Since the 1980s opera and fashion directors have earnestly explored the potential for symbiotic relationships as a way to sustain performance institutions and showcase forward-thinking approaches to operatic works, as evidenced by collaborations between the creative directors of Missoni, Versace, Fendi and Armani with La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House. In addition, fashion companies such as Dolce&Gabbana have found inspiration from opera’s long and celebrated histories within Italy, using operatic works as a platform for haute couture runway design.

This article studies three projects from Maison Valentino which are among the most recent fashionable forays into the genre of opera. In addition to collaborating on the 2016 production of La traviata with the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Valentino highlighted operatic heroines on the runway in 2014, and in 2018 created a collection inspired by Maria Callas, who inspired a number of repertorial revivals in the twentieth century. Valentino’s sartorial re-imaginings of nineteenth-century operatic culture on the stage and runway – achieved in both instances through incarnations of Callas – have sought to position Italian operatic history as a practical aspect of contemporary material culture. By showcasing the economic, political and social ramifications of Valentino’s collaborative efforts, I show how the company’s reformulations of operatic materials have impacted both conventional and unconventional structures of contemporary performance.

This article explores the economic and aesthetic dimensions of Resurrección María de Azkue’s (1864–1951) Basque operas, focusing on the tension between artistic ambition and financial constraints in the early twentieth-century Basque Country. Drawing on the example of the operas Ortzuri (1911) and Urlo (1914), this article explores how industrialisation and bourgeois interests influenced the definition of Basque opera. It also assesses the viability of this project by analysing its internal infrastructure, including the theatre landscape and repertoire, while underscoring the role of critics in shaping aesthetic norms for composers. By integrating both local and transnational perspectives, this article situates Azkue’s Basque operas within a broader context, relating it to contrasting models of modernity represented by Italian opera and Wagnerism, and demonstrating how peripheral regionalist and nationalist movements navigated these trends to try to assert a position of centrality.

In his book S/Z, French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes applied his five narrative codes – five analytical tools for scrutinising any literary text – to analysing the intersection of various interpretive divisions and cultural discourses in Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine. Barthes’s five codes are meant to be used as an investigative methodology, and this article implements this system as a means of analysing symmetrical symbolic structures in the narratives of the two operas of Austrian composer Alban Berg: Wozzeck and Lulu. The aim of this endeavour is to present a new outlook on Berg’s method of dramaturgical construction through interdisciplinary connections that juxtapose musicology with literary analysis. This approach presents Berg as a narrative designer of allegories that closely mirror Barthes’s literary critical technique, as exemplified by their shared use of the five codes.

In a well-known scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the audience discovers that one of the main characters, Madeleine, closely resembles an imaginary character in a painting, allegedly portraying her maternal great-grandmother, Carlotta. Madeleine believes she is possessed by Carlotta, a conviction that arouses the curiosity of John – a former lawyer and police officer – hired by Madeleine’s husband to secretly follow her. Other than the portrait, Carlotta never appears physically on screen; her spectral presence is conveyed solely through composer Bernard Herrmann’s haunting musical theme. In other words, a non-diegetic element – the musical score – assumes an indirect diegetic function, as it emerges whenever Carlotta’s ‘presence’ is suggested in the scene. Herrmann’s music cannot be heard by the characters within the filmic world, but it exists in a liminal space: it translates into audible music for the audience the inevitable spectral energy felt by Madeleine and John. The painting of Carlotta functions as a gravitational centre around which multiple storylines unfold. It also offers the music an opportunity to play an active narrative role. Something similar happens in Lydia Goehr’s Red Sea, Red Square, Red Thread, which likewise takes a story about a painting as a starting point for intermedial narrative interplay. In the books under discussion here, the visual returns time and again as an anchor for the relationship between operatic fantasy and quotidian life.

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.