The arias in Mozart’s The Magic Flute are some of the most vivid and enduring in the operatic repertoire. This chapter examines how poetic structures, musical and dramatic conventions, and the abilities of the singers who originated the roles shaped their creation. While many writers focus primarily on musical form when analyzing arias, this study reveals that other elements contribute as much or more to the aria’s expressivity and the dramaturgical role it plays. Analysis also demonstrates how each aria in this work contains something unusual or extravagant – a musical element or moment that stretches the customary practices of eighteenth-century music. This fact alongside the arias’ diversity of style, color, and affect suggests the composer took great care to make each one distinctive. Consequently, Mozart’s skill and creativity was and is on display. Thus, the arias make manifest one of the opera’s main themes: the power of music.

Mozart’s use of multiple musical forms and styles differentiates Die Zauberflöte from his previous works. Schikaneder’s audience expected a mixture of comedy and fine singing, added to which higher styles – ritual fanfares, hymns, and “learned” counterpoint – are presaged in the overture. The opera’s conclusion in which light banishes darkness is mirrored throughout – deceptively in the opening scene. The deployment of keys suggests less a system than choices made to suit a desired orchestration or a singer’s tessitura. The forms of arias reflect the status and emotions of each character. The finales differ from opera buffa in requiring scene-changes, reflected in musical styles including recitative, a strange march for the final trials of Pamina and Tamino, and a new tone and form for Papageno’s near-tragedy. The genii who intervene at critical points epitomize a mode peculiar to this opera, the comical sublime; the mixture of styles contributes to the opera’s strengths.

This chapter discusses the singers who first performed Puccini’s operatic roles, or who were well-known interpreters of them in revivals during his lifetime. Singers discussed include Cesira Ferrani, Rosina Storchio, Giovanni Zenatello, Eugenio Giraldoni, Florence Easton, Giuseppe Cremoni, Evan Gorga, Emilio de Marchi, Giuseppe de Luca, Miguel Fleta, Tito Schipa, Geraldine Farrar, Emmy Destinn, Enrico Caruso, and Rosa Raisa. The author notes that by Puccini’s time, singers had far less agency in creating roles than their predecessors from the early nineteenth-century had had. Nevertheless, Puccini had a clear sense of the type of singer he wanted for a particular role. The author reveals that the singers who took on Puccini’s roles had extensive repertoires and were comfortable interpreting the music of a wide range of composers. Many were also to be found working across continents, travelling between opera houses on either side of the Atlantic and enjoying a degree of celebrity and renown previously unknown, partly because of opportunities in recording and film.

This chapter discusses the singers who have performed and recorded Puccini’s works since the mid-twentieth century. The author analyses changing trends in Puccini performance, particularly in terms of the sorts of voices that were considered most suitable for singing this repertory in audio recordings. The chapter begins with a discussion of the rivalry between Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, two sopranos who took quite different approaches to the performance of Puccini’s female roles. Mirella Freni and Tebaldi took a more lyrical approach than their immediate predecessors. By the 1960s and 70s – the era of the long-playing record – a new breed of international sopranos and tenors with opulent voices was emerging, including Montserrat Caballé, Luciano Pavarotti, and Placido Domingo. The 1970s and 80s was the era of the big-budget studio recording, featuring starry conductors and casts and the world’s greatest orchestras. The 1990s saw a drop-off in recordings by major labels, yet a new generation of bankable stars was emerging, including Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu, and (in the 2000s) Jonas Kaufmann. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a recent turn towards lighter voices tackling this repertory, epitomised by the success of the compelling Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, who brings into question the idea of what an ‘authentic’ Puccini singer might be.

Molière’s comedy-ballets and the tragedy-ballet Psyché, many written in haste, form a heterogenous whole, but we must not forget the habitual presence of music in theatre of the time. Molière, himself an amateur musician, gave himself a number of roles involving singing, and music – that attribute of a cultivated, city-based society – is discussed in his plays, often ironically. Comedy-ballet – inspired musically by the court ballet – was a princely spectacle performed in the royal residences, and Molière benefitted from exceptional financial, technical and musical resources. He may have been given a free choice regarding their subjects, but he relied heavily on instrumentalists and dancers from the royal institutions, many of whom had participated in the great ballets of previous years, and his comedy-ballets gained from their qualities. Comedy-ballet was, therefore, devised in view of the effects desired and the means at his disposal. Most were organised around scenes or characters taken by Molière and Lully from a topical repertoire and composed according to a variety of writing conventions. Certain scenes were suggested to Molière by Lully, and some comedy-ballets were entirely devised around musical scenes in the same way as was the case for ballets.

