We publish here, in slightly altered versions, three lectures given by Pierluigi Petrobelli in Autumn 1988 as Chair of Italian Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. The terms of the Chair, established in 1928, state that the person entrusted with the post should ‘lecture in illustration and interpretation of Italian culture’.

There are few opportunities to compare differing readings by Mozart of the same text. Except in his sacred music, Mozart rarely had occasion to return to texts that he had already set, and relatively few sketches, drafts or heavily revised autographs offer extended alternative versions of other settings. Although most of the surviving sketches and drafts for operas and other vocal pieces do not diverge significantly from the final versions, some of these preliminary materials reveal Mozart reconsidering a text-setting, and thus offer important glimpses into his dramatic imagination. Such is the case with a draft for ‘Da schlägt die Abschiedsstunde’, the first aria of Der Schauspieldirektor. The draft and final autograph present related yet significantly different conceptions of the same number, enabling us to examine Mozart's revision of one particular aria, and his reconciliation of an individual solo number with the larger dramatic argument of the opera.

From Flaubert to Richard Strauss, male artists in late nineteenth-century Europe were fascinated by the figure of Salome. This fascination, indeed, amounted to a genuine craze. One representation sparked another: J.-K. Huysmans fantasised about paintings by Gustave Moreau; Oscar Wilde expanded on Huysmans; Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Wilde. Fine editions of Wilde's Salome with Beardsley's illustrations remained cult objects well into the twentieth century. In general, the Salome craze, like the science and medicine of its day, sought to legitimise new forms of control by men over the bodies and behaviour of women. The present paper revisits this well-known episode in cultural history with two distinct aims in mind, one interpretative, the other methodological. The interpretative aim is to offer a feminist approach to the fin-de-sièclecompulsion to retell the Salome story with lavish attention to misogynist imagery - those quivering female bodies and gory male heads. The methodological aim is to find a meeting ground for literary criticism and musicology as both disciplines aspire to become vehicles of a more comprehensive criticism of culture.

On 6 June 1920, a work premièred at the Paris Opéra and, unlike others preceding it that season, met with general approbation in the press. Despite reservations, newspapers as well as political and musical journals pronounced the opera sincere, deeply religious, an ‘oeuvre de foi’. The composer–librettist, Vincent d'Indy, must have been both pleased and perplexed by such praise, for he had originally conceived the work as a trenchant political critique. As planned in 1903, the opera was to show, in d'Indy's words, ‘the nauseating Judeo-Dreyfusard influence’ within a legend that accommodated this message.