Cesti's Orontea (Innsbruck, 1656), one of the most celebrated operas of the seventeenth century, is considered a significant antecedent of eighteenth-century opera buffa; the important role of Gelone is deemed one of the first basso buffo roles in opera history. Yet this view is based on incomplete and problematic historical data. This article reexamines that data and develops strategies for handling the text-critical problems that plague seventeenth-century opera. It concludes that Cesti probably designed Gelone for an alto – the most common voice type for buffo servants in the mid-late seventeenth century – and warns against using eighteenth-century models to interpret the seventeenth-century repertory.

With regard to scenic movement, the chorus in French Baroque opera was, for the most part, almost completely static. Yet from Lully on, French musical theatre had available the ‘chœur dansé’: a chorus number which incorporated both singing and dancing. The era of Lully and Rameau knew various forms of chœur dansé, in all of which scenic movement was realized through dance. Gluck’s Parisian reform operas of the 1770’s transformed this sort of number, since Gluck had the singers as well as the dancers move. The decisive change, however, came in the function of the musical setting, which underwent a paradigm shift. Whereas formerly only homophonic passages accompanied dancing, with polyphony serving as a surrogate for physical movement, now polyphony was actually associated with that movement.

The origins of the Roman intermezzo, an important and influential sub-genre of Italian comic opera, can be traced back to the 1730s, when the composer and librettist Benedetto Micheli wrote several two-part intermezzi for the Teatro Valle and other theaters in Rome for performance during the intermissions of spoken plays. The Valle cultivated the intermezzo with particular consistency during the next six decades, presenting works by many distinguished composers, including Sacchini, Paisiello, and Cimarosa. Sacchini's La contadina in corte, on a libretto derived from Giacomo Rust's three-act comic opera of the same title, may serve as a good example of the Roman intermezzo.

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.

The recitative is found in the original conducting score of Martin y Soler’s opera Il burbero di buon cuore, held by the Austrian National Library. While no autograph of the accompagnato survives that would unequivocably identify it as Mozart’s composition, the evidence strongly points to that conclusion. Motivically tight and well-crafted, the accompagnato continues the process of reworking borrowed material observable in K.583 as well as its companion aria ‘Chi sa, chi sa qual sia’ K.582. In the conducting score, the accompagnato is written on the same inserted gathering as K.583 and in the same hand. Even more compellingly, the aria begins on the reverse side of the page on which the accompagnato ends. The aria is labelled by the copyist as ‘del sigr. Mozart’; the recitative, not surprisingly, is not separately identified.

Marschner's villains occupy an important place in the history of operatic style, forming a bridge between characters such as Dourlinski or Pizarro and Wotan or the Dutchman. His villains may also be understood against the background of early nineteenth-century pathology, and particularly the syndrome of ‘monomania’. Marschner's music, which partially ‘heroicizes’ the villains in keeping with the contemporary rise of the sympathetic villain, parallels efforts to redefine the nature of madness. Marschner's operas could thus simultaneously construct and undermine the hegemony of bourgeois values, and become a vehicle through which composers, performers, and audiences could explore the contradiction between social/sexual order and the fantasy of deviance.

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.

The orchestrally accompanied recitative which precedes the aria ‘Vado ma dove’ does contain gestures and harmonies found in Mozart’s accompagnati, yet it differs from his standard practices in a number of respects. Its lack of motivic development, persistent use of unison, and reiteration of chords and arpeggios in the same inversion all diverge from Mozart’s customary procedures. Moreover, the passage does not include a chord progression found in practically all of the composer’s accompagnati. If the recitative is by Mozart, it appears, as Link argues, that he composed it in haste. The music and the manuscript evidence also suggest that one of Mozart’s pupils or an apprentice at the Burgtheater may have composed the passage. Whoever wrote the recitative, however, brought the scene more in line with late eighteenth-century operatic practice.

I propose that certain ‘Japanese’ elements of Puccini's Madama Butterfly have cultural analogues that support a reading of the opera as more profoundly authentic than has usually been argued. My discussion begins with the house, the most basic scenic component of the opera, and develops via a number of interrelated issues: the Japanese home as the center of the life cycle, Puccini's choice of the home as his single set, and finally, Butterfly's ‘Vigil’ as the central event in an unfolding home-based life-cycle that raises issues of ritual and ceremony corresponding to values of the geisha culture.

‘La maledizione di Fausto’ A new book on a famous figure from the past should challenge the previous critical outlook; that much we may take for granted. However, when the critical tradition is as odd, polarized, and opinionated as is Puccini's, difficulties arise, especially over the stance to be assumed. Although staples in the repertoires of opera houses around the world, Puccini's operas seem to inspire a sort of guilty enjoyment that gives way either to harsh criticism (if not outright dismissal) or to strenuous defense.

Like several of her early operas, Judith Weir’s The Consolations of Scholarship (1985) lives on the concert stage: the work lasts only twenty-two minutes, there is just one singer, and there are no costumes or scenery. A similar economy and restraint characterizes Weir’s musical language from this period. The essay argues that The Consolations of Scholarship is as much ‘about’ the workings of the genre as it is ‘about’ the story it purports to tell. Indeed, Weir constructs music drama by emphasizing its artificiality, and her reworking of established conventions results in an unusually reflexive form of opera.

This study, intended as a seventy-fifth birthday tribute for Luciano Berio, examines the dramaturgy of his most radical theatrical work, Outis (1995–6). To a greater extent than any of his previous operatic works, Outis dispenses with linear narrative. Instead, it constructs an associative network of images – visual, verbal and musical – upon a cyclic frame. A recurrent source for these images is the story of Odysseus/Ulysses, the wanderer, and the many different texts that stem from that tradition. These include Ulysses by James Joyce – whose work has long been a source of inspiration for Berio. This essay suggests, however, that it is rather the techniques and aspirations of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake that provide the most telling analogue for what Berio here seeks to achieve.