as the tenor was used by the doctors as a ‘living experiment’ to reach conclusions about the function of the voice generally.

The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth equivocate between the demons of random malevolence and ordinary (if exceptionally nasty) old women; and both King James I, whose book on witchcraft may have influenced Shakespeare, and A. W. Schlegel, whose essay on Macbeth certainly influenced Verdi, also stress this ambiguity. In his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Verdi uses certain musical patterns associated with the witches; and like the witches, who sound sometimes tame and frivolous, sometimes like incarnations of supernatural evil, Lady Macbeth hovers insecurely between roles: she is a hybrid of ambitious wife and agent of hell.

Shortly following the premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, performances of this opera often featured a strange substitution: sopranos performed the rondò-finale from one of Donizetti's earlier operas, Fausta, in place of the now-famous mad scene aria. At least four productions were affected and this alteration was performed by some of the most famous sopranos of the time. This article explores the brief tradition of altering the mad scene by looking carefully at its origin and subsequent appearances, discussing its effects on the experience of hearing Lucia di Lammermoor as a whole, and investigating the possible reasons why this substitution lasted only for a brief period of time.

Ever since the cultural watershed of the 1960s, predictions of the imminent demise of classical music, especially in America, have been rife. Its audience, undermined by the precipitate decline in public music education and decimated by defections to pop (respectable for aspiring intellectuals from the moment rock became British), was assumed to be aging, indeed dying off. Whether as a symptom of this process or as one of its causes, media coverage for classical music steadily and drastically diminished over the 1970s and 1980s (coinciding with the rise of serious pop coverage), as did the number of radio stations that offered it.

Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life

Until recently, women's biography and feminist interpretation of texts have travelled along separate paths, the exhaustive documentation required by biography often seeming to overwhelm efforts at interpretation, dictating that the genre remain essentially conservative and anti-theoretical. This is unfortunate, if only because it is in the writing of women's lives that biography and theory may need each other most. The women we examine are sometimes minor figures, ordinary people most interesting when seen as emblematic of a broader context; and of course they rarely lived according to modern feminist principles: what does one make of a talented woman who devoted her life more to caring for men than for herself? Such situations present conundrums that simultaneously resist and require the solace of theory.

Rossini's comic finales consistently foreground the propensity of noise to overwhelm the senses, to both signify and induce madness or confusion, and to transform the bodies on stage into noisy automata. Such mechanical noisiness may appear ‘naturally’ comic and dramatically appropriate – and therefore hardly in need of comment. But the din of Rossini's operas was a point of contention for critics; even Stendhal, normally the composer's staunch advocate, displays a kind of ambivalence about the sheer physical force of Rossini's music. This ambivalence mirrors a larger division between fans and critics, a bifurcation that produced an immense volume of printed matter as Rossini's music became a nexus for debates about the place of reason versus sensation and the troubled relationship between physiological and moral stimulation. These tensions are especially apparent in two operas from 1817, La Cenerentola and La gazza ladra. Both works tend to subvert the conventions of sentimental comedy by ironizing sentimental display, mocking tender feelings or, most tellingly, juxtaposing tears with violent cacophony – tactics that did not always sit well with critics. Using Stendhal's Vie de Rossini as a focal point, this essay situates Rossinian noise and the controversy surrounding it in the context of pervasive concern about the sensible body in a post-sentimental era. Because it seemed to act on the body in such powerful ways, noise very easily allowed commentators to invoke a whole panoply of overlapping discourses – of politics, sentimentality and sensibility, morality, medicine and physiology – in their attempts to account for Rossini's popularity.

By all accounts the premiere of Puccini's Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera on 11 February 1907 was a triumphant success, with the presence of the composer adding special lustre to the brilliant performance of a distinguished cast. Amidst the general acclamation, however, a foreign visitor named Jihei Hashiguchi raised a dissenting voice in a letter to a local newspaper:

I can say nothing for the music of Madama butterfly. Western music is too complicated for a Japanese. Even Caruso' celebrated singing does not appeal very much more than the barking of a dog in faraway woods.

With the exception of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Soviet opera in the 1930s has been relatively little studied. Yet this was an era in which opera was vigorously promoted as an ideal Soviet form after more than a decade of criticism from radical proletarian groups. This article considers three main aspects of Soviet operatic culture in the 1930s. First, opera's emotional power was valued as a way to mobilise mass opinion and the opera house was increasingly seen as a highly ideological site. Second, whilst most of the work in founding a Soviet repertory was carried out at Leningrad's Malyi Opera Theatre, Moscow became increasingly involved as the decade continued. Third, Soviet opera was highly dependent on adaptations of socialist realist novels. This phenomenon of ‘transposition’ is seen here as an attempt to invest scores with an unimpeachable political message. Moreover, transposition was an ideal method of regulating ambiguous literary texts by condensing their cardinal features in dramatic form. Although the story of Soviet opera was largely one of failure, its study sheds important light not only on the development of the Russian operatic tradition, but also on the dynamics of Stalinist culture.

