Through brief case studies of burlesques of Ernani, Il trovatore and La traviata written for nineteenth-century London, this essay makes a preliminary examination of the nature of Victorian operatic burlesques, why they existed, and how they functioned artistically and sociologically. My larger purpose is threefold: to investigate the manner in which burlesque interpreted the foreign art form of Italian opera in a culture self-consciously identified as English, to consider how these works traversed class differences in an evolving socio-cultural milieu, and to ask how we might understand the these works in relation to the cultural codes of Victorian London.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the models of Greek tragedy and Aristotelian theory were appealed to repeatedly, first to invent the dramatic genre we call opera, and then in an effort to use theory to rid that genre of what were perceived to be its self-indulgent excesses. This essay argues that despite these theoretical claims, influences from classical Rome were so thoroughly ingrained in European librettists that it was the experience of the Latin that prevailed. Roman subject matter, dramatic structure, philosophical fashion and imperial performance-context produced a musical theatre that was in essence Roman rather than Greek.

Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto is based on a complex web of sources – writings by Calvino, Barthes, Kafka, Auden, Shakespeare and others – themselves intricately interrelated through games of citation and revision. Linking all these texts is a scene in which a male artist is confronted by a voice outside of his control. This scene is re-enacted – unexpectedly – at the climax of Berio's work. In this new context the unruly voice sounds like a revenant from a form long presumed dead: pure opera and absolute madness.

The theme of transformation (Verwandlung) plays a significant role in the work of Richard Strauss, from his Tod und Verklärung (1889) to his Metamorphosen (1945). This article examines two Strauss operas where transformation is a central aspect of the libretto: Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/16), libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Daphne (1937), libretto by Joseph Gregor. Though each opera focuses on transformation, this concept is interpreted and realized in entirely different ways. For Hofmannsthal, Verwandlung is a journey outward to a new level of existence, attaining a new sense of humanity. For Gregor, transformation is an inward movement, joining nature, and becoming divine in the German-Romantic sense of the term.

London composers competed for a music prize in 1701, setting William Congreve's libretto on the judgment of Paris, a beauty contest among Juno, Pallas and Venus. Paris, contest judge, exiled prince and amorous shepherd, prefers Venus, placing love above Juno's promised empire and Pallas's martial success. This essay reveals the general political meanings of the judgment of Paris myth, shows how the tale had been used to critique Charles II and James II, examines the political beliefs of the sponsors and librettist, and demonstrates how music by John Eccles, Daniel Purcell and John Weldon supported the politics of Congreve's libretto.

The scene upon which I focus here – the final duet – was a late addition to the list of primal scenes for this conference. The Don Carlos scenes on the original list were the Posa–Philippe duet and the Quartet, and thus we almost had a session on Don Carlos without the Prince of Spain. Perhaps this is not surprising. Carlos has not fared well in recent writing about the opera.

In the course of his insightful analysis of Act II of Un ballo in maschera, Harold Powers recurs to two critics of earlier generations who hyperbolically describe how, to cite his more measured summary, ‘the drama has turned into music as the opera was being composed. The music is the drama for an audience habituated to its conventions, its style, its genres’. Powers first quotes Gabriele Baldini, who describes the libretto of Il trovatore as ‘a phantom libretto, which became completely engulfed by the music and, once the opera was finished, disappeared as an individual entity’, and then the earlier Bruno Barilli, in whose view ‘the grotesque libretto is only the causal element that provokes the explosion, after which it collapses, annihilated – a confused scattering of rhymes, syllables, babblings – to vanish forever without a trace’. Although Powers and other more recent scholars tend to pay operatic words greater respect, I begin with an invocation of views that might seem anathema to a scholar of texts for the inspiring idea that the text can be ‘annihilated’ as one moves to another level of the work. In what follows, I intend to annihilate both text and music in order to dissolve to a yet higher level of analysis and to recuperate a specific history in which Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, I maintain, participates.

Idealized mother figure, great protectress, unsurpassed magician, devoted wife of Osiris: the goddess Isis assumed multiple roles in ancient Egyptian mythology. Verdi's Aida reflects this polysemy. Concordant with its general attention to Egyptological detail (though not without inaccuracies even by the standards of the day), Auguste Mariette's early synopsis for the opera refers to Isis only once, at the beginning of Act III when Aida awaits Radames: ‘May Isis, protectress of love, guide him to her who wants to belong only to him’.

‘Nothing is but what is not’. These words uttered by Macbeth after his bizarre first encounter with the three weird sisters could serve as a motto for the whole of Shakespeare's tragedy; for ‘the Scottish play’, as the superstitious have called it for centuries, is ruled by uncertainty, the questionable, the netherworld, where the only thing that is absolute is evil. It is about ambiguous forces that violate ife's natural order – witches, ghosts, a moving forest, an invisible dagger – what we call the macabre, what Freud called the uncanny, and what Verdi called ‘un genere fantastico’. Shakespeare constructs a world of binary opposites where boundaries, as Marjorie Garber has observed, are ‘continually transgressed, and marked by a series of taboo border crossings’.

