When ‘la mesta’ (the sad one) intones ‘Salce!’ from the lonely heath within the Willow Song, she creates a situation at once compelling and artificial — a song within a song within an opera:

We have long been accustomed to think in terms of opera ‘stars’, and thus it should not overstrain the imagination to extend the astronomical analogy when dealing with operatic history: to speak of comparisons in magnitude, of orbits, or of suns and their satellites. A particularly useful notion in interpreting with reasonable accuracy evidence surviving more than a century and a half is that of parallax: the apparent displacement of an object caused by an actual change in point of view. A shift caused by the passing of years can intro-duce comparable distortions. My case in point involves the early Italian careers of two operas: Lucia di Lammermoor, making its way much more slowly at first than Belisario, which took off auspiciously but soon fell behind in terms of number of productions and performances. I select these two operas because, in spite of individual differences, they share the same composer and librettist, the same impresario commissioned them and only a little more than four months separates their first performances. Lucia's premiére took place at the San Carlo, Naples, on 26 September 1835; Belisario's the following 4 February at La Fenice in Venice. They emerged, therefore, into much the same climate of sensibility.

To what degree does late seventeenth-century English opera contain politics? Some recent critics have assumed that political commentary conveyed by allegory is a pervasive feature of ‘Restoration’ masques and operas. Is this true? Quite a few political interpretations of particular works have been published but no one has systematically enquired to what extent allegory and/or ideology was presumed to be built into operas mounted in late seventeenth-century London. Theoretical statements of the time about opera are scant and contradictory, their authors disinclined to take up political issues. Some of the political content is glaringly obvious (the allegory in Dryde'ns and Grabu's Albion and Albanius); some of it is sharply disputed. How should we read a work like Dryden's and Purcell's King Arthur? Is it essentially a muddled adventure story? An expression of British nationalism rising above current politics? A piece of covert Jacobite propaganda?

The several contradictory, and even apologetic, explanations that were put forward concerning the origins of Mozart's Così fan tutte, ossia La scola degli amanti in the years following its première in 1790 reflect both the dearth of hard information concerning the commission to Mozart, and the unease with which the post-Josephinian era greeted this most unsettling of comic operas. One of the composer's first biographers, Franz Xaver Nêmetschek, wrote:

In the year 1789 in the month of December Mozart wrote the Italian comic opera Cosi fan tutte, or ‘The School for Lovers’; people are universally amazed that this great genius could condescend to waste his heavenly sweet melodies on such a miserable and clumsy text. It was not in his power to refuse the commission, and the text was given expressly to him.

The Pantheon Opera remains among the least known of the major theatrical ventures in eighteenth-century London. It came into being amidst the conspiracies that flourished after the King's Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Conceived as a kind of English Court Opera, the Pantheon was backed at enormous expense by the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury. It struggled through the 1790–91 season, accumulating ruinous debts, and then on 14 January 1792 it too burned to the ground, just four nights into its second season.

In a little study of the orientalist trope denoting sensuality (nega ) in nineteenth-century Russian opera, ‘“Entoiling the Falconet”: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context’ (this journal, 4 [1992], 253–80), I closed by observing that Chaikovsky, one among major Russian composers of his time, seemed immune to the lure of the East, and that his only orientalising numbers were two late and insignificant items: the Arabian Dance in The Nutcracker and the Moorish physician Ibn-Hakia's aria in the one-act opera Iolanta, which shared a double bill with The Nutcracker on their joint premiére during the last year of the composer's life (18/30 December 1892).

On 6 June 1920, a work premièred at the Paris Opéra and, unlike others preceding it that season, met with general approbation in the press. Despite reservations, newspapers as well as political and musical journals pronounced the opera sincere, deeply religious, an ‘oeuvre de foi’. The composer–librettist, Vincent d'Indy, must have been both pleased and perplexed by such praise, for he had originally conceived the work as a trenchant political critique. As planned in 1903, the opera was to show, in d'Indy's words, ‘the nauseating Judeo-Dreyfusard influence’ within a legend that accommodated this message.

Each year for the past decade, the French vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants has visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In that time, three of their productions stand out as particularly significant: Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys (1989 and 1992), Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Medée (1994) and Hippolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1997). This trilogy of landmarks in the history of French opera was presented in fully staged productions conceived by stage director Jean-Marie Villegier and conductor William Christie.

Like the modern romance novel or murder mystery, late-eighteenth-century opera buffa is a thoroughly conventional genre. Standard plot devices, stock characters and vocal types, and particular kinds of musical number appear again and again, and any reasonably comprehensive understanding of the genre requires that we recognise these familiar patterns in text and music. This is especially important in the case of Mozart, who lies at the heart of our interest in the repertory: while his operas are routinely praised for their uniqueness and originality, we can evaluate these claims only by addressing the formal and stylistic procedures that served as his immediate context.

In the attempt to construct the ‘story’ of post-Rossinian Italian opera it has been standard practice to identify as the central plot the dissolution of traditional structural types and genres. The charting of those musical ‘facts’ that illustrate this dissolution is a familiar musicological endeavour, and there remains a persistent temptation not merely to notice the ever-weakening pull of convention but also to identify it with the notion of ‘historical progress’: a move towards the mature virtues of dramatic complexity, idiosyncrasy and flexibility. Considerations of established conventions and their modifications tend to encourage anti-generic evaluative positions, judgements which are then bolstered by appealing to influential aesthetic systems. Thus Benedetto Croce: ‘Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics’. Or Theodor Adorno: ‘Actually, there may never have been an important work that corresponded to its genre in all respects’. Or Hans Robert Jauss: ‘The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity […]. A masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching’? So bewitching is this image of genre dissolution that artistic production is often assessed by the degree to which it rebels against the idées reçues of tradition or encourages the momentum of the ‘historically inevitable’.

Conservative writers in seventeenth-century France tended to agree that the morals of women were degenerating, though they disagreed as to whether the cause was the excessive strictness or the leniency of husbands. We would perhaps characterise the change more as a newly found sense of freedom and self-confidence that allowed women, however tentatively, to contest the double standard of the age. The new morality was seen in fashions that bared progressively more of the neck, shoulders, breasts, ankles and legs, revealing new erotic frontiers; in a relaxation of the taboo against female swearing and coarse language; in an epidemic of female gambling; and in scandalous reports of women's over-indulgences in the sensual pleasures of food, drink, nicotine and sex.