No aspect of Janáček's operas has been publicised more widely than their alleged use of ‘speech melodies’. Indeed, most commentators now assume the a priori existence of speech melodies in the composer's operas. However, only John Tyrrell has explored the matter in depth, and many basic questions about Janáček's speech-melody theory and practice remain unanswered. What follows is an attempt to investigate in detail one of the most prominent, and most misrepresented, issues of Janáček opera analysis. A brief initial digression into the principal characteristics of spoken Czech is unavoidable.

Genealogies persist in the writing of histories, if not to suggest lineages then to delight or dismay us with the effects of accident and circumstance. The first generation of Italian operas were all court, that is private, entertainments, whether produced in Florence, Mantua, Rome or Turin. When this new form of entertainment first emigrated, it spoke Italian in foreign courts (except in Madrid), perhaps because it was so identified in its novelty with still novel Italian musical styles, with the dramaturgy of Italian spectacle and above all with the Italian way of singing. It travelled to the Habsburg imperial court early, in Prague, 1627. Like this performance, later occasional stagings in Vienna and Innsbruck remained in Italian and at first by Italians, though eventual progeny included scores by Gluck and Mozart. The court in Madrid, however, heard in 1627 a version of opera with a libretto by Lope de Vega, La selva sin amor; its score was by a theatrically inexperienced Tuscan lutenist, Filippo Piccinni. Madrid did not essay opera again until 1660. The court of Sigismund III in Warsaw heard Italian opera beginning in 1628, possibly with a Mantuan score. Opera made its way to Paris only in 1645, where, after acquiring a French text and French dancing and singing, it became one of the glories of the royal court. The cradle of opera, in all these cases, was the court, with all its resources in terms of money, an obligated audience and more than willing professionals, whether imported or local.

‘Scandal’, ‘uproar’ and ‘sensation’ are words that are often used by critics when writing about operatic stagings of directors Hans Neuenfels and Peter Konwitschny. Neuenfels' 1981 staging of Aida in Frankfurt/Main aroused a veritable furore, as did his interpretation of Nabucco (Berlin, 2000); similar reactions greeted Konwitschny's Graz Aida (1994) and his Hamburg Don Carlos (2001). Neuenfels and Konwitschny continually undermine traditional concepts of operatic staging: the provocative statements advanced by their powerful images regularly elicit bewildered reactions.

Two dissimilar subjects – Hermann Levi (1839–1900), a Jewish Wagnerian who conducted the Bayreuth première of Parsifal, and Parsifal itself – can be seen in a critical discourse that binds them together in a paradoxical relationship. In accounts of both Levi and the opera he conducted, certain historians and critics have made a point of stripping away a supposed veneer of aesthetic deception in order to expose the raw underbelly of historical truth. In these revisionist readings, Levi's enthusiasm for Wagner and his music amounts to a shameful form of Jewish ‘self-hatred’, while Parsifal, far from espousing a message of compassion and redemption, propagates ideas of an solidarity and racial supremacy. To advance these arguments is tantamount to claiming that moral and psychological categories such as shame and guilt are appropriate ways to describe a musician's life or the historical legacy of an opera; and these are views I find difficult to share. The slogan in my title should thus be understood as an ironic commentary, as well as a call to formulate the questions in a new way. Although I can only sketch the outlines of an alternative approach, I will suggest that critical accounts shaming Hermann Levi for his Wagnerism, and damning Parsifal for its anti-Semitism, are cut from the same cloth; they need to be revalued by a musicology that traffics in both an aesthetic understanding of art works and a critical assessment of the cultural framework in which this understanding is produced.

Grand opéra occupied a prominent but fraught position in the life of New Orleans in the 1830s, where it became a focus for debates surrounding contemporary cultural and political issues. In 1835, the city’s rival theatres – one francophone, the other anglophone – raced to give the first performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, bringing tensions between their respective communities to a head. This article explores Robert’s arrival in New Orleans, arguing that the discourses that grew up first around this work and later Les Huguenots provided a means through which opposing linguistic and cultural factions within the city could negotiate their local, national and international identities.

