No aspect of Janáček's operas has been publicised more widely than their alleged use of ‘speech melodies’. Indeed, most commentators now assume the a priori existence of speech melodies in the composer's operas. However, only John Tyrrell has explored the matter in depth, and many basic questions about Janáček's speech-melody theory and practice remain unanswered. What follows is an attempt to investigate in detail one of the most prominent, and most misrepresented, issues of Janáček opera analysis. A brief initial digression into the principal characteristics of spoken Czech is unavoidable.

In a recent issue of this journal, David J. Levin proposed an approach to evaluating the work of directors and producers of opera. The idea that one might be able to theorise the difference between good and bad stagings is appealing, not least because many of us would like to feel able to raise the standard of debate on this subject. Most public discussions of opera productions (or at least of those productions that generate public discussion) can be predicted in advance, more or less verbatim; the persistence of the arguments used on all sides is in itself enough to suggest that little progress is being made. On the other hand, it is not easy to see how academic debate contributes. Theatre is where operas enter public discourse. Performance might seem like a decisive act of interpretation – choices have to be made about how to present the given work – but, paradoxically, it also marks the point at which opera escapes the attentions of the academy in favour of a constituency which is (presumably) less grounded in theory and less committed to consciously interpretative acts. With understandable reservations, Levin suggests the use of commercially available videos to analyse details of a staging, but details of this sort are not likely to contribute significantly to a theatre audience's experience of how a production works and what it has to say. Videotape permits us the mastery of freeze-frame enquiry, and at the same time confines us within the flattened perspective chosen at each moment by the camera's eye. Both its advantages and its drawbacks are incommensurate with theatre, where (especially in opera, with its simultaneous but distinct modes) the stream of information is diverse and continuous, and our eye moves in relative freedom, never capturing the totality of the stage. One might draw an analogous distinction between academic criticism, which works by isolating certain elements of the ‘text’ or its contexts and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, and the more holistic act of sitting in the opera-house watching a ‘work’ unfold. The pause button creates a sequence of discrete images submitted to the critic's intellectual play. In the theatre, a staging is more likely to achieve its effects through what we might call its ‘feel’, its general character and stance. When Peter Sellars set Così fan tutte in a diner, the air of incongruous modernity – conveyed through costume, set, the characters' ways of behaving–must have determined the audience's sense of his interpretation far more powerfully than (for example) the fact that he had Ferrando and Gugliemo sing ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ in their own characters rather than their assumed ones.

The literature on Mozart's Idomeneo contains many references to short motives, initially presented in the overture and recurring at critical points during the opera itself. While this practice has not been shown to be widespread in eighteenth-century opera seria, earlier instances may be found in operas known to Mozart and from whose example he clearly profited, notably Gluck's Alceste and Iphigénie en Aulide. The tendency to orchestrate most or all of the recitative and to elide aria cadences contributes to increasing continuity of musical thought in all these works; the denouements of both Gluck's Iphigénie operas become nearly symphonic.

It is becoming increasingly usual to think of music of the Classical period as conveying its meanings at least in part through a rhetoric of topoi. According to this model, such elements as rhythm, texture and melody evoke both musical and extra-musical ‘echoes’. Woven into the structure of the music, these echoes form a collage of connotations from which meaning can be inferred. As a genre of its time, opera buffa is in no way exempt from this ‘combinatorial’ process, or its corollary system of associative meaning. Indeed, every level of meaning in opera buffa arises from the combination and recombination of textual, musical and dramatic elements. For example, the characters, plot types and comic riffs of opera buffa are often drawn from the commedia dell'arte; we also find stories from folk tales and fairy tales, and from fashionable novels and spoken theatre. We find gestures and scenes from opera seria and tragédie lyrique, as well as quotations from and allusions to other opere buffe. The music also ranges widely in stylistic origin and reference, moving from low comedy to elevated coloratura, from bland neutrality to affecting sentimentality, and from extended expressions of a single emotion to lightning changes in Affekt. Thus the rhetoric of topoi characteristic of instrumental music of the period is included within a structure of reference and resonance that invokes textual and dramatic ‘sources’ as well as musical ones. Opera buffa is, in other words, a fundamentally intertextual genre.

In Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Brutus Jones undertakes a fatal flight through the jungle, near the end of which he stumbles into a clearing and ‘incoherently mumbles’: ‘What is – dis place? Seems like – seems like I ben heah befo’.’ He's right – he has been there. Jones's frantic run has brought him full-circle, leading him to roughly the same place where he began. However, Jones retraces his steps in more man just O'Neill's drama: he repeatedly rushes through die same jungle in the numerous adaptations of the play that followed its successful 1920 première. The first progeny of die Emperor – Louis Gruenberg's opera performed at the Metropolitan and Dudley Murphey's film starring Paul Robeson – appeared in 1933. Surprisingly, given die dated and, to present-day audiences, offensive racial depictions, the work is still being translated into other media, including Sven-David Sandström's 1985 opera and a 1986 dance version by Donald McKayle set to music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

In the 1840s and 1850s, four operas by Giuseppe Verdi (I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera) premiered at the theaters Argentina and Apollo in Rome. Two of these works (I due Foscari and Un ballo in maschera) had been rejected at other theaters because the authorities did not consider them concordant with the censorial requirements, and none of the four would have been permitted in Rome had the authorities applied the usual criteria. That they accepted them anyway suggests the process of censorship did not follow strict rules but was handled arbitrarily. These premieres are even more astonishing when we take into account that Rome, in contrast to most other cities on the peninsula, had very rigorous standards of censorship.

Those fortunate enough to have seen the recent production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys mounted by Les Arts Florissants will remember the sumptuously staged realm of sleep in Act III, during which costumed lute and recorder players appeared alongside the singers and dancers. Although conductor William Christie and director Jean-Marie Villégier made no attempt to reproduce the original seventeenth-century staging, they did adhere to Quinault's instructions for this scene to the extent of making musicians prominently visible. Atys is not exceptional in calling for stage musicians: Lully regularly included instrumentalists among the dramatis personae of his tragédies en musique, the genre on which he lavished most of his creative energies after 1672, and the practice is even more evident in the thirty or so ballets he composed for Louis XIV's court during the preceding two decades. The phenomenon of on-stage instrumentalists – much more extensive than the use of the banda in nineteenth-century Italian opera – has been studied only for the information it affords about the development of Lolly's orchestra or the iconography of French Baroque opera. This article is concerned rather with why instrumentalists appeared on stage at all, what they represented, how they functioned as characters, and the impact they had on the visual spectacle.

Considerations of exoticism and particularly of orientalism in opera seem to focus, either explicitly or implicitly, on generalities – even when scholars have looked at only a few isolated works taken almost exclusively from ‘serious’ or ‘great’ repertories. However, in order to understand this complex phenomenon in its contemporary context, it is necessary to work from a knowledge of the extraordinary diversity of ‘exotic’ opera.

One of the final scenes of Farinelli, Il Castrato, dir. Gerard Corbiau (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994), shows a solar eclipse witnessed, eighteenth-century style, by members of the court of Philip V of Spain around 1740. Restless spectators squint through pieces of tinted glass prepared in the smoke of a small fire. It is a precious visual detail, a jot of history in this sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed film that offsets the melodrama to follow. Without warning, a wind, helped along by corny, time-lapse photography, ushers in a sea of Goya-like clouds. A murmur passes through the entourage; eerie blackness falls on the court.