As this collection has demonstrated, an exciting process of convergence is under way in the world of opera studies. The attention generated by the “critical” approach to opera, with its desire to read contemporary meanings into canonical works, has obscured the fact that many opera scholars who stand outside of this paradigm, be they musicologists, literary theorists, historians, or sociologists, are currently engaged in a common project: namely the reconstruction – based often on painstaking archival research – of the conditions of operatic production, reception, and social instrumentalization during different periods of the genre's four centuries of existence. It is this project that represents the common denominator between those following a “systems of meaning” and those employing a “conditions of production” approach and one that, as Victoria Johnson has shown in her introduction, was made possible by the historical “turn” within the humanities and social sciences over the last two decades.

As Craig Calhoun, Herbert Lindenberger, and Jane Fulcher have all argued in this volume, a close elective affinity exists between this recent research within opera studies and the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In her contributions here, Fulcher has illustrated one way in which this often difficult body of writings can be put to use in understanding opera. She argues that Bourdieu's idea of a struggle among elites as well as between elites and non-elites over symbolic legitimacy and domination allows for a more complex understanding of the relationship between state power and ideology and art works produced under various forms of state sponsorship.

Aside from their numerous and well-discussed musical differences, French and Italian Baroque operas depart radically from each other in their construction of on-stage societies. As a general rule, Italian operas present a small group of individuals who find themselves in unstable situations to which they seek individual resolutions. They may be rulers or generals, and the fate of thousands may depend on their actions, but their subjects or soldiers have no role within the musical world of the opera. French operas, on the other hand, bring crowds of people on stage at least once an act – singing and dancing in the most extended and musically sumptuous passages of the entire work. The protagonists function not as isolated individuals, but within societies that are visible and audible for as much as a third of each opera.

I had this difference brought forcefully to my notice recently when I saw a production of a Handel opera in which the director seemed to chafe at its restricted social world and used two methods to modify visually the string of solo utterances that composed the musical fabric of the work: introducing supernumeraries from time to time; or having any other singers who happened to be on stage engage in actions that put them into relationships with the soloist that created, however briefly, a sense of a community. But I remained struck by how different an occasional visual sign of togetherness is from the world of the crowded French stage.

The complexity of opera is self-evident, but it also represents a great challenge. The genre's multi-media nature requires an interdisciplinary approach. Thus the richness of opera makes it an appropriate object of study for different research fields, disciplines, and methodologies. Often opera has been considered a matter for musicologists only (opera as a composer's work), or for literary studies (opera as a libretto: see the numerous works on Metastasio's texts that have appeared since 1982). More recently, opera has come to be recognized as a complex social phenomenon, and sociology aims to take the initiative in studying it.

Sociological approaches to opera could well produce very interesting results, just as musicological, literary, or historical approaches (see John Rosselli's studies on the nineteenth-century impresario) have already done. But though the object of study is the same (or is at least identified by the same term, “opera”), what these approaches aim to explain is totally different: for musicologists, opera as a work of art in its historical as well as cultural context; for sociologists, opera as a product and a means of expression of social relations. And though it is possible that sociologists, because they possess theories through which they can reinterpret the data of extant opera research, may find the results of musicological as well as literary or historical studies useful for their work, it seems less likely that sociological approaches to opera will help a musicologist find answers to his or her questions.

Few today would dispute Michel Foucault's intellectually seismic assertion that discourse defines or “authorizes” knowledge: it renders visible, it “produces” what we see. As he so incisively demonstrated, discourse not only furnishes those conceptual categories through which we conceive reality within a period, but shapes or articulates all our subsequent discoveries. An outstanding feature of the humanities and social sciences in the past several decades has been the entry of those new discourses developed originally by the French Left in the sixties. Within the humanities, figures like Jacques Derrida have had an unquestionable impact, while in anthropology, sociology, and history the cynosures have been Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.

