The undoubted cause célèbre of the 1969 Holland Festival was the large-scale music theatre piece Reconstructie, jointly authored by a team of five young composers and two librettists. The work, which took as its subject ‘the struggle against US imperialism in Latin America’, and revolved around the figure of Che Guevara, embodied the authors’ dual commitment to political engagement and artistic experiment. My account examines the work through the lens of recent scholarship that stresses the politically reactionary function of avant-garde experimentation within the cultural Cold War. In the process, attention is given to broader factors affecting the work’s production and reception: these include contemporaneous debates about cultural popularising and the Holland Festival; the complex motives of the work’s governmental patrons; and the influence upon the authors of Cuba, Castro and Guevara himself.

Towards the end of a life spent meditating on music, philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote that ‘music is the silence of words, just as poetry is the silence of prose’. With this lapidary remark, he bottled up essences of French symbolist musical doctrines, their elevation of music above language, their impulse to urge poetry towards the condition of musical sound, and their sense that music is ineffable. ‘And the ineffable’, Jankélévitch wrote, ‘cannot be expressed because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it’. Denying that music was inarticulate – that what it invokes is indicible, unable to be said – he saw instead a hall of sonorous mirrors, saturated with implications and suggestions diat draw the mind on to a vanishing point that can never be reached. Music has the perfect apparitional quality that others would deem characteristic of symbols per se, as that which materialises in the distance and cannot be caught when we journey towards its meaning: it will always recede, leaving us with our glowing trail of assumed connotations. Thus symbolist literature, with its rhapsodies to musical mystery, dealt profitably in poetic images of suggestive but unimaginable sound. Such sounds have their most famous incarnation in the melody of Mallarmé's faun's flute, repository for all that cannot be thought, said or remembered. Mallarme created a poetic symbol, verbally couched, which as symbol per se borrows the ineffability of music. It is a mirage, which we approach and lose even as we imagine its meaning. By choosing a musical object (a flute melody), Mallarmé drew doubly on music's apparitional quality — as if to say: even if the impossible could occur and we were to grasp the symbol and its single luminous meaning, hearing what the flute plays, that sound, like all music, would merely send us wandering onwards again.

How can Wagner simultaneously herald modernism, express the quintessence of romanticism and evoke primeval experience? This question is illuminated by the constellation of advanced production and desire that Walter Benjamin finds in the process of commodity manufacture, dwelling on the tendency for new technologies to create repetitive conformity while recognising their capacity to trigger unfulfilled prospects in older forms of knowledge. When, however, Adorno frames the dilemma posed by Wagner he finds mythic deception, not a release of archaic subjectivity. These two currents in modernity cannot be easily segregated, but reading Adorno's Wagner through Benjamin's appraisal of modernity facilitates a more sanguine interpretation of Wagner's evocation of ur-forms through advanced compositional technology. The rigidity of Adorno's interpretation is further softened by Jacques Derrida's reading of Karl Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value, while, on a broader front, Derrida's attention to the reader also suggests that commodity production need not dominate reception strategies. Indeed, Adorno, in an essay on film first published in 1966, acknowledges that intention and effect frequently do not coincide.

In 1903, Otto Weininger, twenty-three, Viennese, Jewish, and an imminent suicide, published his misogynist manifesto Sex and Character and created an international sensation. ‘One began’, reported a contemporary, ‘to hear in the men's clubs of England and in the cafés of France and Germany – one began to hear singular mutterings among men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared.’ Weininger's new gospel tied the spiritual progress of the human race to the repudiation of its female half. Women, said Weininger, are purely material beings, mindless, sensuous, animalistic and amoral; lacking individuality, they act only at the behest of a ‘universalised, generalised, impersonal’ sexual instinct. For humanity to achieve its spiritual destiny, men – particularly ‘Aryan’ men, who had not suffered a racial degeneracy that made the task impossible – must achieve the individualistic supremacy first revealed by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In order to do this, they must both rid themselves of the femininity within them and reject their sexual desires for the women around them.