Scholarly consensus denies a real connection between ancient tragedy and early opera because music historians have measured early operas against an idealised conception of Attic tragedy. However, the pioneers of opera were seeking to revive a Euripidean style of musical tragedy as it was performed in the ‘decadent’ theatres of the Hellenistic era. Euripides's tragedies established conventional relationships between musical expression and the representation of the passions. Baroque opera is seen as a strongly complex reading of a set of Euripidean tragedies that enjoyed favour in the Hellenistic era but fell from critical grace in the nineteenth century. These plays hold the key to opera's tragic pretensions; the esteem they long enjoyed should prompt us to reconsider the spirit of tragedy and the nature of catharsis.

Condemned as degenerate art during the Third Reich, German Zeitopern and their artistic treatment of technological infiltration during die Weimar Republic have sparked a variety of new research projects, world-wide musical performances and CD releases from Decca/London in a continuing series entitled ‘Entartete Kunst.’ Manifestos were written in response to the penetration of technology into nearly every aspect of human life, envisaging a future where human beings would interact organically with their new urban environments. Expressionism, Americanism and the concept of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) symbolized fresh driving forces that emerged most visibly in opera. In contrast to pre-war Romanticism and Wagnerian mythology, the ‘New Objectivity’ demonstrated a radical commitment to the modern environment, focusing on visible, objective reality rather dian on the emotions of the artist. Particularly in Zeitopern, composers like Max Brand, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek embraced contemporary ideas of progress, new technological inventions, modern electronic communication systems and means of transportation as props, story topics and artistic vehicles to introduce new sound-effects. In several instances modern technology appeared as simply anodier stage-prop in die long history of opera stage design. In die context of European conceptions of Americanism, technology was pardy understood as a threat to the establishment's reverence for Romantic high culture. And yet in many instances it was also a welcome tool in the project of redirecting all the arts from their stagnant, inflexible pasts to modern, progressive forms of contemporary entertainment. Such diverse attitudes to the potent symbolism of the machine indicate a conflict inherent in aesthetic practice at the time and raise fundamental questions. Do composers successfully represent human beings as creative and autonomous individuals while simultaneously introducing technological images of dominance and depersonalization? If there are contradictory aspects in the representation of technology, how do they relate to the various aesthetic views of the 1920s? Max Brand's central work and acclaimed prototype of Zeitopern, Maschinist Hopkins (1928), brings the world of technology and its sophisticated artifacts to the musical stage. A close analysis reveals basic contradictions, symptomatic of the era, in the composer's embrace of modern technology.

Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West, premièred in New York, 1910, represents what we might call a photographic turn in the later Puccini. For one, its mise-en-scène was given textual status equivalent to that of libreto and music. The opera's first costumes and sets were crafted for the Metropolitan Opera House from stills of the source play, The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco. What is more, the circulation of photographs and eventually a staging livret ensured that La fanciulla looked the same in every iteration. In this model, authorship and performance become acts of remediation between layers of machine-generated souvenirs. Both The Girl and La fanciulla bear the marks of their mediated nature: The Girl suggests a fragile third dimension through the use of panoramas and scrims; during its famous Act I sunset La fanciulla moves from a realist sound-world towards a fantasy one, the latter marked by disembodied humming from a tenor chorus and even a new instrument, the fonica, designed by Puccini to be sounded by electricity. This essay suggests that the purported resistance of Puccinian opera to revisionist staging has its roots in critiques of realism's ‘statistical’ universe, and the perceptual modes held to be available to mass-consumed art.

This article shows how central dance was to the experience of opera in seventeenth-century Venice. The first part provides an introduction to the use of dance in Venetian opera and the primary sources – libretti, scores, treatises, and various eyewitness reports. The second section summarizes the extraordinary variety of subjects and style of the dances. A third section treats the musical sources, describing stylistic features of the dance music, as well as providing important insights as to how to identify which vocal or instrumental excerpts would likely have been danced.

