By all accounts the premiere of Puccini's Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera on 11 February 1907 was a triumphant success, with the presence of the composer adding special lustre to the brilliant performance of a distinguished cast. Amidst the general acclamation, however, a foreign visitor named Jihei Hashiguchi raised a dissenting voice in a letter to a local newspaper:

I can say nothing for the music of Madama butterfly. Western music is too complicated for a Japanese. Even Caruso' celebrated singing does not appeal very much more than the barking of a dog in faraway woods.

It seems fair to say that we are enmeshed in an Age of Reconstruction. Whatever groans the shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ may elicit from musicians and musicologists, the film industry's leap for the bandwagon is proof of the principle that Period Pieces Pay. Of the recent spate of feature films set in the eighteenth century, one in particular has marketed itself through its reconstructive credentials. The technologies that allow us to remodel our bodies, and revive old recordings on compact disc, also allowed the makers of Farinelli, Il Castrato to reach back and breathe new life into the voice of the long-dead castrati.

Suzanne Cusick has recently argued that the musical processes of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna purge Ariadne of passion and desire in order symbolically to make her a good wife. Written for the 1608 marriage of Francesco Gonzaga to Margherita de Savoy, the lament, according to Cusick, reflects Renaissance marriage and gender ideologies that were determined to silence women and put them in their place. Ariadne has dared to choose her own mate and therefore must suffer. Her fate is dramatised by her uncharacteristically long lament, which enacts the transformation women experienced as they gave up their own desires to the constraining institution of marriage. Cusick's argument is in line with recent critical tendencies to read early modern culture in terms of the opposition between passive female silence and active male desire.

A common feature of Cherubini's Parisian operas of the 1790s is the displacement of one or more of the protagonists. They are out of sorts with their environment, experiencing a need to escape that prevents the traditional unity of place from focusing the drama. The heroine of Lodoïska (1791) is imprisoned in a tower; in Eliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard Florindo travels to Mont St Bernard to forget his beloved Eliza, who pursues him and saves him from suicide. For the heroine of Médée (1797), Corinth represents unhappiness: she returns to her former home only to take revenge. In Les deux Journées (1800), Armand and Constance flee Paris to save their lives; even in the comic opera L'Hôtellerie portugaise (1798) the central location serves merely as a rendez-vous for the two lovers on their way to evade the wicked plans of Donna Gabriele's stepfather. These operas do not, in other words, unfold in reassuring environments where characters feel at home; nor are there neutral backgrounds that enable the drama to concentrate on personal interaction. What is more, although placing protagonists in such unhappy circumstances is widespread in late eighteenth-century opera, and ‘rescue operas’ in particular, it is at least arguable that Cherubini exploited their restlessness in a uniquely successful manner.

‘Pur sempre su le nozze canzoneggiando vai.’ Arnalta's remark to Poppea (L'incoronazione di Poppea, Act II scene 10), occasioned by Poppea's lyrical exultation over the death of Seneca, provokes the closing sententia of Edward T. Cone's recent exploration of the ambiguous world of opera and its inhabitants. Translating the nurse's comment as ‘You're forever going around singing songs about your wedding’, Cone concludes that ‘this is just what characters in opera do: they go around singing songs all the time’.

In February of 1929, the German National Party raised a matter of pressing concern in the Prussian State Parliament: the party requested a parliamentary investigation into ‘the transformation of the State Opera at the Platz der Deutschen Republik (popularly known as the Kroll Opera) into a laboratory for Bolshevik art experiments’. The crisis had become particularly acute in the wake of the Kroll Opera's production of Der fliegende Holländer, which had been premièred a few weeks earlier on 15 January 1929 and which, according to the party, brazenly ‘mocked the spirit of Richard Wagner’. For anyone who has worked on Wagner or, for that matter, simply attended performances of his works, the sentiments come as no surprise. Indeed, the fact that they arose in the wake of Otto Klemperer's and Jiirgen Fehling's famously abstract production (with sets by Ewald Dülberg) make them almost predictable. Fehling and Klemperer incurred the wrath of the National Party for producing what I want to call a ‘critical reading’ of Wagner's text. In Klemperer's and Fehling's reading, the Dutchman's ship may be anchored in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not permanently mired there. And that is precisely what enraged the National Party, just as years later Patrice Chereau would incur the wrath of countless like-minded Wagnerians, whose recourse to the official channels of government for the redress of their aesthetic grievances was, however, no longer so direct.

