The latest books by Martha Nussbaum and Peter Franklin, on the music and life of Benjamin Britten, both come from positions notionally outside music studies. Nussbaum – the liberal philosopher, as close to an academic celebrity as one can find nowadays – writes about the War Requiem (1962) as a (mostly) appreciative visitor to the discipline. Franklin, by contrast, is well known in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music studies. Britten Experienced nevertheless adopts the institutionally detached, less inhibited perspective of the emeritus. It would not be too far from the truth to call Franklin’s book a career retrospective. Crucially, though, it takes in not only the things that he has taught and published over the years, but also the personal encounters and enthusiasms that have (often invisibly) shaped this teaching and scholarship – the very things, in other words, that typically lie outside the professional purview of music studies.

Geopolitical tensions escalated between the USSR and the Republic of China over control of the Chinese Eastern Railway during the late 1920s, resulting in a brief war in which several thousand people were killed. Given the violence in Manchuria in the months preceding direct military engagement, it is surprising that Soviet authorities sent an opera tour to the zone of conflict. This article examines the two seasons spent by visiting Soviet opera vocalists at the Railway Assembly Hall (Zhelsob) from September 1927 to February 1929, attending to the staging, reception and political goals of the tour. I argue that the opera stage in the city of Harbin transformed into a temporary zone of informal extraterritoriality, where unpredictable collaborations transpired between ideological enemies on either side of the military clash. The Soviet opera tour to Manchuria prompts us to reconsider the agency and intentionality of musicians in armed conflict.

Recently, over the course of a month in Taipei, I took in twenty-five opera performances, each opening a window onto the vast and varied world of Chinese opera.1 The performances were drawn from different genres: Peking opera (both canonical repertoire and new works), Taiwanese opera (kua-á-hì, or gezaixi), Hakka opera, Beiguan opera, Kunqu opera, Yu opera (Henan opera) and glove puppet opera (pòo-tē-hì). Although I was well aware of Taiwan’s vibrant operatic and theatrical scene – indeed, it was the very reason I pursued this residency – I was nonetheless surprised by the volume, variety and vitality of the performances I experienced. My visit coincided with one of the peak periods in the ritual calendar (the third lunar month), during which one could easily choose from more than ten outdoor opera performances each day, held at various temples throughout the greater Taipei area. In addition, meticulously crafted and lavishly mounted productions were featured at formal venues such as the Taiwan Traditional Theatre Center and Dadaocheng Theater. The performing culture of Chinese opera in Taiwan nowadays remains vibrant, imaginative, colourful and remarkably robust.