From 1748 onwards, the marvellous made a comeback in opera seria via the Königliches Opernhaus in Berlin. The striking resurgence of myth and magic in the predominantly historical operatic genre appears to bespeak a growing interest in Lullian tragédie en musique, which in turn can be associated with Frederick II's French orientation in literary and philosophical matters. But how did deities, sorcerers and Louis quatorzien imports chime with Frederick's notorious resistance to superstition and divinely ordained kingship? The juxtaposition of the relevant operas with theoretical writings from Friderician Prussia yields a multi-faceted, somewhat paradoxical answer, revealing that the marvellous, alongside nourishing a new type of operatic spectacle, served Frederick as a vehicle to impart his philosophical agenda to his state, a former centre of Pietism.

The preparation of the critical edition of Verdi's I due Foscari has drawn attention to two overlooked sources: an early scenario attributed to Andrea Maffei and an early manuscript copy with various layers of corrections. This article questions the scenario's attribution to Maffei, revising the opera's early history. It furthermore identifies one of the layers in the manuscript copy as being in Verdi's hand, showing that the composer's role in fine-tuning a libretto at this early stage in his career was greater than has so far been possible to show.

Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow, 1917) was conceived as Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's ‘chief joint work’, and its central message has been read as an allegory of artistic collaboration and social engagement. This article calls upon Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory to enrich such an interpretation and unravel the opera's positive conclusion as an inadequate cure for the artistic melancholy of the fin de siècle. While Strauss successfully engaged with allegory to portray two of the opera's characters – the infertile Emperor and Empress – he was unable, for his own philosophical reasons expressed in the contemporaneous Eine Alpensinfonie (1915), to ratify Hofmannsthal's hope, rooted in his ‘Chandos Crisis’, of creating an aesthetic totality, of reconstituting the symbol that Benjamin, in his later writings, pits against allegory.

Two King's Bench lawsuits in The National Archives of the UK contain new information about the activities of castrati working in mid-eighteenth-century London. Monticelli v. Sackville (1748) confirms Horace Walpole's testimony that singers employed by the Earl of Middlesex's opera company received enormous salaries. Manfredini v. Geminiani (1751) preserves details of a contract of employment between singer and impresario that went disastrously wrong for both parties. An account of the London careers of the main protagonists is supplied to contextualise the new information.

This article explores Verdi's death as a ‘media event’, tracing the unfolding news from the earliest reports of his imminent demise up to the monumental commemorations held 30 days afterwards. Throughout this time, news media helped to define a period of so-called national mourning. Yet a broader range of media (including the telegraph, tram and railway) played an important role in demarcating the geopolitical scope of this collective grief. As a point of comparison, Verdi's death is considered in relation to the assassination of King Umberto I – a recent incident, of greater magnitude, which had provoked a spell of national mourning only months into the new century. Echoes of Umberto's assassination can be heard in responses to Verdi's death, linking both events to a common historical and political moment. This new context for understanding Verdi's final moments not only seeks to illuminate the manifold interactions between public and persona in Liberal Italy but also raises questions about the construction of auditory experiences in national mourning and the sensory dimension of the nation state's lugubrious politics.

This essay charts the contours of a ‘second practice’ in Puccini's corpus. Whereas his operas from the 1890s are fuelled by a longing for unmediated access to empirical reality, his later works unleash a variety of distant sounds that unsettle the aesthetics of verismo opera. These sounds, which draw on the ontology of wireless transmission just as surely as his earlier works do on that of phonographic transcription, find their fullest expression in Suor Angelica. The notorious Marian apparition that concludes that opera has long been mocked and explained away, and no wonder: for, if we attempt to take the miracle seriously, we may (like Puccini himself, in the years following Madama Butterfly) begin to doubt whether modernism ever was an art of confidence and disenchantment.