Pears was innately skilled at the creation of new song works, making him the ideal collaborator for composers and clearly an inspirational artist for whom to write. Yet there was something more. With Pears there was the concomitant presence of all of the particles inherent to the creative process. He was a prolific reader and therefore the ideal text interpreter, with an extensive range of colours and dynamics that were technically available in his voice paired with his seemingly boundless artistic instincts. This tenor’s voice was not universally admired. Yet Pears’s recordings of Britten set the gold standard against which all successive generations of Britten interpreters would need to measure up – defining if not implying an authoritative version for phrasing, dynamics, vocal colours, textual inflection, and tempi, at the very least. This chapter explores the first performances of Pears’s association with dozens of living composers, works for unaccompanied tenor, and combinations of tenor and piano, guitar, harp, and chamber orchestra. The chapter concludes with a table of all of the tenor’s premieres.

Britten’s diaries and letters between the wars reveal a profound irritation with what he saw as the parochialism and amateurishness of British music making, especially in comparison with the standards he admired in Europe. So it is perhaps not surprising that the first singer with whom he worked closely was not British, but the Swiss-born Sophie Wyss. It is clear that by 1942, on his return from America, and with Peter Pears installed as his permanent partner, Britten’s expectations had developed radically. Unique to this volume and building on Roger Vignoles’s career as an internationally recognised collaborative pianist, this chapter continues with discussions of Joan Cross (after her departure from Sadler’s Wells Opera), as well as Jennifer Vyvyan, Arda Mandikian, Heather Harper, Alfred Deller, David Hemmings, Galina Vishnevskaya, Janet Baker, Kathleen Ferrier, Nancy Evans, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Owen Brannigan, Robert Tear, Theodore Uppman, and John Shirley-Quirk.

Often studied as a transitory step towards the late consolidation of Italian opera in Mexico, the activities of the Spanish tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City from 1827 to 1829 call for a more nuanced analysis. The spatial reconceptualisation pursued by transnational and global histories as well as the redefinition of cultural borders triggered by postcolonial studies give us the tools to address García’s Mexican career as a key moment in terms of understanding the effects and issues raised by the spread of Italian opera in Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The chapter rethinks García's activities in Mexico City as comprising one of the first (while at the same time highly problematic) cultural encounters between Europe and the young Latin American nation after its emancipation from Spain (1821). Until then, mutual perceptions between Europe and Mexico were distorted by the intrusive cultural politics of imperial Spain. After independence, such misperceptions became more marked. Perceived as a familiar expressions of Europeanness, Italian opera became the arena where issues of identity and otherness were discussed. A close reading of the operas García composed for Mexican audiences will reveal how Italian opera changed by absorbing and reflecting the multiple postcolonial tensions of Mexico City.

In the 1820s, a stable company of Italian singers was in charge of the operatic performances staged at the Imperial Theatre in Rio de Janeiro. Working together with a French ballet troupe, those soloists joined forces to present their repertoire before a heterogeneous audience. Works by Rossini and his contemporaries were sung in the original language, subscriptions were sold for annual seasons and Italian masterpieces crowned the theatrical festivities offered to the Emperor. The chapter examines this recently independent country’s attraction for foreign singers and looks at how these artists were able to pursue their careers in a totally different milieu to that to which they had been accustomed, living in a city that offered great opportunities, but also considerable challenges to newcomers. A small group of Italian singers were employed by a local impresario, with the aim of making opera a viable cultural activity at an Imperial Court that was proud of its connections with Europe, yet they also struggled with economic difficulties and the country’s political instability. The press assumed a central role in negotiating the relationship between artists and their audiences, revealing a growing public interest in opera, its backstage and the lives of its protagonists.

The importance of opera and operatic practices to nineteenth-century Latin American culture has been widely acknowledged; opera was central to the construction of ideas about liberalism, Europeanism, cosmopolitanism and the all-encompassing notion of 'civilisation'. The centrality of opera and of opera houses in the region, however, often obscures the ways in which opera, and Italian opera in particular, were being read. Taking account of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of operatic experiences in the region, the chapter examines the experience of Italian opera singers in the southern Andes (Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) during the 1840s, a period of major expansion of opera throughout Latin America. Often these singers were the first to perform opera in the region. How did they live the experience of being Italian and singing Italian opera in South America? Based on newspapers, archival documents and private letters, the chapter demonstrates how, for many of these singers, producing opera in Latin America was neither marked by a direct projection of their previous Italian experiences, nor was it seen as an exotic transatlantic adventure. Instead, it was something in between: a constant process of negotiation between their private and public identities.

The chapter explores the role of Italian opera in the Brazilian Amazon during the Belle Époque and its effects on national and transnational identities. It focuses on the region’s most famous opera house – the Teatro Amazonas – and on the successes and misfortunes of the travelling companies that performed there between 1897 and 1907. The chapter probes the extent to which the opera house was considered a means of engaging with a ‘global fantasy of civilisation’, foregrounding the effects that local tropical diseases had on opera production and on global perceptions of the region during a period of keen interest in its commercial exploration. The shift from the Italian to the French repertoire at the start of the twentieth century sheds new light on Amazonian understandings of different notions of italianità, of Europe and of civilisation.

