Wagner’s relation to Italy and Italian culture has been explored numerous times in relation to his criticisms of Italian opera, where potential reinterpretations of this starkly negative assessment sit alongside analytical readings of Italianate style in certain works. This chapter moves past that tradition, situating biographical and familial contexts for Wagner’s stated dislike of Rossinian opera alongside his deep attachment to Venice, and the progressive importance his works acquired within Italy, evidenced by commercial interests that paired locomotive travel with tours of Lohengrin, Rienzi, and the Ring and the Wagnerian characters that formed advertising emblems for the Liebig meat company.

This chapter explores the links between opera’s sublime mode and political power through two case studies from London in 1848: a 4 May performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula at Her Majesty’s Theatre and a 20 July performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at Covent Garden. In these instances, the sublime was routed mainly through the star singer-actresses Jenny Lind and Pauline Viardot-Garcia respectively, whose performances were judged immeasurably moving and powerful by several critics and fans. But in each case Queen Victoria, too, carried her aura of ‘natural power’ into the performative circuit: with Lind, through demonstrative gestures of royal protection; with Viardot, through the framing of Les Huguenots as a ‘command performance’. This chapter argues that at each performance the queen and diva, supported by their respective entourages, formed a circuit in which the ‘command’ of the opera diva and the queen’s innate sovereignty mutually constituted, or ‘surrogated’, one other.