The use of semiotic methods and concepts in analytical studies of opera has not yet produced the results that the variety of communicative levels in musical theatre might lead us to expect. If, to repeat a frequently cited formulation by Pierluigi Petrobelli, ‘various systems work together in opera, each according to its nature and laws, and the result of the combination is much greater than the sum of the individual forces’, it seems likely that the difficulty of applying this principle may in fact be directly related to the multiplicity of ‘systems’ involved. Only theoretical enquiries that go beyond differentiating expressive levels can hope to arrive at a more satisfactory concept of this ‘system of systems’, and thus apply it in a useful way. The problem is of course too vast to be developed here; however, because the following reading of Aida involves such theoretical considerations, it may be useful to make explicit some basic difficulties involving polytextuality in opera.

Idealized mother figure, great protectress, unsurpassed magician, devoted wife of Osiris: the goddess Isis assumed multiple roles in ancient Egyptian mythology. Verdi's Aida reflects this polysemy. Concordant with its general attention to Egyptological detail (though not without inaccuracies even by the standards of the day), Auguste Mariette's early synopsis for the opera refers to Isis only once, at the beginning of Act III when Aida awaits Radames: ‘May Isis, protectress of love, guide him to her who wants to belong only to him’.

Although the term ‘verismo” emerged in both literature and opera during roughly the same period (in novels and spoken theatre around the 1870s, in opera around the 1890s), the modern tendency has been to regard this as a coincidence of little consequence. However, it is perhaps worth returning to the question in light of recent studies in literary verismo, some of which offer new perspectives and even contribute to a re-definition of operatic verismo. I shall start, then, from the hypothesis that a new comparison between these two types of verismo may lead to a common definition.

France receives little attention in narratives about the sublime in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This article will argue that the cataclysmic tableau at the climax of Cherubini's first opera for the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris, Lodoïska (1791), can be understood as part of a coherent and distinctively French discourse of the sublime, rooted in revolutionary experience that can be understood in relation to wider European trends.

One of the central events of the film Moonstruck (1987) takes place in a performance of La bohéme at the Metropolitan Opera. Loretta (Cher) is puzzled by what seems to be Mimì's unexpected death, which takes her by surprise, even though the explanation by her friend Ronny (Nicholas Cage) reveals that she suspects its cause. Most of us will smile indulgently at a first-time opera-goer's ingenuous conflation of character (‘coughing her brains out’) and voice (‘keep singing’). But we might pause for a moment on a more intriguing twist in Loretta's surprise at Mimì's death – the fact that our antibiotic age has largely forgotten the devastating epidemic formerly known as phthisis or consumption.

Describing the performances of two Chinese opera groups – the visiting famous opera singer Mai Lan-fang and his troupe on Broadway and the local San Sai Gai troupe in Chinatown – and their reception by non-Chinese Americans, this essay tracks various formations and effects of Chinese images in 1930s New York that were deeply imprinted in popular imagination. The regrettable invisibility of Chinese opera in American music history is a result of such a pre-constructed concept of Chineseness.

This article explores Verdi's death as a ‘media event’, tracing the unfolding news from the earliest reports of his imminent demise up to the monumental commemorations held 30 days afterwards. Throughout this time, news media helped to define a period of so-called national mourning. Yet a broader range of media (including the telegraph, tram and railway) played an important role in demarcating the geopolitical scope of this collective grief. As a point of comparison, Verdi's death is considered in relation to the assassination of King Umberto I – a recent incident, of greater magnitude, which had provoked a spell of national mourning only months into the new century. Echoes of Umberto's assassination can be heard in responses to Verdi's death, linking both events to a common historical and political moment. This new context for understanding Verdi's final moments not only seeks to illuminate the manifold interactions between public and persona in Liberal Italy but also raises questions about the construction of auditory experiences in national mourning and the sensory dimension of the nation state's lugubrious politics.

