In a well-known scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the audience discovers that one of the main characters, Madeleine, closely resembles an imaginary character in a painting, allegedly portraying her maternal great-grandmother, Carlotta. Madeleine believes she is possessed by Carlotta, a conviction that arouses the curiosity of John – a former lawyer and police officer – hired by Madeleine’s husband to secretly follow her. Other than the portrait, Carlotta never appears physically on screen; her spectral presence is conveyed solely through composer Bernard Herrmann’s haunting musical theme. In other words, a non-diegetic element – the musical score – assumes an indirect diegetic function, as it emerges whenever Carlotta’s ‘presence’ is suggested in the scene. Herrmann’s music cannot be heard by the characters within the filmic world, but it exists in a liminal space: it translates into audible music for the audience the inevitable spectral energy felt by Madeleine and John. The painting of Carlotta functions as a gravitational centre around which multiple storylines unfold. It also offers the music an opportunity to play an active narrative role. Something similar happens in Lydia Goehr’s Red Sea, Red Square, Red Thread, which likewise takes a story about a painting as a starting point for intermedial narrative interplay. In the books under discussion here, the visual returns time and again as an anchor for the relationship between operatic fantasy and quotidian life.

Since the establishment of permanent public theatres in Brazil – known as opera houses from at least 1746 – the presence of Black and biracial artists was predominant. Enslaved individuals also participated in music, performing in orchestras and opera companies, though primarily within private contexts. During the same period, public opera houses employed singer-actors on a permanent basis. These positions were scarce and particularly significant for women, who often lacked financial independence in the Luso-Brazilian world. Many of these artists pursued parallel occupations, including tailoring, seamstressing, lacemaking and, in some cases, prostitution. Although biracial performers were required to conceal their faces with white make-up, they were nonetheless contracted for entire seasons under agreements that afforded a degree of social security, including provisions for illness. Contemporary records also document theatrical artists who succeeded in acquiring considerable wealth, enabling them to own property and, in some cases, enslaved persons. This paper examines the conditions of the first professional actors and actresses employed in eighteenth-century Brazilian opera houses, drawing on archival sources and foreign travellers’ accounts to contextualise their social, ethnic and educational backgrounds within a society profoundly shaped by slavery and racial prejudice.

This article examines Sebastián Durón’s opera La guerra de los gigantes (c. 1701–3) in the context of the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) and Philip V’s reign (1701–46), as well as the development of opera in Madrid. It presents three main arguments. First, I argue that the character of Minerva in this opera was intended to symbolise Maria Luisa Gabriela of Savoy (1688–1714), the bride and future queen consort of Spain. The aristocrat who commissioned La guerra de los gigantes sought to portray Maria Luisa not only as an ideal wife and woman but also as a powerful military and political ally to King Philip V during the war. Second, I propose that La guerra de los gigantes is part of a broader ‘theatre of loyalty’ that emerged during the early years of Philip V’s reign and the War of the Spanish Succession. This type of theatre allowed Spanish noblemen, particularly the grandees, to express their allegiance to their new king, gain his favour, and enhance or solidify their power. Finally, I suggest that La guerra de los gigantes represents one of several attempts by the Spanish high nobility to develop the genre of opera in Madrid, at a time when partly sung musical dramas such as the zarzuela were the dominant theatrical forms.

In 1988, during the abolition centennial in Brazil, Verdi’s Aida and Carlos Gomes’s Lo schiavo were perceived and pitched as abolitionist operas thanks to events that unfolded at their stagings one hundred years earlier in Rio de Janeiro. Both operas stirred controversy by being recreated in productions intended to correct historical inaccuracies and unjust erasures, primarily in the context of African slavery, but with unexpected cultural and political repercussions. This article examines connections between operatic performances and social activism, discussing the role of opera singers in promoting an aesthetic of sensibility within the abolitionist movement of the 1880s, but also considering how the most controversial aspects of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement resonate with issues debated in the 1988 productions.

The latest books by Martha Nussbaum and Peter Franklin, on the music and life of Benjamin Britten, both come from positions notionally outside music studies. Nussbaum – the liberal philosopher, as close to an academic celebrity as one can find nowadays – writes about the War Requiem (1962) as a (mostly) appreciative visitor to the discipline. Franklin, by contrast, is well known in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music studies. Britten Experienced nevertheless adopts the institutionally detached, less inhibited perspective of the emeritus. It would not be too far from the truth to call Franklin’s book a career retrospective. Crucially, though, it takes in not only the things that he has taught and published over the years, but also the personal encounters and enthusiasms that have (often invisibly) shaped this teaching and scholarship – the very things, in other words, that typically lie outside the professional purview of music studies.

Geopolitical tensions escalated between the USSR and the Republic of China over control of the Chinese Eastern Railway during the late 1920s, resulting in a brief war in which several thousand people were killed. Given the violence in Manchuria in the months preceding direct military engagement, it is surprising that Soviet authorities sent an opera tour to the zone of conflict. This article examines the two seasons spent by visiting Soviet opera vocalists at the Railway Assembly Hall (Zhelsob) from September 1927 to February 1929, attending to the staging, reception and political goals of the tour. I argue that the opera stage in the city of Harbin transformed into a temporary zone of informal extraterritoriality, where unpredictable collaborations transpired between ideological enemies on either side of the military clash. The Soviet opera tour to Manchuria prompts us to reconsider the agency and intentionality of musicians in armed conflict.

Recently, over the course of a month in Taipei, I took in twenty-five opera performances, each opening a window onto the vast and varied world of Chinese opera.1 The performances were drawn from different genres: Peking opera (both canonical repertoire and new works), Taiwanese opera (kua-á-hì, or gezaixi), Hakka opera, Beiguan opera, Kunqu opera, Yu opera (Henan opera) and glove puppet opera (pòo-tē-hì). Although I was well aware of Taiwan’s vibrant operatic and theatrical scene – indeed, it was the very reason I pursued this residency – I was nonetheless surprised by the volume, variety and vitality of the performances I experienced. My visit coincided with one of the peak periods in the ritual calendar (the third lunar month), during which one could easily choose from more than ten outdoor opera performances each day, held at various temples throughout the greater Taipei area. In addition, meticulously crafted and lavishly mounted productions were featured at formal venues such as the Taiwan Traditional Theatre Center and Dadaocheng Theater. The performing culture of Chinese opera in Taiwan nowadays remains vibrant, imaginative, colourful and remarkably robust.