‘Dramaturgy’ is one of those vogue words to which frequent use lends the appearance of being increasingly well understood, whereas the wear and tear to which it is subjected actually makes it ever harder to understand. When a word has lost almost all meaning through overuse, the simplest way to make it usable again is, of course, to try to restore its original meaning. It should be possible to agree that dramaturgy is the composition of dramas tout court, and there can be no serious objection if that basic definition is understood to include the theories and principles of dramatic composition (as Lessing did in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie). In that sense ‘dramaturgy’ is to drama what ‘poetics’ is to poetry: it denotes the essential nature of the categories that form the basis of a drama and can be reconstructed in a dramatic theory.

In the original version of the libretto of Hippolyte et Aricie, the librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin prefaced Act V with the rubric ‘le théatre ne change qu'à la troisiéme scéne’ [‘the stage changes only at the third scene’]. This is one of the few acts in the entire repertoire of tragédies en musique where the conventional formula ‘le théatre représente …’ [‘the stage represents … ’], followed by a description of what the stage was intended to depict, was not used. The annotation in Hippolyte warned audiences that, instead of the change of scenery that would normally occur during the entr'acte, the first two scenes of Act V retained the setting of Act IV (‘a wood by the sea, consecrated to Diana’), and the new décor (‘a delightful garden comprising the avenues of the Forest of Aricie’) was revealed only in the third scene. The sense of discontinuity at this ‘internal’ scenery change was also heightened by a break of liaison de presence (that is, none of the actors in scene 2 remained on stage for scene 3). A dispute arose over this breach of convention, and resulted in the first two scenes being omitted from performances sometime during the opera's first season in 1733, ostensibly to avoid the breach of unity of place caused by the change of scenery. This was not the only revision made to the opera in that season, but it was arguably the most significant.

This essay examines the story of two stories, both by Richard Wagner: a story of Lohengrin, knight of the Holy Grail, and of Lohengrin, the opera. Lohengrin's story is well known: Elsa of Brabant, accused by her former suitor Friedrich of Telramund of having killed her brother and heir to the throne, prays for help from the unknown knight in her dreams, promising herself as wife in exchange for his assistance. Miraculously, the knight appears in a boat pulled by a swan and accepts her offer on condition that she never ask about his origin, name or nature. But political and personal intrigue spun by Friedrich and the gypsy woman Ortrud nourish doubts about the knight's magical existence, doubts that ultimately drive Elsa to ask the forbidden question during her wedding night. Lohengrin publicly discloses his identity and leaves Elsa, though not without returning her brother (whom Ortrud had transformed into the swan) to power.

Wagnerian gestures were from the outset translations onto the stage of the imagined reactions of the public – the murmurings of the people, applause, the trumpet of self-confirmation or waves of enthusiasm. In the process their archaic muteness, their lack of language, proves its worth in a highly contemporary instrument of domination.

At one point in Paul Rudnick's play, Jeffrey, the title character, who claims to have slept with 5000 different men, speaks directly to the audience: ‘I know it's wrong to say that all gay men are obsessed with sex. Because that's not true. All human beings are obsessed with sex. All gay men are obsessed with opera.’

Recent research in French Revolutionary culture has revealed that women composers and librettists gained access to the opera stage in unprecedented numbers in late eighteenth-century France. Although the number of women constituted still only a fraction of the total number of composers and librettists, it was an explosion as compared with earlier periods. In the fifty years between 1770 and 1820, there were five times as many women writing opera as all the women combined in the 125 years since the beginning of opera in France in 1645. This increased number of female-authored operas constituted a sufficient critical mass for some of these works to be singled out as great successes; indeed two of them, Julie Candeille's (1767–1834) libretto and music for Catherine, ou la belle fermière, and Constance de Salm's (1767–1845) libretto for Sapho (with music by J.-P.-E. Martini), ranked among the ten most-performed dramatic works in Paris during and just after the Terror, in 1793 and 1795, respectively. This article examines the ideological context in which these works were received, and asks, why, despite (or because of) the success of their works, women composers and librettists were often perceived by critics and the public as radical and subversive, especially when the messages they chose to include in their operas could be interpreted as feminist. This attitude is not surprising when one considers that the period of greatest success of female-authored opera (and of women's public activism), 1793–95, coincided with the height of the Jacobin authorities' repression of women. Despite this climate, women composers and librettists of the 1790s were surprisingly vocal in protesting their continuing exclusion from the many advantages brought about by the democratization of the institution of opera and society. This article is part of a continuing investigation by feminist scholars into the controversial meaning of the Revolution for public women, bringing nuance to earlier conclusions that women were excluded from public life during the era of the Revolution.