Anniversary years always prompt revaluation as well as celebration, and the centenary of Verdi's death in 2001 was no exception. The conference for which the articles in this issue were written came at the end of a year packed with Verdi celebrations in both opera houses and academic settings. In terms of performance, a handful of ostentatious critical failures in 2001 sparked new debate about two old issues – the pros and cons of revisionist staging in general, and the degree to which contemporary productions should be faithful to what we can glean of the composer's intentions. These edgy, sometimes irreverent productions prompted the critic for the New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross, to declare that Verdi should be exempt from the rigours and indignities of Regietheater. While the abstraction of Wagnerian drama might reward updated settings spiked with flashes of contemporary social critique, he suggested, Verdi's operas work because the composer ‘meant every word’ and because their dramatic force is propelled by unadulterated emotion and sharp juxtapositions, qualities too direct and ‘site-specific’ to tolerate stagings that draw out hidden contexts or ironize dramatic conventions. In what quickly began to sound like a back-handed defence, Ross pronounced: ‘To the analytical mind such music can look crude, even vulgar on the page. Only in live performances, when the momentum begins to build and the voices become urgent, does it catch fire. But how do you go about analyzing momentum and urgency?’

After years spent reflecting on Western imperial practices, critic Edward Said wrote that Giuseppe Verdi's Aida is ‘a kind of curatorial art’, a work

whose rigorous and unbending frame recall[s], with relentless mortuary logic, a precise historical moment and a specifically dated aesthetic form, an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience.

‘La sventurata rispose’ [the poor wretch answered]. This sentence, among the most famous of Italian literature, appears in chapter 10 of Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, first published in 1827 and revised in 1840), where it functions as stitches trying to heal the deep wound caused by a radical surgical intervention, the excision of pages and pages devoted to a description of seduction. In the best Gothic tradition, the first version of the novel, entitled Fermo e Lucia (1821–23), contained a long account of the seduction of the Nun of Monza by a young libertine, but religious and, apparently, aesthetic considerations convinced Manzoni to cut this episode and replace it with those three words. The rhetorical figure of reticence, so prominent in chapter 10 of I promessi sposi, dominates the tradition of Italian ‘high’ Classicist and Romantic literature, which seems to have considered seduction unfit as a literary theme, to be left to the gutter of the popular novel.

A notorious adultery scandal involving Guillaume Kornman (a co-founder and sponsor of the French mesmeric society) and Beaumarchais, who defended Kornman’s unfaithful wife, should be considered one of the main sources of inspiration for Così fan tutte. A pamphlet war between the two broke out in 1787, when Salieri was living with Beaumarchais in Paris. Significantly, the earliest sources of the opera – Salieri's first unfinished setting of La scola degli amanti, Da Ponte's original libretto, and Mozart's autograph – all spell the name of Guglielmo as ‘Guilelmo.’ A study of this real-life Parisian drama helps to clarify several dramatic and musical elements of the opera, including the use of mesmeric references, which is more pervasive than previously recognized. In this new light, the opera appears to offer a political response to the radical ideas on the regulation of sexual and social matters disseminated by Kornman's mesmeric circle.

It all started with voices – voices not meant to be heard. Verdi's demand that at crucial moments in Macbeth the performers stifle vocal expression is by now famous. Again and again he urged that the duet and sleepwalking scene be sung ‘sotto voce’, ‘with mutes’, that the singers should speak more than sing, that their voices should sound ‘harsh’, ‘stifled’, ‘hollow’, ‘veiled’. Verdi's wilful insistence that his singers not sing has been understood as part of the composer's struggle to curb the excesses of primo ottocento opera and invest it with a new psychological depth. Gilles de Van, for example, argues that the suppression of the voice in Macbeth creates a shadowy subjective interiority, and claims further that the decision represents a shift in Verdi's aesthetic orientation from ‘melodrama to music drama’. De Van understands Verdi's inward turn as a renunciation of the kind of extroverted display upon which melodrama relies, as a ‘turning point, the beginnings of a dramaturgy of interiority that does away with the superb transparency of traditional melodrama and marks Verdi’s new awareness of the aura of confusion and ambiguity that can inhabit the human soul'.

One of the contemporary production books for Don Carlos thus austerely sums up the Philippe–Posa duet in Act II (of the five-act version); its none-too-subtle indication of grand themes handled seriously is one that has consistently driven the piece's reception. As so often, Verdi himself encouraged the trend – most significantly by treating the duet to more substantial revision than any other major piece in his entire output. Some drastic cutting occurred even during rehearsals, so that the supposed Urfassung predates the first performance. What is commonly referred to as the ‘original’ version corresponds, then, to the music performed at the 1867 Paris première. This was substantially refashioned for Naples in 1872 (with Italian text only), and given an even more thorough overhaul in 1884. The four versions have been much discussed: indeed, revisions such as these were one of the proving grounds on which Verdi (and thus his admirers) became musicologically respectable. Where would we stand today without those four versions and their many Verdian copains? Possibly on some other, less comfortable podium.