At the climax of his account of a night of drunken adventure, Albert Herring, who has at last thrown off conventional restraints, suddenly breaks off: ‘a nightmare example of drunkenness, dirt, and worse…’. At which point the Glyndebourne production of a few years ago had Albert produce from his shirt an outsize pair of women's bloomers. The visual aid was presumably deemed necessary because the text does not make clear what inference we are to draw. The nature of Albert's desire is left open, and at least one early reviewer recognised that there might be a less conventional understanding of the superficially hilarious romp that Albert Herring presents. More recently, Philip Brett has trenchantly argued that the opera is a parable of the ‘coming out’ of a young gay man set against the oppression of small-town respectability, a view I believe to be in essence correct. There may, however, be room for a more detailed study of those elements in the text that enable us to affirm it with confidence.

The historiography of Italian opera is particularly well suited to illustrate some problems in the general field of music history and musicology. On the one hand, there is little doubt that Italian opera belongs to the canon, not to say the museum, of learned western music; indeed, today's opera houses surpass concert halls in projecting the ‘museum character’ in which musical tradition seems ‘frozen’. On the other hand, it is also true that only in recent years has international musicology accepted Italian opera as unquestionably deserving of attention. The reasons for this delay are clear enough. Some were easily overcome, connected to the very history of our discipline: since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the musical language of Italian operatic composers diverged from the mainstream Austro-German tradition; the dramaturgy of Italian opera was difficult to understand in a cultural context moulded by Wagnerian theory and practice (in part also by Shakespeare, Schiller, etc.). Other factors, however, are more deeply embedded, and continue to have an effect even in intellectual conditions very different from those of traditional musicology. These include: the manner in which extra-artistic factors determine the operatic work; the various creative competencies that take part in operatic production; the considerable importance accorded to performers, particularly singers; the possibility that parts of an opera may be moved from one work to another, or from one author to another; the fact that in die history of Italian operatic conventions, shared codes and repetition of formulas often prevailed over the search for novelty.

The day following the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), Voltaire observed in a letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville that the opera's libretto was by the abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, and he added with characteristic irony that it was ‘worthy of the abbé Pellegrin’. As we know, Voltaire was not alone in his sentiments. Few poets were reviled with the relish one finds in criticism of Pellegrin. Doomed to be a less-than-perfect poet in a literary culture, Pellegrin was forced by circumstance to do something few of his time could understand or accept: he earned a living writing poems on commission. This made him a faiseur. a hack who pursued art for money rather than inspiration, a paid servant who, improbably, sought to move in the very social circles that employed him. It is emblematic of Pellegrin's situation and his reputation that in 1774, twenty-nine years after his death, Voltaire did write noëls when the marquise du Deffand requested them, but complained that it was ‘une rude commission’ and compared his lot to Pellegrin's. Chastened, the marquise apologised. Pellegrin's artistic destiny would seem to have little to do with diat of die urbane and widely admired Voltaire, but I will argue that, in spite of this, the two shared some similar attitudes and experiences regarding the emplotment of tragedy and tragic opera, and further, that these shared views may have had a direct bearing on Rameau's development as a composer.

Not least because of its librettist, Tarare (1787) ranks among the most interesting ‘reform’ operas of the eighteenth century. The work was by no means unique among such efforts at the Académie Royale de Musique, but it undoubtedly had the greatest impact after the Piccinni controversy at the end of the 1770s, in part because Beaumarchais was untiring in his efforts to promote the new opera – a task at which he was far superior to his librettistic colleagues. He presented his new operatic conception in a detailed preface to the libretto (‘Aux Abonnés de l'Opéra’), the central point of which was to emphasise the mixture of conventional genre traditions, in particular of serious and comic elements.

In the early part of this century Italian musical critics were bemoaning the decadence of the national lyric stage. No inspired figure had come forth to claim the mande of Verdi; new Italian opera was becoming artistically irrelevant. In an effort to reclaim a ‘lyric spirit’ from Wagnerian Germany, Gabriele D'Annunzio ‘rediscovered’ the early seventeenth century as the birthplace of opera. Specifically, he fashioned Monteverdi – ‘il divino Claudio’ – as visionary proto-lyricist, a nostalgic move seconded by many other Italian authors through the 1920s and 30s.

Although there have been a few revivals of Verdi's Stiffelio since its first modern performance in 1968, including an important 1985 production at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the opera has received until now only limited attention. With two stagings by major theatres in 1993 (London's Covent Garden in January and New York's Metropolitan Opera in October), the situation has changed markedly. Those of us who know Stiffelio well have tried to temper our enthusiasm, avoiding excessive claims and acknowledging some of the work's dramaturgical problems. But it should come as no surprise that an opera exquisitely poised between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto is likely to be worth rehearing, particularly when the work was withdrawn from circulation by its author for reasons having to do primarily with censorship of its libretto (in which the wife of a Protestant minister commits adultery) rather than with intrinsic artistic merit.

What is music in opera? In Monteverdi's Orfeo, his first opera, music is arguably the protagonist, whether La Musica in the prologue, whose ritornello guides Orfeo to and from the Underworld, or embodied in the legendary singer himself, who uses his musical prowess to charm the guardians of Hell. In Il ritorno d'Ulisse, however, there is no such protagonist, no single embodiment of musical power. In the largest sense, of course, and in contrast to straight drama – the plays of Euripides, Shakespeare or Calderon may have some music in them but are essentially spoken – all of Il ritorno d'Ulisse, all of most operas, is music. But in Monteverdi's sense (and in the librettist Badoaro's), that music is divided into ‘speech’ and ‘song’ – or, speech-like and musical utterances.