The subject of this article is the failure of the Stalinist Soviet opera project. Although similar proposals had appeared years before, the project was inaugurated in 1936, and its realisation was placed in the hands of the State Committee for Artistic Affairs. The archival materials discussed in the article (including transcripts of the Committee's meetings) demonstrate that even publicly acclaimed productions were seen as failures by these senior bureaucrats. On the one hand, there were demands for realism and contemporary topics, and on the other, for monumentality and elevated musical language; these demands proved to be in deep conflict with each other. In addition to this crippling problem, it soon became apparent that any treatment of a contemporary topic was bound to become unacceptable before long, given the ever-shifting political landscape. While novels and films were certainly under close scrutiny, many operas were subjected to so many demands for revision that they never saw production at all. The article's central claim is that the 1939 Soviet reworking of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar as Ivan Susanin fulfilled the state's needs much better than any newly created Soviet opera could have, resulting in the effective curtailment of the project by 1946.

It seems fair to say that we are enmeshed in an Age of Reconstruction. Whatever groans the shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ may elicit from musicians and musicologists, the film industry's leap for the bandwagon is proof of the principle that Period Pieces Pay. Of the recent spate of feature films set in the eighteenth century, one in particular has marketed itself through its reconstructive credentials. The technologies that allow us to remodel our bodies, and revive old recordings on compact disc, also allowed the makers of Farinelli, Il Castrato to reach back and breathe new life into the voice of the long-dead castrati.

A common feature of Cherubini's Parisian operas of the 1790s is the displacement of one or more of the protagonists. They are out of sorts with their environment, experiencing a need to escape that prevents the traditional unity of place from focusing the drama. The heroine of Lodoïska (1791) is imprisoned in a tower; in Eliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard Florindo travels to Mont St Bernard to forget his beloved Eliza, who pursues him and saves him from suicide. For the heroine of Médée (1797), Corinth represents unhappiness: she returns to her former home only to take revenge. In Les deux Journées (1800), Armand and Constance flee Paris to save their lives; even in the comic opera L'Hôtellerie portugaise (1798) the central location serves merely as a rendez-vous for the two lovers on their way to evade the wicked plans of Donna Gabriele's stepfather. These operas do not, in other words, unfold in reassuring environments where characters feel at home; nor are there neutral backgrounds that enable the drama to concentrate on personal interaction. What is more, although placing protagonists in such unhappy circumstances is widespread in late eighteenth-century opera, and ‘rescue operas’ in particular, it is at least arguable that Cherubini exploited their restlessness in a uniquely successful manner.

Ferdinand Hérold's 1827 ballet-pantomime La Somnambule, written for the Paris Opéra, is generally remembered today only as a source for Bellini's 1831 opera La sonnambula. However, Hérold's work – which also inspired a series of popular vaudevilles on the same theme – illustrates the strong, voyeuristic appeal of the trance phenomenon at the end of the Bourbon Restoration. It can be viewed as encapsulating wide-ranging contemporary ideas about the relationship between sleepwalking, mesmerism, madness and the supernatural. The aims of this article are twofold. First, it seeks to introduce important nuances into the received and often generalised claims usually made about the containing nature of trance scenes in nineteenth-century theatre, positing an alternative model to that of the unhinged heroine of Italian opera familiar from recent feminist writing on opera. Second, it illuminates the musical practices specific to late Restoration Paris that were so crucial to the aesthetic – and the success – of these sleepwalking heroines. A web of visual and musical allusions conjured up an entranced figure who, although related to the Italian operatic madwoman, has a personality and social implications all her own.

It has often been suggested that a renewed fascination with Verdi’s Don Carlos coincided with the advent of Regieoper (or radically revisionist staging) in Germany over the past few decades. However, Don Carlos already counted among the most frequently revived operas in German-language theatres during the first half of the twentieth century. This article argues that neglect of this rich performance tradition is linked both to a German-centred narrative of the history of operatic production, which constructs the 1930s and 1940s as a gap in the development of ‘avant-garde’ direction, and to an over-emphasis on the visual side in recent academic discourse on operatic staging. These attitudes are challenged by a close look at selected German productions of Don Carlos from the 1920s to 1940s. Treatment of the opera's most difficult scenes – the mystical elements of the auto-da-fé finale and the dénouement – reveals striking continuities between the Weimar and Nazi eras, as well as conceptual affinities to some of the most acclaimed recent stagings. These findings call for a more historically grounded approach to operatic production.