This chapter examines Puccini’s relationship with early film. The composer’s career coincided with nearly the first thirty years of the cinematic art form, and it was a form of technology with which Puccini had an ambivalent relationship. The chapter begins with an account of Puccini’s known thoughts about film and cinema going. There follows an extensive discussion of Puccini’s and Ricordi’s legal efforts to prevent the use of his music as film accompaniment, and of the difficulty in recouping royalties. By the 1920s, however, Ricordi was including a clause about film usage in opera contracts, including that for Turandot. From the 1930s, with the arrival of the ‘talkies’, commercial opportunities became apparent and the company pursued a more liberal course. The chapter also considers how Puccini’s operas were brought to the screen during his lifetime and shortly after – there was a particular vogue for Tosca films – and discusses the ways in which the composer’s works might be considered ‘cinematic’.

This chapter situates noir soundtracks as a technology of blackness in Western modernity. With the formulation “black records,” it points up the deep transnational and technological entanglements of what we can call, following Tyler Stovall’s lead, “a new, postcolonial genre of criminality.” Tapping into contemporary research by black studies and sound studies scholars, it connects noir soundtracks with the history of technologies meant to facilitate the tracing, tracking, identification, and surveillance of people deemed marginal, criminal, or suspect in the West’s long twentieth century. The first of the chapter’s three sections, “Liner Notes,” builds from Peter Szendy’s conceptualization of the dynamics of surécoute – overhearing – in espionage films to suggest the importance of structures of listening and overhearing manifest in noir film. The “A-Side: Miles and Malle: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud” focuses on Davis’s signature performance and soundtrack composition for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. “B-Side: Melville, Martial, and Solal: Deux hommes dans Manhattan” focuses on the sound and phonographies of blackness in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux hommes dans Manhattan. Built on scenes of sound recording within and without the narrative structures of the film, the chapter considers how the sonic tracing, tracking, and recording of dark or deviant bodies in noir fiction and film ushers in new modalities for thinking and feeling urban modernity, and provides an important entryway into the discussion about the “phonographic” as “a singular mode of (black) modernity” (Weheliye).

Two decades into the twenty-first century, Beethoven’s Third Symphony is programmed regularly by the world’s leading orchestras and remains popular with audiences. In contemporary mainstream classical musical culture, the Eroica continues to be the pre-eminent musical emblem of heroism and revolution. In visual media, the Eroica retains classical music’s conventional generic meaning of wealth and superior status, but it is also deployed in film, television and video game soundtracks to track markedly intelligent heroes and culturally sophisticated revolutionaries. As new critical theories engage with the symphony’s traditional interpretations, alternative readings of the Eroica are emerging in musical scholarship alongside the heroic/revolutionary trope. The pastoral, politics and freedom figure prominently in several recent close readings, while the Eroica is fast becoming a pivotal musical work in disability studies. As a central example in both heroic narratives of overcoming and human narratives of adaptation, the Eroica endures.