According to conventional wisdom, East German censorship of The Trial Of Lucullus (1951) required that composer Paul Dessau and librettist Bertolt Brecht completely overhaul the opera before it could be re-premièred later that year as The Condemnation Of Lucullus. However, archival sources prove that the two versions are virtually identical, suggesting that the attendant controversy was adroitly managed by East German officials to appease both internal/Soviet and the external/Western audiences. Analysis of several versions of scene 8 demonstrates that Dessau revised far more before the first première than after, and examines his use of musical style to symbolize sociopolitical status.

This essay examines the attributes of some typical opere buffe by Vincenzo Fioravanti, Nicola De Giosa, and Errico Petrella that may count as particularly Neapolitan. Contextualizing these ‘Neapolitan’ elements – especially the ‘Neapolitan characters’ like Pulcinella, and the use of local dialect and spoken dialogue – demonstrates their function in the comedy of these works, which rests on the multifarious, complex and yet direct connections between theatrical events and the real world surrounding them.

‘Fu qualche cosa d’incredibile …': ‘it was something unbelievable, something new, unprecedented’. Thus wrote Marianna Barbieri-Nini, the singer who created the role of Verdi's Lady Macbeth, in reference to the famous Act I duet between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Indeed, this duet seems to have been one of the most effective pieces in the opera for nineteenth-century audiences. Verdi himself wrote about it as one of the ‘two principal numbers’ of the opera, together with the sleepwalking scene, upon which the opera's dramaturgy depended. The reception of this piece at the 1847 première was stupendous. Antonio Calvi cites it as one of the opera's three excellent pieces, in which ‘maestro Verdi has arrived at Shakespeare’s sublimity'. The duet's opening section (‘Fatal mia donna’), according to various press releases during the opera's first few runs, was regularly encored three, four, even five times an evening. Abramo Basevi waxed eloquent over the piece, calling it ‘the culminating number of the opera’, ‘a true flash of Verdian genius’. And by the time the revised version was premièred in Paris in 1865, this duet had become entrenched in the repertory in a way the entire opera had not: one reviewer noted that the Act I duet ‘has always been considered the best duet Verdi has ever written’.

In his recent book on Hamlet, Stephen Greenblatt writes:

What there is again and again in Shakespeare, … is a sense that ghosts, real or imagined, are good theatre – indeed, that they are good for thinking about theatre's capacity to fashion realities, to call realities into question, to tell compelling stories, to puncture the illusions that these stories generate, and to salvage something on the other side of disillusionment.

The dramatic climax of Byron's poem The Corsair comes when Gulnare, a harem slave, seizes a weapon to free herself and Conrad, the pirate whom she loves, from the prison of their common enemy the Pasha Seyd.

What makes Bernard Shaw, for us, the most perfect of Wagnerites is that he did not mince words when he judged the master to have taken a wrong turn. Such a turn came in Das Rheingold, and Shaw was quick to expose it, even though he had just spent a chapter elaborating the profound political allegory he discerned in the work:

In the midst of these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and blood-curdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in the matter.

‘Scandal’, ‘uproar’ and ‘sensation’ are words that are often used by critics when writing about operatic stagings of directors Hans Neuenfels and Peter Konwitschny. Neuenfels' 1981 staging of Aida in Frankfurt/Main aroused a veritable furore, as did his interpretation of Nabucco (Berlin, 2000); similar reactions greeted Konwitschny's Graz Aida (1994) and his Hamburg Don Carlos (2001). Neuenfels and Konwitschny continually undermine traditional concepts of operatic staging: the provocative statements advanced by their powerful images regularly elicit bewildered reactions.

In June 1867 Ismail Pasha, the new Viceroy of Egypt, arrived in Paris to represent his country at the Exposition universelle. The Egyptian pavilion, erected on a large corner of the Champs de Mars, featured a marvellous collection of architectural spaces that included a pharaoh's temple, a mediæval palace ‘richly decorated in the Arabic style’, and a modern-day bazaar showing all manner of merchants and artisans at work. If the temple, designed by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, was intended to display artefacts from the most remote corners of Egypt's history, other spaces transported spectators directly to the present, offering what one French commentator called ‘a living Egypt, a picturesque Egypt, the Egypt of Ismail Pasha’. An enormous panorama of the Isthmus of Suez, created by the Suez Canal Company with the help of M. Rubé, set designer from the Opéra, drew long queues of paying customers. Elsewhere visitors could gaze at authentic Egyptian peasants, or Bedouins on white dromedaries, all the races governed by the Viceroy ‘personified by individuals selected with care’, as the critic Edmond About put it. Most dazzling of all was the exhibit within the refabricated royal palace, where the Viceroy himself was the featured attraction: poised on a divan in a bedroom painted to look exactly like the place of his birth, he smoked a hookah and daily received guests from the best Parisian society. The whole sumptuous spectacle, About would conclude, ‘spoke to the eyes as well as to the mind. It expressed a political idea’.

Opera seria underwent more change in the latter part of the eighteenth century than is commonly recognized, but the nature of the change often had as much to do with practical considerations as with aesthetic ideology. This essay focuses on Turin's Teatro Regio, which in the 1760s imported two particularly innovative operas, Sofonisba and Oreste, and retained some ‘‘progressive” features while discarding others. This essay demonstrates the importance of extra-musical factors in decisions regarding production.