Yet musicology has neglected Bourdieu – we have slighted his insights into power and its deployment of symbols in favor of the social, symbolic analyses of Adorno and Geertz. Among my aims, then, is to raise the question of why those symbolic exchanges that Bourdieu has made “visible,” stimulating insights in so many other fields, still have not done so in ours. For the issue of why we have skirted his political and social grounding of symbols compels us to recognize premises that persist in our field and have buttressed the predominance of other paradigms. However, my focus shall be on how Bourdieu's semiotic analysis of power relations reveals contestation within French music, and particularly opera, of the 1920s, which is obscured by the now prevalent models.

In 1798 there appeared in Weimar an elegantly produced magazine, eight issues a year, entitled London und Paris. Its title tells the story: it offered reports about social, cultural, and political trends in the capital cities of England and France. The magazine was rather like a Sunday magazine in a high-tone newspaper today, offering engaging color pictures alongside smoothly written stories about what life was like there among the rich and powerful, the beau monde or the bon ton. This was fantasy and jealousy time, one might say. Through its columns readers were able to keep informed about the fashions and the pleasures in the two key cities – dress, promenading, horse equipage, prostitutes, politics, theatre, and of course opera. A whole host of similar periodicals of fashion, culture, and politics, most notably the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, sprang up in this period, linking opera intimately with London and Paris, the capital cities that had come to define cosmopolitan taste and social practices.

Attitudes of those culturally subordinate to empowered groups or institutions tell us the most about what is going on in a social context. German commentary shows us how central the two capitals, and their operas specifically, had become to cultural and social life in Europe and America. Historians tend to take the roles played by the two cities for granted; they have not inquired into when and how London and Paris took on an authority they had not held in the seventeenth century.

When considering the great epochs of French operatic history one would scarcely even entertain the notion of including the decade of the 1920s, which pales in comparison with the febrility of Weimar. In fact, our dismissal of the French operas of this decade only appears to reinforce the common dictum of the genre's decline in much of Europe – its ineluctable marginality both in modern culture and in musical life. However, as I shall argue, this apparently insignificant decade in French opera is indeed seminal in terms of the genre's changing function, its evolving intellectual and political role. For opera in France in the twenties became an arena for a new kind of exchange: as a nexus for attempts to enunciate ideology, it led rather to an intriguing effacement of older ideological lines. This, I maintain, was the result of the inherent contradictions of the sub-genre involved, which sought to communicate abstract ideas in a semiotically unstable and emotionally compelling art.

The “opera of ideas,” as I shall call it, emerged from and yet transformed German precedents, fostered by governments of both the Right and the Left in the polarized atmosphere that followed World War I. When articulate ideologically, however, it failed to convince artistically; conversely, the most successful examples led not to reinforcement of certainties but to intellectual ferment.

The notion that works of art have some sort of relationship to the society that creates them is perhaps axiomatic. The difficulty, however, is untangling the numerous threads that link these cultural products to the people and institutions that produce and consume them. Inevitably, this task is made simpler when a work seems to express the ideology of a single patron or a centralized power base. Wealth and prestige, for example, might be demonstrated simply by opulence, grandeur, and spectacle – only the magnificent can produce magnificence. Ostentation can sometimes be imbued with simple, yet effective, messages: “benevolence and wisdom are noble attributes”; “duty is more important than physical love”; “reason and restraint are better than desire” – or any number of precepts that might exemplify the virtues of whichever ruler is at the helm. Occasionally, seemingly contradictory ideals are melded together in ways that resist easy analysis. This is the case, for example, with L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643), in which Busenello's poetic fancy and Monteverdi's incomparable music create an ambivalent moral frame. For example, we still can't decide whether Seneca is a pretentious buffoon (Act I) or a worthy citizen and martyr to the Stoic cause (Act II), or whether the ambivalence is simply part of the game – as well as a demonstration of Monteverdi's unmatched ability to trip us up on our search for meaning.