This article focuses on two cinematic versions of the ‘Madame Butterfly’ tale. Produced near the beginning of the sound era, the 1932 Madame Butterfly struggles to co-opt Puccini's opera and thereby create a fully cinematic Butterfly. My Geisha, created three decades later, aspires to subvert Orientalist representation by reflecting back upon Puccini's and Hollywood's Butterflies with hip sophistication. Both films work simultaneously with and against the Butterfly canon in intriguing ways and both are shaped by prevailing American perceptions of race and gender. In investigating the relationship between these films and Puccini's opera, I raise broader issues of comparative genre analysis, focusing particularly on exotic representation on stage and screen. Does film, in its bid to project exotic realism in both sound and image, succeed in surpassing the experience of staged Orientalist opera?

Early twentieth-century Paris saw an embarrassment of half-naked women dancing with seven veils and papier-mâché heads: ‘Salomania’ had gripped the capital. By 1913 Salome was a regular feature on music hall show-bills, besides the balletic and operatic stage. This study focuses on three variations on Salome's notorious Dance of the Seven Veils, performed by Loie Fuller (1907), Ida Rubinstein (1909) and Maud Allan (from 1906) on music by Florent Schmitt, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss respectively. Such an investigation provides a peculiar line through the cultural and aesthetic determinants of early twentieth-century theatrical dance. In this context music takes on new narrative significance, offering ways of configuring the Dance above and beyond its mere visual surface.

In Opera and Drama Richard Wagner promised to abolish the opera chorus. Although the chorus's continued appearance in Wagner's later works seems to belie this pledge, this essay argues that Wagner symbolically made good on his promise in his treatment of the knights in Parsifal. For most of the drama, the knights serve as active, even demanding, participants. Yet as the work closes, the knights simply join the off-stage treble voices to reflect on the action. Their reverent spectatorship now parallels that of the intended audience of Bayreuth itself, the theatrical space that Parsifal– Wagner's Bühnenweihfestspiel– was written to consecrate. This dramaturgical transformation is matched by a musical one, in which the intense chromaticism marking much of the knights' earlier music is abandoned for a mediated yet insistent diatonicism far removed from the chromatic space of the principals. By eliminating the chorus from the active sphere of the drama, Wagner counteracted a Nietzschean ideal of communal authorship ‘from below’ that had previously dominated German theorising of the chorus.

This essay addresses the materiality of voice in opera production, proposing a shift away from methodological models that posit voice as silent and disembodied towards one in which the body figures central. Comparing the voice in opera with the voice of the performative utterance, the article assesses the relevance of performativity to opera studies. A distinction between Derrida's critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and the presence of performance leads to a discussion of the ‘force’ of the vocal utterance and its relationship to the real via Shoshana Felman's The Scandal of the Speaking Body. The central argument is that voice upsets the model of distanced reason upon which enlightened subjectivity depends.

I am happy to strive to add an appoggiatura – if my comments might be considered a minor bridge towards a deferred conclusion – to the very stimulating set of articles by Michelle Duncan, David Levin and Fred Moten that appear in this issue. It struck me that these three articles can be read as imbroglio in that they offer contest, or dissonant engagement, more than seamless convergence. Indeed, by underscoring the complexities that haunt our habits of reception in ‘artistic’ practice, these essays further the passion and urgency in listening closely to less audible aspects in any cultural production including opera.

For Adorno, the graphic reproduction of operatic performance means that the primary scene of audition has shifted as well: from the theatre – and the telic determinations towards which the natural history of the theatre tends – to the living room, where people gather to listen to what they no longer concern themselves to perform. The phonograph allows the vagaries and vulgarities of the visuality of (operatic) performance to be held off or back by an auditory experience whose condition of possibility and whose end is the illusory recovery of something literary – and thus essentially visual. What remains is to begin an attempt to see and hear what might be gained by moving through the opposition of the denigration of the recording in the discourse of performance and the denigration of performance in the discourse of ‘classical’ musicology. This attempt is made by way of the 1993 recording of Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, starring Jessye Norman as the opera's single character, Die Frau, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the baton of James Levine. It is an attempt that has required reading with and against Adorno – which is to say, listening to and for the sound that works in and against him.

The title of this issue, ‘Performance Studies and Opera’, optimistically announces a conjunction between two disciplines that have previously had surprisingly little to do with each other, despite substantial common ground. The three articles gathered here, however, bear marks both of the excitement sparked by the novelty of bringing the methods of performance studies to bear on opera (significantly, the reverse process, operatic theory used to interpret other modes of performance, remains almost unimaginable) and a caution occasioned by their authors' sensitivity to the difficulties involved in any such translation.

This essay does two things, one of them analytical, the other more sociological. The former consists in a dramaturgical analysis of Verdi's Macbeth. The discussion is not entirely conventional insofar as its impetus was pragmatic: this section lays out some of the dramaturgical thinking that went into preparations for a new production of Verdi's work slated for San Francisco Opera in the Autumn of 2004. Alas, in the Autumn of 2003 the production was abruptly cancelled. This (non-)event led to the essay's sociological aspiration: a consideration of how and why that cancellation came about. In addition to reviewing Pamela Rosenberg's unusually ambitious, experimental and controversial regime at San Francisco Opera, the essay also speculates on the relationship between a nascent critical dramaturgy and the prospects for innovation on the operatic stage in the United States at this historical moment.