This article explores the relationship between politics, society and culture in Napoleonic Milan (1796–1814) on the one hand, and opera reviews published in the city’s periodical press at the time on the other. This relationship is worth discussing for two reasons: first, Milan under French rule constituted the earliest, embryonic instance of the modern city in Italy; second, it was there that for the first time in Italy operatic criticism shifted from an undivided focus on the performance, mostly treated as a social occasion, to a prominent concern for the work being performed, which became the object of lengthy critical scrutiny. The article focuses specifically on the function of the periodical press as a crucial link between the discourse of opera and that of the city, exploring the complex ways in which Milanese society, culture and ideology, especially as represented in the city’s newspapers, are connected to the epoch-making shift from performance to work in the opera reviews published there.

Contemporary press reports of two important stagings of grand opéra in Bologna – Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (as Rodolfo di Sterlinga) in 1840 and the Italian première of Verdi’s Don Carlos in 1867 – shed light on some intriguing details of the beginning and culmination of the genre’s reception in Italy. Through the prism of local civic pride, they illuminate not only the national standing of the composers in question and the state of regional operatic production, but also the political issues of the day as they impinged – frequently in unexpected ways – on then-current debates about musical style and genre. In particular, when read alongside the pronouncements of Angelo Mariani (conductor in Bologna from 1860) and, above all, Verdi, they reveal that the role, provenance and relative status of the works’ visual aspect (apparently so integral to the development of grand opéra) figured surprisingly importantly in the complicated and often contradictory discourse on unity in the nation at large.

Controversial efforts to find political allegory in Dido and Aeneas (c.1689), the great chamber opera by Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell, have obscured the opera's broader concern with the politics of culture. As rival political factions claimed ownership of the nation's cultural heritage, Tate and other dramatists in Restoration England asked searching questions about the relationship between the artist and political authority. Grappling with Virgil's Aeneid, a central text of Stuart absolutism, Dido and Aeneas explores the workings and the costs of partisan myth-making. The opera joins many other Restoration voices in taking up an ancient ‘chaste Dido’ tradition, which accused Virgil of mangling Dido's historical reputation in the service of imperial propaganda. Yet Dido does not set forth a topical allegory or a coherent critique of Stuart misrule, but takes an unstable, irresolute attitude towards the cultural legacy of Virgil, the aesthetics of female suffering, and the politics of royal praise.

Not least because of its librettist, Tarare (1787) ranks among the most interesting ‘reform’ operas of the eighteenth century. The work was by no means unique among such efforts at the Académie Royale de Musique, but it undoubtedly had the greatest impact after the Piccinni controversy at the end of the 1770s, in part because Beaumarchais was untiring in his efforts to promote the new opera – a task at which he was far superior to his librettistic colleagues. He presented his new operatic conception in a detailed preface to the libretto (‘Aux Abonnés de l'Opéra’), the central point of which was to emphasise the mixture of conventional genre traditions, in particular of serious and comic elements.

‘From Nino and Semiramide, rulers of Assyria, was born a son who carried the name of his father, and so resembled his mother that the people could distinguish them only by means of masculine and feminine clothing.’ Thus begins the argo-mento to the libretto La Semiramide, produced in Venice at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo for the 1670–71 season. The gender ambiguity described in the argomento is evident in the portrait of Semiramide from the frontispiece of that libretto (see Fig. 1). She sits alone at her dressing table, adorning her hair with roses in anticipation of her lover's arrival. She admires herself in the mirror, eternal symbol of female vanity. Her bare breasts and navel contrast strikingly with the metal shield that girds her chest. A high-topped military sandal is displayed prominently beneath the folds of her skirt. Prior to assuming the male disguise that she will wear for much of the opera, Semiramide is already pictured in a manner that is warlike and sexually dangerous, challenging and seductive. This mixture of male and female attributes is critical to her new guise as a Venetian heroine.

This article argues that the early nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of operatic aesthetics in France: fuelled by post-Revolutionary notions about theatre's importance in processes of nation-building, the Opéra sought to strengthen its reputation as the ‘Académie that unites all the arts’. The intertwinement of this aesthetic and political aim is conspicuous in the production of Jean-François Le Sueur's Ossian ou les bardes (1804), loosely based on James Macpherson's Ossianic ‘translations’. The work's meticulous coordination of the arts sought to bring third-century bardic society back to life and make audiences feel part of this long-forgotten, supposedly ‘historical’ and French, past. Thus, this article points to the Opéra's intensifying interaction with nationalism and genealogical historiography around 1800 as it sought to define its role as a national theatre. It also challenges the common scholarly notion that the Opéra's productions served primarily to aggrandise Napoleon.

