During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the models of Greek tragedy and Aristotelian theory were appealed to repeatedly, first to invent the dramatic genre we call opera, and then in an effort to use theory to rid that genre of what were perceived to be its self-indulgent excesses. This essay argues that despite these theoretical claims, influences from classical Rome were so thoroughly ingrained in European librettists that it was the experience of the Latin that prevailed. Roman subject matter, dramatic structure, philosophical fashion and imperial performance-context produced a musical theatre that was in essence Roman rather than Greek.

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.

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.

London composers competed for a music prize in 1701, setting William Congreve's libretto on the judgment of Paris, a beauty contest among Juno, Pallas and Venus. Paris, contest judge, exiled prince and amorous shepherd, prefers Venus, placing love above Juno's promised empire and Pallas's martial success. This essay reveals the general political meanings of the judgment of Paris myth, shows how the tale had been used to critique Charles II and James II, examines the political beliefs of the sponsors and librettist, and demonstrates how music by John Eccles, Daniel Purcell and John Weldon supported the politics of Congreve's libretto.

August in the Restoration, like Augusts before and since, was a time for those who could afford it to escape the hot, dirty streets of Paris to head for the country. With this in mind, Ludovic Vitet, music critic of Le Globe, broadcast an appeal in his Bulletin musical on 1 August 1829 (cloudy and unseasonably cool): Have patience, you poor dilettanti who have rushed back from the countryside; and those of you who have put off your departure to be present at the first performance of this marvel, don't think that you have yet reached the end of your suffering.

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 proposes that dance was a central way in which Venetians reinvented the ancient world on the operatic stage. Focusing on Niccolò Bartolini's preface to Venere gelosa (1643) and his use of dance in that opera, this article explores how Venetian balli became a locus for expressing otherwise inexpressible passions and desires – ecstatic Bacchic rituals, the goat-dances of Pan, or the erotic games of nymphs and satyrs – that were integral to the early modern reception of antiquity. It concludes with a consideration of the balli in La Calisto (1652), demonstrating the significance of the dances for understanding the work as a whole.

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.

Byron was determined from the start that Manfred should not be performed on stage. Writing from Venice in spring 1817 he told his publisher, John Murray, that: The thing I have sent you will see at a glimpse - could never be attempted or thought of for the stage . . . I composed it actually with a horror of the stage - with a view to render even the thought of it impracticable, knowing the zeal of my friends, that I should try that for which I have an invincible repugnance - viz. - a representation.

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.

The theme of transformation (Verwandlung) plays a significant role in the work of Richard Strauss, from his Tod und Verklärung (1889) to his Metamorphosen (1945). This article examines two Strauss operas where transformation is a central aspect of the libretto: Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/16), libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Daphne (1937), libretto by Joseph Gregor. Though each opera focuses on transformation, this concept is interpreted and realized in entirely different ways. For Hofmannsthal, Verwandlung is a journey outward to a new level of existence, attaining a new sense of humanity. For Gregor, transformation is an inward movement, joining nature, and becoming divine in the German-Romantic sense of the term.

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.

Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto is based on a complex web of sources – writings by Calvino, Barthes, Kafka, Auden, Shakespeare and others – themselves intricately interrelated through games of citation and revision. Linking all these texts is a scene in which a male artist is confronted by a voice outside of his control. This scene is re-enacted – unexpectedly – at the climax of Berio's work. In this new context the unruly voice sounds like a revenant from a form long presumed dead: pure opera and absolute madness.

‘Neapolitan elements and comedy in nineteenth-century opera buffa’, by Sebastian Werr.

Verdian Opera Burlesqued: a glimpse into mid-Victorian theatrical culture by Roberta Montemorra Marvin