The oft-cited observations of Italian librettist Carlo Goldoni as he described his first visit to the Académie Royale de Musique in 1763 are usually presented with an emphasis on what Goldoni missed. Accustomed as he was to eighteenth-century Italian opera, he could not hear a single aria in the French opera: “I waited for the aria … The dancers appeared: I thought the act was over, not an aria. I spoke of this to my neighbor who scoffed at me and assured me that there had been six arias in the different scenes which I had just heard. How could this be? I am not deaf; the voice was always accompanied by instruments … but I assumed it was all recitative.”

Suzanne Cusick has recently argued that the musical processes of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna purge Ariadne of passion and desire in order symbolically to make her a good wife. Written for the 1608 marriage of Francesco Gonzaga to Margherita de Savoy, the lament, according to Cusick, reflects Renaissance marriage and gender ideologies that were determined to silence women and put them in their place. Ariadne has dared to choose her own mate and therefore must suffer. Her fate is dramatised by her uncharacteristically long lament, which enacts the transformation women experienced as they gave up their own desires to the constraining institution of marriage. Cusick's argument is in line with recent critical tendencies to read early modern culture in terms of the opposition between passive female silence and active male desire.

The indebtedness of Handel's English librettos to their sources is increasingly well understood, but much remains to be said concerning the function of those sources in their new context. In other words, scholars have devoted too little attention to literary allusiveness – intentional references to earlier works and their intended ‘messages’ to the audience. That such allusions can be found in these librettos by British authors almost goes without saying, for the British poetry of Handel's day is saturated with allusions. Reuben Brower, in fact, has called the Augustan poets the writers of ‘the poetry of allusion’.

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.

Recent research in French Revolutionary culture has revealed that women composers and librettists gained access to the opera stage in unprecedented numbers in late eighteenth-century France. Although the number of women constituted still only a fraction of the total number of composers and librettists, it was an explosion as compared with earlier periods. In the fifty years between 1770 and 1820, there were five times as many women writing opera as all the women combined in the 125 years since the beginning of opera in France in 1645. This increased number of female-authored operas constituted a sufficient critical mass for some of these works to be singled out as great successes; indeed two of them, Julie Candeille's (1767–1834) libretto and music for Catherine, ou la belle fermière, and Constance de Salm's (1767–1845) libretto for Sapho (with music by J.-P.-E. Martini), ranked among the ten most-performed dramatic works in Paris during and just after the Terror, in 1793 and 1795, respectively. This article examines the ideological context in which these works were received, and asks, why, despite (or because of) the success of their works, women composers and librettists were often perceived by critics and the public as radical and subversive, especially when the messages they chose to include in their operas could be interpreted as feminist. This attitude is not surprising when one considers that the period of greatest success of female-authored opera (and of women's public activism), 1793–95, coincided with the height of the Jacobin authorities' repression of women. Despite this climate, women composers and librettists of the 1790s were surprisingly vocal in protesting their continuing exclusion from the many advantages brought about by the democratization of the institution of opera and society. This article is part of a continuing investigation by feminist scholars into the controversial meaning of the Revolution for public women, bringing nuance to earlier conclusions that women were excluded from public life during the era of the Revolution.

A mythical giant, a Malagasy slave, a song, an accomplished baritone, an outraged critic; these seemingly incompatible figures are bound together in the Paris premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'Africaine in 1865. They are the fundamental elements of my story of the opera's third act, a narrative web binding together early modern nautical history, epic poetry, grand-opera dramaturgy, and the nineteenth-century politics of operatic performance and listening in an exploration of how the opera's rather fictionalised account of Vasco da Gama's first sea voyage to India five centuries ago bears witness to the strength of the historicist project in grand opera.

‘If forced to choose, I would prefer Monsieur Zola widi wings than Monsieur Zola on all fours.’ So groused Anatole France about the apparent new turn in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle taken by die publication of Le Rêve in 1888. Because the gritty surface of La Bête humaine (1890) followed closely upon the delicate folds of Le Rêve, France's critical quandary was soon resolved. Yet ever since the publication of Le Rêve even critics much more congenial to Zola than France have remarked upon the unusual place in die Rougon-Macquart of this tale about a virginal heroine set adrift in the small provincial town of Beaumont.

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.

In the 1840s and 1850s, four operas by Giuseppe Verdi (I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera) premiered at the theaters Argentina and Apollo in Rome. Two of these works (I due Foscari and Un ballo in maschera) had been rejected at other theaters because the authorities did not consider them concordant with the censorial requirements, and none of the four would have been permitted in Rome had the authorities applied the usual criteria. That they accepted them anyway suggests the process of censorship did not follow strict rules but was handled arbitrarily. These premieres are even more astonishing when we take into account that Rome, in contrast to most other cities on the peninsula, had very rigorous standards of censorship.

In their different ways, a series of Germanic artists and thinkers – the poet Novalis, the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and, most powerfully, composer Richard Wagner – all espoused at one point in their lives the view that death should not only be welcomed but ardently desired, even sought after as the final rest after a life of striving and suffering.

Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In the New York Times of 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that. I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?