We publish here, by permission of Cornell University Press, two excerpts from Michel Poizat's L'Opéra, ou le cri de l'ange, a book that first appeared with the Parisian publisher A. M. Métailié in 1986. The extracts are taken from Arthur Denner's translation, which is due out with Cornell University Press in the spring of 1992 under the title The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Poizat's book is an ‘essay on the jouissance of the opera lover’ – an exploration of the experience of being an opera ‘fan’. It begins with interviews that the author conducted on the steps of the Paris Opéra in 1985. On the night before the première of Marek Janowski's production of Tristan und Isolde, Poizat spoke to some fans devoted enough to wait all night for a standing-room ticket, and asked them what motivated their dedication. In both our extracts, we hear more from these fans – Claude, an art history student, and Renaud, a twenty-one-year-old judo instructor.

Five women have been blinded by the darkness of Bluebeard's castle, each punished for the same fatal curiosity, the same whimsical refusal to obey her husband. Roaming in a vague, useless search for freedom, unable — perhaps unwilling—to find a way of escape, they can no longer remember how long they have been captive, and have even forgotten their vanity. It seems they will wait forever.

Bizet’s Carmen entered Spain’s cultural consciousness when it was first staged in Madrid in the 1887–8 season. A public battle for the performance rights in the autumn of 1887 led to competing productions at major theatres: the first in a new Spanish translation at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, and the second in the fully-sung Italian version at the Teatro Real. This article explores the Spanish encounter with Carmen during this season, from the political machinations of the lawsuit, to the opening nights and the extended critical debates that greeted the two premières. The Spanish adaptation is compared with the original French version and mapped against the native musico-theatrical tradition of the zarzuela, which had long purveyed constructions of ‘Spanishness’ for local consumption. Contemporary debates about national identity and its theatrical and musical representations underscore the varied critical responses to Carmen, which was embraced by Madrid opera audiences.

The King's Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Shortly thereafter some wealthy and powerful patrons – notably the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury – launched an ambitious scheme to build a fabulously expensive Royal Opera House in Leicester Square. The venture was designed to re-establish London as a major centre for Italian opera and ballet, to reform the wayward financial and artistic management of the King's Theatre and to give the capital city a grand opera house of modern design that would rival any in Europe. Because the royal patent promised for Leicester Square was blocked, the scheme had to be dropped, and the sponsors wound up establishing the ill-fated and short-lived Pantheon Opera instead – but that is another story. Our concern here is with the Leicester Square project which, though never realised, did set in motion many of the changes desired by its backers and helped to return London to the mainstream of opera.

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book, Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for the punctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of the studium (art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). The punctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside the studium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, what punctum could it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.

The Enlightenment witnessed the rise of a public whose role as sovereign arbiter of operatic taste irreversibly changed the processes by which fame and renown were bestowed upon composers. The public sphere – a conceptual space in which texts (including music) were disseminated and debated – emerged as an expansive intellectual forum in which composers, performers and works could be evaluated. In spite of opera's long-standing association with fame and renown, its role in the processes leading to ascriptions of musical value and fame in the Enlightenment public sphere is a significant dimension of canon formation that has yet to be fully investigated. This article offers a case study of Electress Maria Antonia of Saxony (1728–1780), whose mutually beneficial relationship with the Breitkopf firm, coupled with its redesigned ‘movable type’ in 1755, prompted a new mode of opera criticism, one that focused sharply on the music itself. Maria Antonia's Il trionfo della fedeltà (1754) and Talestri (1762) were the first operas to receive reviews featuring in-text musical examples, fuelling the public's quest to monumentalise Maria Antonia as celebrated composer. Ultimately, the inclusion of musical excerpts in opera criticism was an important step toward the construct of the work as separate from individual localised performances.

The essay analyses the Turkish mode in Mozart's output, discovering some unexpected examples, particularly Don Giovanni's aria ‘Fin ch'han dal vino’, whose uncommon sonority, obsessive rhythm and harmonic poverty evoke this topos. Don Giovanni may present Turkish features because his character coincides with eighteenth-century Western European views of the Turks as a threat to the established order and inclined to reckless sensuality. The romantic view of Don Giovanni as an ideal figure may also be connected with eighteenth-century thinking about ‘orientals’ as the representatives of utopia.

Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (1905) was conceived during a period of instability in both operetta and Viennese life. Considering the music and reception of both Witwe and some of its immediate, now-forgotten predecessors, this article argues that the operetta’s dramatic and musical dualism between urbane, Offenbach-like Paris and folksy, imaginary Pontevedro can be read both as a response to operetta’s conflicting priorities of satire and sentiment and as a depiction of the multi-ethnic world of working-class Vienna. The operetta’s unusual popularity, subsequent influence and exceptionally long performance history have tended to obscure these more immediate concerns.