In a recent issue of the Cambridge Opera Journal, Dorothea Link has proposed that Mozart may have been the author of an unattributed accompanied recitative that precedes the aria ‘‘Vado, ma dove?,” K. 583, in the Viennese court theatre’s original performing score of Martín y Soler's Il burbero di buon cuore. The present article re-examines the case for Mozart's authorship of this recitative in the wider context of Mozart studies as a whole, and through a detailed reconsideration of the source and stylistic evidence. The recitative preceding K. 583 is compared to two other accompanied recitatives with plausible connections to Mozart: an unattributed one that precedes a score of Mozart's aria ‘‘No, che non sei capace,” K. 419, in a Viennese manuscript of extracts from Paisiello’s Fedra; and one that is explicitly attributed to Mozart in the Viennese court theatre's original performing score of a pasticcio based on Guglielmi's La quacquera spirituosa.

Printed stage-direction books, so-called livrets de mise-en-scène, count among the most important sources for the history of staging of nineteenth-century French opera. Their function was to document the then-current condition of a Paris production, and to serve as a model for provincial or foreign theatres. In this essay, a comparison of two such livrets for Auber's Fra Diavolo from Paris, by Vieillard Duverger and Louis Palianti, shows that the staging of successful works underwent significant changes over time. One cannot, however, assume that a published stage manual indicates the chronological fixity of a production. Indeed, directors even in the nineteenth century did not aim at an ‘‘objective” reproduction of a staging, but rather at an innovative, lively, and ever-changing music theatre within the framework of contemporary operatic aesthetics.

Rimsky-Korsakov dwelled at length on his place in music history. His musings informed his creative processes, notably his handling of operatic time and space relationships. His stage works rely on structural and syntactic reflection rather than patterns of cause and effect for cohesion. This article examines the narrative contents of Sadko (1896), a setting of the merchant tale ‘‘Sadko the Rich Trader” that follows the contours of the Orpheus parable. The analysis, focusing on the mirror relationships between Russians and non-Russians, indicates that the composer conceived the score as a parody of nationalism and orientalism. In depicting self as other and other as self, Sadko also demonstrates the inherent universality, rather than the inherent Russianness, of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music.

Unlike the opera parodies performed at the Comédie-Italienne in the 1690s and collected by Evariste Gherardi, Dancourt's Angélique et Médor and Renaud et Armide were performed during the première runs of their target operas – Lully's and Quinault's Roland and Armide, respectively. Undoubtedly prompted by Lully's opera monopoly and the draconian restrictions on music and dance that affected the musical repertory at the Comédie-Française, Dancourt's parodies take a tongue-in-cheek view of the madness of opera in general, while specifically satirizing the themes, characters, and operatic situations found in Roland and Armide.

Permeable boundaries form the musical ‘thread’ of Don Giovanni– a compositional strategy fundamental to the opera's character. Customary cadential borders get omitted or blurred; material heard early in the opera prominently returns; and all the accompanied recitative-set piece pairs act as ‘composite pieces’ – scenes in which musical material as well as dramatic function bind the accompanied recitative and aria or duet together and fuse them into one entity. ‘Permeability’ is heightened in Don Giovanni due to the supernatural elements of the plot, the title character's refusal to to submit to society's strictures, Gluck's association with the story, and Mozart's propensity for musical one-upmanship. Yet it is by no means unique to that work. Studying the relationships between accompanied recitatives and adjacent numbers reveals a ‘middleground’ of musical continuity that lies between long-range tonal plans and the motivic and tonal unities of individual numbers. Hence these passages challenge, as well as complement, some of our underlying assumptions about operatic form, and urge us to expand our definition of a ‘number’.

Parma's lavish commemoration of the centennial of Verdi's birth took to an extreme the post-Unification trend to memorialize great figures of Italy's past. This essay examines the encyclopedic nature of the commemoration in the context of the local and national political climate. Its reception and display were symptomatic of contemporary changes in the physical sites of politics, sharing features with later, more overtly nationalist exhibitions and suggesting a symbiotic relationship between culture and ideology. The reception history of the monument to Verdi built on this occasion, however, warns against historical generalizations, underlining the contingency of the interactions between art, politics and ideology, and demonstrating that current concerns with nationalism often obscure more than they clarify.

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District became extraordinarily infamous after its damnation by Pravda in 1936. The amount of violence and sex in the opera distinguishes it from the Leskov novella on which it was based, and seems to have underpinned Stalin's disapproval. The complex relation between Shostakovich's detailed representation of sexuality and his portrait of Katerina, the opera's tragic heroine, mirrors the social tensions of the sexual revolution and the conservative backlash of the 1920s and 1930s. The writings of feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) about the new Soviet woman display striking similarities to Shostakovich's portrayal of his female characters and offer a context for his approach.

Puccini reception lay at the heart of a crisis of national identity that gripped Italy between the turn of the century and the First World War. For Puccini's detractors his works were an emblem of decadence; for his supporters they provided a means for regeneration. In his vitriolic monograph, Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912), Fausto Torrefranca associated Puccini with dangerous ‘others’ – women, homosexuals and Jews – in order to instil fear about the ‘feminisation’ of Italian culture. The reception of his book shows that Torrefranca's ‘extreme’ views were widely shared.

Shortly following the premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, performances of this opera often featured a strange substitution: sopranos performed the rondò-finale from one of Donizetti's earlier operas, Fausta, in place of the now-famous mad scene aria. At least four productions were affected and this alteration was performed by some of the most famous sopranos of the time. This article explores the brief tradition of altering the mad scene by looking carefully at its origin and subsequent appearances, discussing its effects on the experience of hearing Lucia di Lammermoor as a whole, and investigating the possible reasons why this substitution lasted only for a brief period of time.