In their different ways, a series of Germanic artists and thinkers – the poet Novalis, the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and, most powerfully, composer Richard Wagner – all espoused at one point in their lives the view that death should not only be welcomed but ardently desired, even sought after as the final rest after a life of striving and suffering.

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book, Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for the punctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of the studium (art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). The punctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside the studium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, what punctum could it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.

There are few opportunities to compare differing readings by Mozart of the same text. Except in his sacred music, Mozart rarely had occasion to return to texts that he had already set, and relatively few sketches, drafts or heavily revised autographs offer extended alternative versions of other settings. Although most of the surviving sketches and drafts for operas and other vocal pieces do not diverge significantly from the final versions, some of these preliminary materials reveal Mozart reconsidering a text-setting, and thus offer important glimpses into his dramatic imagination. Such is the case with a draft for ‘Da schlägt die Abschiedsstunde’, the first aria of Der Schauspieldirektor. The draft and final autograph present related yet significantly different conceptions of the same number, enabling us to examine Mozart's revision of one particular aria, and his reconciliation of an individual solo number with the larger dramatic argument of the opera.

Heinrich Dorn, conductor, composer and critic in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, was well known to his contemporaries as a man who disliked Wagner's music. He himself always claimed to have given Wagner every chance: ‘Sensible people who do not set themselves blindly either for or against Wagner's music’, he would comment, ‘cannot but admit that he is the greatest of living composers’. Yet his reviews of Wagner's work invariably ended in querulous diatribes against what he considered Wagner's refusal to supply the necessities of good operatic composition – lively plot, singable melody and if not traditional then at least recognisable forms – in works that, moreover, were far too long. ‘Individual moments seize one’, Dorn wrote after attending dress rehearsals for the Munich première of Tristan and Isolde, ‘but they are, as so often in Wagner's music, oases in a vast desert. … The second act of Tristan seemed to drag on even more endlessly than the first, and at last I found myself in such an apathetic condition that I almost turned and bit my neighbour … just to be delivered from the prevailing circumstances’.

Expressions such as ‘author’, ‘work’, ‘text’ and ‘repertory’ are used constantly in writings about Italian opera; they stand for concepts that seem uncontroversial and unproblematic. However, these terms acquired the value we currently grant them only through a long process, one inextricably linked to the century-long formation of an Italian ‘operatic repertory’ between about 1750 and 1850. At the beginning of this period, a select number of literary texts received new musical clothing each time they were revived; by its end, the text of a successful opera could not be set to music again, because music and text were indissolubly linked in the audience's perception. There were exceptions, of course, and the process of change was gradual and differed according to genre: in the late eighteenth century some drammi giocosi had European careers that lasted as long as thirty years, much longer than the most successful drammi per musica. What is more, although we can speak of a ‘repertory’. with reference to the whole of Europe or to Italy, if we narrow the focusto a single city we may have to move into the nineteenth century to amass a body of works sufficiently large to merit the term. However, the fact that this process lasted for a century, far fromdiminishing its importance, is in one sense proof of its relevance. for an understanding of Italian opera that fully embraces its cultural, social and political context, ‘facts’ will indeed last as long as a century.

‘From Nino and Semiramide, rulers of Assyria, was born a son who carried the name of his father, and so resembled his mother that the people could distinguish them only by means of masculine and feminine clothing.’ Thus begins the argo-mento to the libretto La Semiramide, produced in Venice at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo for the 1670–71 season. The gender ambiguity described in the argomento is evident in the portrait of Semiramide from the frontispiece of that libretto (see Fig. 1). She sits alone at her dressing table, adorning her hair with roses in anticipation of her lover's arrival. She admires herself in the mirror, eternal symbol of female vanity. Her bare breasts and navel contrast strikingly with the metal shield that girds her chest. A high-topped military sandal is displayed prominently beneath the folds of her skirt. Prior to assuming the male disguise that she will wear for much of the opera, Semiramide is already pictured in a manner that is warlike and sexually dangerous, challenging and seductive. This mixture of male and female attributes is critical to her new guise as a Venetian heroine.

Among surviving portraits of Augusta Holmès is a photograph taken towards the end of her life (Fig. 1). The setting is her home: possibly the main room, but more likely a study, since the picture is dominated by a grand piano at which the composer stands imperiously. Images such as this – emphasising professional zeal rather than feminine charm – were the exception in the representation of women composers at the end of the nineteenth century. A vase of flowers, a flowing gown and a recumbent posture would have been typical. In high-necked blouse and dark skirt, hair pulled back severely to reveal a large, pale face, Holmès is less alluring; but she is ready to compose. The image also engages with contemporary conventions of representing male composers. Within the photograph is another, a framed portrait on the piano, positioned so that it reproduces Holmès' features. Richard Wagner: same bushy cravat, same forbidding pose. Almost the same, but not quite.

It is a commonplace that the poetry best suited to an operatic libretto has fewer pretensions, and more transparency in the range of interpretations that can be placed upon it, than ‘literary’ poetry. Otherwise, it will scarcely bear the weight of the music, much less contribute to the great emotional climaxes that justify opera for many listeners in the first place. And some might mistrust a libretto that is too ‘literary’ or too complicated, for metaphysical and other subtleties are not easily projected across the footlights. No one was more acutely aware of this ‘unliterary’ relationship between words and music in opera than W. H. Auden. Writing in 1948, he stated: ‘Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry.’

So says Othello, confronting Iago for the last time in Shakespeare's play. He looks down to seek for the cloven hoof of a demon, for only if lago is satanic can Othello understand what has come to pass. Looking down – the physical gesture – represents an impulse to interpret, to find clues, codes, signs there in the darkness. But Iago is no supernatural being: ‘that's a fable’. What remains is an enigmatic lago more frightening than any demon – the attempt to interpret undermined by the sign not given.

Stories, whether true or calculatedly false, have played at best an ancillary role in the evolution of Berio's approach to musical theatre. Indeed, to find a straightforward example of story-telling in his output, one would have to go back some twenty years from La vera storia to his previous collaboration with Italo Calvino, Allez Hop (1959), an ironic parable narrated in mime. But as soon as subsequent commissions offered Berio the resources of the human voice, he turned away from the seductions of a central narrative core, and instead built his vision of the potential of musical theatre around a more allusive and multi-layered conception. Narratives are still skeletally present – for instance, in Passaggio (1962), which employs the barest outlines of a scenario, spelt out explicidy only at the end, as a frame on which to hang a complex web of poetic and theatrical imagery, or indeed Opera (1970), with its intertwining myths of the ancient and modern worlds evoked through concentrated imagery, but not acted out. But the narrative twists and turns that are the chief pleasure of the story-teller – and the chief impetus behind the lyric outbursts of the operatic tradition – were no longer his concern.

The oft-cited observations of Italian librettist Carlo Goldoni as he described his first visit to the Académie Royale de Musique in 1763 are usually presented with an emphasis on what Goldoni missed. Accustomed as he was to eighteenth-century Italian opera, he could not hear a single aria in the French opera: “I waited for the aria … The dancers appeared: I thought the act was over, not an aria. I spoke of this to my neighbor who scoffed at me and assured me that there had been six arias in the different scenes which I had just heard. How could this be? I am not deaf; the voice was always accompanied by instruments … but I assumed it was all recitative.”