This essay discusses the famous sunrise in the prologue of Attila in the context of early nineteenth-century theatrical lighting and musical conventions, and relates it to Félicien David's Le Désert, Haydn's The Creation and Rossini's Guillaume Tell, as well as Verdi's Alzira and Jérusalem.

Before returning to Paris in 1874 after his eventful four-year stay in England, Gounod embarked on a comic opera based on Molière's George Dandin. Recuperating in St Leonard's-on-Sea from a ‘cerebral attack’ he wrote a lengthy Preface, dated 10–11 April 1874, from which the following is drawn:

The infinite variety of stress, in prose, offers the musician quite new horizons which will save him from monotony and uniformity. Independence and freedom of pace will then come to terms with observance of the higher laws that govern periodic pulse and the thousand nuances of prosody. Every syllable will then have its own quantity, its own precise weight in truth of expression and accuracy of language. Longs and shorts will not have to make those cruel concessions, those barbarous sacrifices of which composers and singers, it must be admitted, take so little notice. What inexhaustible mines of variety there will be in sung or declaimed phrases, in the duration and intensity of stress, in the proportion and extension of musical periods, extensions which will no longer depend on continual reiteration and repetition but on logical progression and the growth of the germinal idea on which the piece is based […]

Wagner’s vaunted model of artistic synthesis persists in scholarly assessments of his work. But at its centre, the composer argued that the media of voice and orchestra do not mix: they retain their identities as separate channels of sound that can neither duplicate nor substitute for one another. Taking as a starting point Wagner’s claims for the non-adaptability of media, this article addresses the adaptation of Wagner’s music to the modern digital technologies of HD cinema and video game. Drawing on a wide circle of writers, from Schiller and Žižek to Bakhtin, Augé, Baudrillard and second-generation media theorists, it interrogates the concept of ‘reality’ within live acoustic performance, both historically, as a discursive concept, and technologically, via the sensory realism of digital simulcasting and telepresence. The philosophical opposition of appearance and reality fails when reality is defined by the intimate simulation of a sensory event as it is registered on the body. And by contrasting the traditions of high fidelity in (classical) sound recording with that of rendering sound in cinema, I suggest ways in which unmixable media appear to have an afterlife in modern technologies. This raises questions – in a post-Benjamin, post-McLuhan context – about our definition of ‘liveness’, the concept of authenticity within mediatised and acoustic sounds, and our vulnerability to the technological effects of media.

In Herman Melville's story, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the potentially mutinous reaction of the Bellipotent's crew to Billy's execution is quelled by a call to order:

For suddenly the drum beat to quarters, which familiar sound happening at least twice every day, had upon the present occasion a signal peremptoriness in it. True martial discipline long continued superinduces in average man a sort of impulse whose operation at the official word of command much resembles in its promptitude the effect of an instinct.

Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000), a British film about a boy from the industrial north-east who forsakes his roots to train as a professional dancer, opens and closes with two almost mythic scenes of male dancing. In the first, the film’s opening, the eleven-year-old Billy lays the stylus on a T-Rex LP and, after a scratchy false start, the soundtrack begins with the 1978 ‘Cosmic Dancer’. Hopping onto his bed, Billy starts to leap up and down – first as any boy would, but then higher and higher, his body caught in slow motion in a variety of abstract poses. In the film’s final scene, we return to Billy dancing, this time as a mature, muscular adult arriving in the wings of a London theatre. This is the first and only time we see the grown-up Billy, and his face is kept from us so that we can focus on the strength and immensity of his limbs, the astonishing athletic body. At the climactic statement of a soaring late Romantic phrase – the music is now Swan Lake – Billy leaps onto the stage. Boy becomes man, adolescent energy is transformed into athleticism and film and soundtrack freeze, capturing Billy in another abstract leap.