Anne Charlotte Leffler's play Sanna kvinnor (True Women) (1883), together with other late nineteenth-century plays by women playwrights, is considered a significant historical event in Swedish theatre histories, regarded as a successful feminist intervention. This study examines the cultural-specific conditions and agendas that governed the interpretations of Sanna kvinnor at the theatres. Theoretically, it is based on the idea of plays as the initiators of circulation, which in turn is performative. The focus is on the social imaginaries that are reinstated by the stagings and their interpretations, and how these imaginaries reciprocally shape the interpretations of the play's central theme, protagonist and audience address. The article provides an overview of the various social imaginaries at play and identifies the cultural and social abstractions that form a specific culture of circulation. The encounters between the play and various Nordic theatre environments are examined by closely analyzing and contextualizing theatrical reviews.

This article explores the 2017 performance of Harrison David Rivers's play, And She Would Stand Like This, and its dramatization of the intersectional marginalization and discrimination endured by a queer family of colour facing AIDS, through the framework of Euripides’ Trojan Women. It does so via three main perspectives: chosen family, normative discriminations and tragic disidentifications. In its changes to the tragic plot, the play reflects on AIDS, exploring criminal infection; hetero-/homosexual, genetic and communitarian HIV transmission; and bereavement. It critiques the offstage intersectional systems of oppression and shifts the status of the community from victimhood to survival, and from the representational periphery to the cultural centre. And She Would Stand Like This appears as a queer communal ritual of poetic empowerment with/through which to pay homage to queer forebears of colour, to celebrate queer lives of colour now and to galvanize those who are to walk a queer futurity of power and liberation.

My examination of game play, ludic activity and being playful in immersive Gatsby shows that Gatsby is a typical example of the playification of theatre in the contemporary art scene. In using the term ‘playification’, I refer to the method of incorporating diverse play categories in theatre to motivate audience activity. While much critical attention has been devoted to the controversial nature of active spectating as a practice of audience emancipation, there has been relatively less focus on its play aspect. To develop an understanding of the idea of play in immersive theatre, I refer to the works of Johan Huizinga and Richard Schechner, and apply Schechner's language, which distinguishes play and game in immersive theatre. Moreover, in developing Schechner's vocabulary in the context of immersive theatre, I expand my scope of reference to include the insights of game theorists.

The provocative work of German artist Christoph Schlingensief may seem to be not possible today. However, it developed an afterlife of its own. Against the backdrop of current discourse shifts and political developments my article historicizes this work from the early stage productions at the Berlin Volksbühne after the fall of the Wall to taking to the streets of Vienna at the turn of the millennium, when right-wing populism entered government politics in Europe. Determining the politicality of its fabrication of public tensions, the article calls for a closer consideration of concepts of affect studies in theatre and performance analysis and confronts the memory of Schlingensief's work with a more recent production and their reception in the context of current discussions on race and gender. Turning to Claudia Bosse's IDEAL PARADISE (2016), a street procession in Vienna, it suggests to locate Schlingensief's afterlife in new performative formats re-negotiating contemporary affective politics.

This article argues that an understanding of male same-sex practices in ancient Greece point towards a queer desirous spectatorship – a male ‘gayze’. Ancient tragic scholarship has often omitted discussion of male same-sex practices, despite using marriage and heterosexual social norms to elucidate meaning in text and performance. This article seeks to redress the exclusion of queer histories and perspectives from understanding tragedy in its social context. The article outlines evidence of male same-sex practices, including pederasty; relates ancient understandings of desire to the gaze; and evidences how and where young men, like those who danced in the tragic chorus, were courted and coveted. The article concludes with a case study of the chorus of young huntsmen from Euripides’ Hippolytus, read through the lens of a desirous gayze.

In the early nineteenth century, concert reviews often judged pianists and pianos on their combined value. This critical tendency is exemplified in the professional career of virtuoso pianist Anna Caroline de Belleville. This article examines the reciprocal relationship between Belleville and her pianos — particularly Érard’s and Streicher’s — within the contexts of the technological development of piano-making and piano performance culture. I argue that the distinct advantages of Belleville’s pianos helped her develop a well-rounded pianism that combined both brilliancy and lyricism, winning her a place among the most distinguished pianists of the day. Furthermore, Belleville’s active engagement with and promotion of her pianos enhanced the instruments’ own reputation and commerciality. This understudied yet illuminating story about the interdependency of the virtuoso and her instruments (and attendant instrument makers) enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century performance culture by highlighting the inextricable relationship between technology, virtuosity, commerciality, and entrepreneurship.