As anyone who has worked in the theatre will know, the journey from deciding to stage a work to its performance has two characteristics: the close interdependence of various artistic and organisational forces, and unpredictability. It should thus come as no surprise that a collection of documents concerning Felice Romani, a figure central to early nineteenth-century operatic life, presents an image both complex and constantly shifting; nor that in such sources the tasks of the librettist, even one of distinction, are always interwoven with those of other theatrical personalities: impresarios, singers and composers, administrators, executives, mediators, journalists, dancers, set-designers, craftsmen and factotums. This exploration of Romani and his trade seeks to describe these collaborations, while remaining sensitive to those fundamental aspects of nineteenth-century librettistic work that were their raison d'être. It will therefore be useful to proceed in two stages: first, to reflect on the nature and function of Romani's dramatic-poetic creations; then to provide synchronic sketches of his working relationships, dwelling on three of the most important – with theatrical institutions, with singers and with composers.

Ravel's comic opera L'Heure espagnole (1911) has often been criticised for a certain coldness and lack of sentiment. Such characteristics, however, might profitably be seen in light of Ravel's modernity, an art where surface is privileged over depth. Parallels between Ravel's approach and Henri Bergson's nearly contemporaneous theory of laughter developed in Le Rire – in itself an articulate explication of the surface/depth binary – provide insight into Ravel's aesthetic. This orientation unfolds in the detached adaptation of two historical models in L'Heure espagnole: secco recitative from opera buffa and leitmotivic writing from Wagnerian opera.

Considerations of exoticism and particularly of orientalism in opera seem to focus, either explicitly or implicitly, on generalities – even when scholars have looked at only a few isolated works taken almost exclusively from ‘serious’ or ‘great’ repertories. However, in order to understand this complex phenomenon in its contemporary context, it is necessary to work from a knowledge of the extraordinary diversity of ‘exotic’ opera.

‘Pur sempre su le nozze canzoneggiando vai.’ Arnalta's remark to Poppea (L'incoronazione di Poppea, Act II scene 10), occasioned by Poppea's lyrical exultation over the death of Seneca, provokes the closing sententia of Edward T. Cone's recent exploration of the ambiguous world of opera and its inhabitants. Translating the nurse's comment as ‘You're forever going around singing songs about your wedding’, Cone concludes that ‘this is just what characters in opera do: they go around singing songs all the time’.

While Jean-Philippe Rameau left behind copious evidence of his changing beliefs as a music theorist, he remained silent about his most deeply held beliefs as a composer of opera. His occasional protestations of admiration for Lully, and his petulant responses to criticism, have formed a small basis for the large amount of commentary on his compositional career. The possibility remains, however, that Rameau's theoretical writings could offer some clues about his compositions and, more generally, about his career as a composer. I am thinking of a brief, but well-known moment in his career when theoretical remarks and compositional attitudes worked together in the performance of what we today would consider an analytical act: his commentary on Lolly's monologue, ‘Enfin it est en ma puissance’, from Act II scene 5 of Armide.Rameau published this commentary in 1754 in his Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, as a response to Rousseau's criticism of Lolly's monologue in the Lettre sur la musique française of 1753. The commentary is well known in modern scholarship and has been the subject of a number of studies, the most thorough being Cynthia Verba's work on the evolution of implied chromaticism in Rameau's theories. Here we will be concerned less with its purely theoretical content than with how Rameau's discourse can be said to betray his compositional beliefs about setting texts to music.

Although there have been a few revivals of Verdi's Stiffelio since its first modern performance in 1968, including an important 1985 production at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the opera has received until now only limited attention. With two stagings by major theatres in 1993 (London's Covent Garden in January and New York's Metropolitan Opera in October), the situation has changed markedly. Those of us who know Stiffelio well have tried to temper our enthusiasm, avoiding excessive claims and acknowledging some of the work's dramaturgical problems. But it should come as no surprise that an opera exquisitely poised between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto is likely to be worth rehearing, particularly when the work was withdrawn from circulation by its author for reasons having to do primarily with censorship of its libretto (in which the wife of a Protestant minister commits adultery) rather than with intrinsic artistic merit.

