Der Rosenkavalier is an opera that foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing and ultimately death for the aging Marschallin, and a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie, in which the temporal intersects with the eternal. It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's relation to historical time and the idea of musical progress, as the composer supposedly retreated from the modernity of Salome and Elektra to a more conservative idiom. The temporal qualities manifested in Der Rosenkavalier invite comparison with another work from this period that similarly foregrounds the concept of time, Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. In this self-styled ‘novel of time’, Mann raises a number of problems concerning the human limitations on perceiving time and its artistic representation, especially with regard to music. Disputing the contention of the narrator of Mann's novel that music cannot ‘narrate time’, I show that Strauss's music in fact exemplifies music's capacity to express ‘the historical in time’, using Der Rosenkavalier as a case study for addressing the philosophical problem of temporal representation in art. I argue that Der Rosenkavalier – both Hofmannsthal's text and Strauss's music – is in several significant ways ‘an opera about time’ – the temporal and the eternal, the historical and what I call the ‘metahistorical’.

Offenbach's first commercially performed dramatic work, the opéra comique Pépito, premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Variétés on 28 October 1853. This article examines it from historical and musical perspectives. First, I argue that its production at the Théâtre des Variétés is an example of what Mark Everist has called ‘the politics of genre’, in this case the attempts by managers of Parisian boulevard theatres to circumvent the hierarchical system of genre imposed on them by the government. Offenbach may have been directly complicit by offering an opéra comique to a theatre that was legally not allowed to perform the genre and by supplying a musical element – ‘local colour’ – as part of the political strategy by which the manager of the Variétés sneaked the opéra comique past the authorities. The subterfuge did not work, however: I argue that Pépito was recognised by audiences as an opéra comique primarily through the character of its music. A discussion of the score, and the musical competence of the original cast and orchestra of the Variétés, allows a partial reconstruction of the actual sound of the first performance of Pépito. Finally, I consider the later history of Pépito, and in a postscript suggest that a faint memory of Offenbach's Spanish opéra comique may have resurfaced twenty-two years later when Georges Bizet, who became part of Offenbach's circle in the late 1850s, was composing his own Spanish opéra comique, Carmen.