In this article we ‘read against the grain’ of the archive to explore the sound world of an Indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Chiapas in 1712. Although this topic has often interested historians and anthropologists, none of them explicitly engage the rebellion’s sonorities. Contending that a focus on sound may allow new features of the rebellion to come to light, we explore the use of sonorous objects and musical instruments in the rebels’ religious worship and military practices. Building on this analysis, we emphasize the place of ideas about ‘quietude’ within practices for violently reasserting colonial power.

This article develops an approach to music history that centres performers and their artistic work, drawing on insights from musical performance studies. It responds to criticisms of the practice turn and builds on recent scholarship on Soviet music to contextualize the life of pianist Maria Yudina in the years 1959–63, in which she dedicated herself (at great cost) to new, avant-garde music. Case studies include Yudina’s key role in performing the first Soviet twelve-tone composition in 1961 — Andrei Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta: Fantasia Ricercata — and her advocacy of Igor Stravinsky in the build-up to his homecoming in 1962.

This essay reflects on a new digital realization by Andrew Hugill of the ‘Christian ballet’ Uspud (1892) by Erik Satie and J. P. Contamine de Latour. The creative process of making the realization entailed a critical re-examination of existing scholarship and revealed that the relationship between music and drama is closer than has previously been understood. The essay situates Uspud in the context of 1890s Montmartre and demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that it was conceived as a shadow play and scored for solo harmonium. It analyses the music in detail, considering how its motivic construction and use of timbral contrasts both supports the action and conveys the inner states of uspud himself. It considers the humorous and serious aspects of Uspud, arguing that this was a key work in the evolution of Satie’s artistic and personal identity.

Recent scholarship at the crossroads of opera and Habsburg studies has emphasised the centrality of Italian opera within the political agenda of the Congress era (1814–22). It was a particularly effective means to project prestige, cosmopolitanism and belonging within a new geopolitical order, as the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia was integrated under the Habsburg Crown. While much attention has been given to performances of Italian opera at the Viennese court theatres, the role of suburban venues has so far been largely neglected. This article aims to demonstrate the ‘weight’ that the so-called ‘light’ genres carried within the cultural life of the capital and across the Habsburg lands. Two parodies written by Adolf Bäuerle for the Theater in der Leopoldstadt in Vienna – Tankredi (1817, music by Wenzel Müller) and Die falsche Prima Donna in Krähwinkel (1818, music by Ignaz Schuster) – serve as case studies for a discussion of the fluidity of genres, operatic voices and audiences, and the role of such singers as Gentile Borgondio, Angelica Catalani and Ignaz Schuster as ‘aural ambassadors’ of the Habsburg cultural project.

This article reflects on a little-told story of musical and cultural censorship: the Mexican government's 1996 destruction of the Foro Abierto, a 2,000-seater auditorium in the heart of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. The Foro Abierto was the home of an anarchist theatre group called CLETA, and was an important venue for a number of genre-crossing musicians. This venue was destroyed by the police just before CLETA was to inaugurate it as part of the rebel Zapatista movement. Several days later, a musician from CLETA was assassinated. Responding to the material turn in music studies, this article combines ethnographic and archival research to explore articulations between rubble and censorship. The venue's destruction disempowered and disarticulated CLETA, to the extent that an unsettling silence emerged about this act on the site of the venue itself. Equally, constructive responses to the complexities of censorship may also emerge from acts of material and ideational de-structuration.

The Crystal Palace held a key position in London concert life during the 1860s and 70s as one of the few public venues to host high quality orchestral music. Importantly, audience members were able to buy single tickets on the day, as opposed to the prevailing practice of paying for a whole-season subscription, making the Saturday Concerts accessible to a much greater range of people. To cater to this newly-broadened audience, the programme booklets featured lengthy programme notes, a form of writing that was still in its infancy (the earliest examples date from the 1840s). These notes were a crucial part of the institutional context for performances of new or unfamiliar music in the nineteenth century, helping create the idea of ‘classic’ works and composers at the key moment of first impressions.

The Saturday Concerts were especially important for Schubert reception in Britain. The promotional efforts of August Manns, the conductor, and George Grove, then Secretary of the Crystal Palace Company, led to important performances of several early symphonies and the incidental music for Rosamunde. Grove's programme notes were especially influential on an audience that had never heard this music before. A close examination Grove's texts shows how they made ‘classics’ of Schubert and his music, referring to financial status, gender, religion, classical history, and imperial identity. This strategy was common to all composers that Grove and Manns wished to promote, though Schubert required special handling on certain key issues. However, these texts also suggest that ‘classic’ did not necessarily equate to ‘canonic’. After all, the ideological promotion of Schubert often failed to secure his works a permanent place the repertoire of the Saturday Concerts. Overall these programme notes suggest some complexity to the emergence of ‘the classics’, and provide valuable insights many areas of Victorian thinking around music.