Franz Schreker's opera Der ferne Klang is usually discussed using the term ‘phantasmagoria’, as a guiding thread. This article argues that this term names not one but two phenomena: as used by Theodor W. Adorno in his analysis of Wagner, the term denotes the repression of musical production in order to create a music without origin. In a lesser-known piece Adorno uses the term slightly differently, in a sense pioneered first by his friend Walter Benjamin. This second sense is interested in the repression not of musical production, but of the acoustic means of production that conspire to create a unified, synaesthetic experience (rather than an aesthetic object). This second sense, the denial of any sense data outside of the one experience to be had in an opera house, is exceedingly fruitful when applied to Der ferne Klang, since its hero is questing for the titular sound which is located in that very space the aural phantasmagoria has to pretend does not exist. Reading Schreker's opera keeping both senses of the term in mind may allow us to overcome Adorno's own somewhat negative assessment of Schreker's modernism and to locate within the opera a certain self-consciousness of phantasmagoric production.

We have long been accustomed to think in terms of opera ‘stars’, and thus it should not overstrain the imagination to extend the astronomical analogy when dealing with operatic history: to speak of comparisons in magnitude, of orbits, or of suns and their satellites. A particularly useful notion in interpreting with reasonable accuracy evidence surviving more than a century and a half is that of parallax: the apparent displacement of an object caused by an actual change in point of view. A shift caused by the passing of years can intro-duce comparable distortions. My case in point involves the early Italian careers of two operas: Lucia di Lammermoor, making its way much more slowly at first than Belisario, which took off auspiciously but soon fell behind in terms of number of productions and performances. I select these two operas because, in spite of individual differences, they share the same composer and librettist, the same impresario commissioned them and only a little more than four months separates their first performances. Lucia's premiére took place at the San Carlo, Naples, on 26 September 1835; Belisario's the following 4 February at La Fenice in Venice. They emerged, therefore, into much the same climate of sensibility.

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.

On 16 September 1989 a national British newspaper, The Independent, carried a full page advertisement placed by Technics for their latest ‘Hi-Fi Midi System for Music Lovers’, the CDX3. At the top of the page, Wagner's furrowed brow and glaring eyes, slightly askance, stared out as if insisting on, though not quite peremptorily demanding, a close reading of the text beneath. The text began as follows (comments in square brackets are mine):

To hear what he [Wagner] intended a hi-fi system has to be perfectly composed.

Is The Death of Klinghoffer anti-Semitic? Performances of the opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September 1991 were at the epicentre of a controversy that continues to this day; the New York audience was – and remains – uniquely hostile to the work. A careful reception analysis shows that New York audiences reacted vehemently not so much to an ideological position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but to specific nuances in the satirical portrayal of American Jewish characters in one controversial scene later cut from the opera, a scene that must be read closely and in relation to specifically American-Jewish questions of ethnic humour, assimilation, identity and multiculturalism in the mass media. I understand the opera's negative reception in the larger context of the increasingly severe crises that beset American Jewish self-identity during the Reagan-Bush era. Ultimately the historical ability of Jews to assimilate through comedy, to ‘enter the American culture on the stage laughing’, in Leslie Fiedler's famous formulation, will have to be reconsidered. A close reading of contested moments from the opera shows librettist Alice Goodman and composer John Adams avoiding the romance of historical self-consciousness as they attempt to construct a powerful yet subtle defence of the ordinary and unassuming.

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.

The French legislation of 6 January 1864 which deregulated spoken and lyric theatre nationwide showed little sensitivity to the distinctive financial ecology of regional theatre. Its effects were precisely the opposite of those its architects intended, and caused most disruption to the very constituencies the legislation was intended to help. Comparative analysis of the immediate aftermath of this ‘liberté des théâtres’ reveals a state of near chaos across France. Town councils oscillated between abandoning to the market their traditions of theatre as artistic social service, and pouring in yet more taxpayers' money just to maintain the status quo. Opera, as the most expensive art form, was the immediate casualty, ceding considerable ground to a vigorous entertainment sector based around the operetta repertory (including opéra-bouffe) and the café-concert chanson.