Around 1800, the human voice was not only considered a musical instrument; it also served as a central motif in the national historiography of music. This chapter investigates a popular source in German-speaking music pedagogy on the systematic education of the (primarily female) voice: Nina d’Aubigny von Engelbrunner’s Briefe an Natalie über den Gesang (1st ed. Leipzig 1803, 2nd ed. 1824). This 'manual' is based on thirty-one fictive letters and is heavily charged with stereotypes of 'the Italian'. The chapter discusses the multiple levels on which the idea of a decidedly Italian voice is constructed and shaped against a transnational background. A close reading shows how the voice served as a wide-ranging projection screen beyond strictly musical topics, tackling anthropological, moral, aesthetic and societal questions, all of them attempting to spread clichés of Italian music into German everyday musical life.

Chapter 25 focuses on the translation of songs and other vocal music. Translations of songs may be required for various purposes – for singers to sing, for announcers to speak, for CD listeners to read, for singing students to study, and for display as surtitles at a performance. Since no translation is ideal for every purpose, translators need to choose strategies and options that best suit the end-users. Particularly complex is the ‘singable translation’ (singable in the target language) which is intended to fit a pre-existing melody – here translators are subject to unusual constraints, such as the need to achieve the right number of syllables and a workable rhythm. Often, a singable translation may include so many changes that the term ‘adaptation’ is more accurate than the term ‘translation’.

Euridice had a poetic text by Ottavio Rinuccini, and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini; its performers included Florentine singers plus others from Mantua and Rome; and its sponsor, Jacopo Corsi, was one of the four instrumentalists who provided the accompaniment. Although it is the “first” opera to have survived complete, it has tended to be treated as an academic exercise, and as a mere forerunner of the seemingly more successful early operas by the likes of Claudio Monteverdi. But having reconstructed the stage, it is now possible to read Euridice in a much more practical light, as something of and for the theatre. Both the text and the music make much more sense in these pragmatic terms, especially given the hitherto unrecognized revisions made to the libretto as decisions needed to be made during the rehearsals leading up to the premiere. Matters of casting, stage movement, costumes, and gesture all come into play, often cued by explicit or implicit directions in the surviving sources. This also offers a more careful way of reading poetic librettos and musical scores that are too often viewed in the abstract without grasping their performative functions.

Chapter 7, ‘Most of My Sheroes Don’t Appear on a Stamp: Contextualising the Contributions of Women Musicians to the Progression of Jazz’, considers the vital part that women – both vocalists and instrumentalists – made to the development of jazz, although they have tended to be excluded from standard historiographical narratives of the genre. With a focus on the development of jazz in the United States, Tammy L. Kernodle considers women jazz musicians’ work from the early days of New Orleans jazz, through jazz in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Europe, to the emergence of women jazz singers, including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and to the all-girl swing bands of the 1940s.

Having considered polyphony as practice in the previous chapter, the focus switches to its practitioners. To begin, the view of music as theory and practice in the Renaissance period is reviewed, tracing the transition from the medieval view of music as science to its status as an art, which comes to a head in the Renaissance period and affects the perception and social status of practitioners of polyphony. This leads to a detailed consideration of the singer-cleric, the primary model for practitioners of polyphony at the start of the period, and the gradual recognition of composition as a salaried activity in its own right, independent of singing, in the decades just before 1500. The sixteenth century brings greater diversification, not least owing to the rise of an urban middle class, catered to by the explosion onto the scene of print culture. The implications of these trends for musicians is considered in the remainder of the chapter, which examines the changing status of the composer, the role of instrumental ensembles in the performance of polyphony, and the emergent status of women as both paid performers and published composers.

This chapter considers how professional singers used benefit concerts to facilitate their exposure and to establish their reputations between 1703 and 1729 – years inclusive of the earliest Italian opera performances in England through the Royal Academy of Music. First, it will document the patterns and conventions apparent in benefits given by professional Italian and English singers, emphasizing the different kinds of concerts and opera benefits, the pros and cons of each, and the ways in which these events were tailored to fit the singers. For the bulk of the chapter, I will focus on three clear motivations behind concert benefits for singers of Italian opera. My survey of advertisements shows that singers used these special performances in order (1) to collaborate within a network of professional musicians; (2) to create and promote their individual celebrity; and (3)to construct and respond to particular narratives about contemporary musical taste.

Some producers are more than presenters of a show, they are involved as artistic directors or as actor managers. George Edwardes combined the skills of artistic director and impresario. Robert Courtneidge, a contemporary of Edwardes, was another producer director in London, and he exercised additional skill as an actor manager. A stage director may appear in the programme as ‘stage manager’ or ‘stage producer’. American producer Jacob Shubert, always known as J.J., enjoyed stage directing and was sometimes named as sole director, as he was for Kálmán’s Her Soldier Boy (1916), and Countess Maritza (1926). Those responsible for the musical direction and conducting of English versions of continental European operetta in London and New York were often involved in more than coaching singers and conducting. They were expected to make arrangements of the music when necessary and were often asked to compose songs for interpolation into the operetta. The chapter also includes consideration of singers, dance directors and designers.