At one point in Paul Rudnick's play, Jeffrey, the title character, who claims to have slept with 5000 different men, speaks directly to the audience: ‘I know it's wrong to say that all gay men are obsessed with sex. Because that's not true. All human beings are obsessed with sex. All gay men are obsessed with opera.’

A number of scholars have drawn attention to the importance of Parisian popular theatre for an understanding of Verdian dramaturgy, especially in the operas leading up to Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. According to Giovanni Morelli, in Paris, Verdi frequented the popular theatre not for the sake of participating in the active milieu of Romantic cultural thought (Milanese circles had adequately fulfilled that need), but in order to mingle with a typical metropolitan theatre audience in the venues dedicated to the dissemination of a watered-down, middlebrow form of Romanticism.

The notion of studying the nineteenth-century danseur is problematic because of an anti-male strain in dance historiography that has led some to suggest that he virtually disappeared from the stage. André Levinson is largely responsible for the danseur’s poor reputation: he minimised the narrative aspect of nineteenth-century ballet and declared in 1929 that the ballerina Marie Taglioni had ‘evicted’ men from the stage. Levinson also canonised La Sylphide (1832), a ballet that he, like his nineteenth-century predecessors Théophile Gautier and Jules Janin, gendered as feminine. He promulgated the term ‘ballet blanc’, a feminising but misleading term now in common use and rarely interrogated. And yet men danced on the stage throughout the nineteenth century. In the case of the Paris Opéra, men contributed to ballet as principal dancers, soloists and in the corps de ballet. A brief study of La Jolie Fille de Gand, a ballet contemporaneous with La Sylphide, shows a rich set of male roles calling on men’s skill as mimes and dancers in various styles. Further studies of the long-maligned nineteenth-century danseur are needed.

The dramatic climax of Byron's poem The Corsair comes when Gulnare, a harem slave, seizes a weapon to free herself and Conrad, the pirate whom she loves, from the prison of their common enemy the Pasha Seyd.

In June 1867 Ismail Pasha, the new Viceroy of Egypt, arrived in Paris to represent his country at the Exposition universelle. The Egyptian pavilion, erected on a large corner of the Champs de Mars, featured a marvellous collection of architectural spaces that included a pharaoh's temple, a mediæval palace ‘richly decorated in the Arabic style’, and a modern-day bazaar showing all manner of merchants and artisans at work. If the temple, designed by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, was intended to display artefacts from the most remote corners of Egypt's history, other spaces transported spectators directly to the present, offering what one French commentator called ‘a living Egypt, a picturesque Egypt, the Egypt of Ismail Pasha’. An enormous panorama of the Isthmus of Suez, created by the Suez Canal Company with the help of M. Rubé, set designer from the Opéra, drew long queues of paying customers. Elsewhere visitors could gaze at authentic Egyptian peasants, or Bedouins on white dromedaries, all the races governed by the Viceroy ‘personified by individuals selected with care’, as the critic Edmond About put it. Most dazzling of all was the exhibit within the refabricated royal palace, where the Viceroy himself was the featured attraction: poised on a divan in a bedroom painted to look exactly like the place of his birth, he smoked a hookah and daily received guests from the best Parisian society. The whole sumptuous spectacle, About would conclude, ‘spoke to the eyes as well as to the mind. It expressed a political idea’.

‘Nothing is but what is not’. These words uttered by Macbeth after his bizarre first encounter with the three weird sisters could serve as a motto for the whole of Shakespeare's tragedy; for ‘the Scottish play’, as the superstitious have called it for centuries, is ruled by uncertainty, the questionable, the netherworld, where the only thing that is absolute is evil. It is about ambiguous forces that violate ife's natural order – witches, ghosts, a moving forest, an invisible dagger – what we call the macabre, what Freud called the uncanny, and what Verdi called ‘un genere fantastico’. Shakespeare constructs a world of binary opposites where boundaries, as Marjorie Garber has observed, are ‘continually transgressed, and marked by a series of taboo border crossings’.