Through brief case studies of burlesques of Ernani, Il trovatore and La traviata written for nineteenth-century London, this essay makes a preliminary examination of the nature of Victorian operatic burlesques, why they existed, and how they functioned artistically and sociologically. My larger purpose is threefold: to investigate the manner in which burlesque interpreted the foreign art form of Italian opera in a culture self-consciously identified as English, to consider how these works traversed class differences in an evolving socio-cultural milieu, and to ask how we might understand the these works in relation to the cultural codes of Victorian London.

This study untangles the complex literary, historical, political and theatrical web of Verdi, Solera, Zacharias Werner, Madame De Staël and Giuseppe Mazzini, and relates it to Verdi's use of light and dark imagery in Werner's play.

It is now a historical commonplace that nineteenth-century operatic singing became generally louder and heavier over the course of the century. Early in the century, before the advent of singers such as Gilbert-Louis Duprez, tenors sang high notes with a light, mixed voice, sometimes even falsetto. Strikingly, while such singing was virtually eliminated from Italian opera by the end of the century, the vocal practice continued in certain cases in the French repertory, some of which were created with one particular tenor in mind, Jean-Alexandre Talazac (1851–1896). Talazac was praised for his unique ability to sing high notes both softly and loudly. This article investigates the physical practice of producing what pedagogues and critics have called voix mixte, an enigmatic timbre applied to moments of soft, high tenor singing. In exploring these moments of what I call ‘léger mode’, I suggest that, by singing high notes softly in a post-Duprez operatic world, tenors transcend stage gestures through their use of a formerly normative performance style to mark moments musically as representations of vocal and masculine vulnerability. The historical evidence also argues for a renewed focus on what soft tenor singing might do for opera today.

Opera is a genre that prizes interior expression. How then does it cope with characters who are defined by reticence and inscrutability? Donizetti's 1837 opera Roberto Devereux thematises these issues – a reflection, in part, of the nineteenth century's growing anxieties over public self-expression. Engaging with contemporary 1830s criticism, this article focuses on two numbers in the work that were identified as problematic by early audiences, arguing that their perceived failure is a consequence of the work's inventive depiction of its characters' vacant subjectivities. Donizetti's opera can be seen to stretch primo Ottocento operatic conventions to their limits, in the process undoing the traditional correspondence between interior expression and self-definition.

I have a picture by Mondrian in front of me. It is made of up of a wide range of different, discrete rectangular shapes. The paint has been applied precisely. The colors are varied and striking and contribute to the overall impression of exactness in the detail and variety in the general. There are no people in the picture. It reminds me of a Handel opera. More or less any Handel opera.

Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is a film that not only represents a performance of Mozart's opera but also reflects on the experience it generates in the theatrical audience. The opera becomes the means through which Bergman explores the magic of theatrical illusion by displaying the artifice behind it. I examine the film's take on the representation of theatrical illusion from two perspectives. First, with reference to the famous sequence of the overture, I demonstrate the crucial role of the audience's imaginative engagement. Second, I zero in on Bergman's role as omniscient director who not only uncovers the artificiality of the theatrical source but also plays tricks with the film audience. Yet our observing the ‘constructed naturalness’ of the magic flute and Papageno or the theatricality of the Queen of the Night's performance does not hinder the film's ability to engage us. Rather, witnessing the workings of illusion strengthens its grip on us.

The operas of Per Nørgård (b. 1932) embody a search for hidden wisdom and spiritual transcendence characteristic of artists who came to maturity during the 1960s. Gilgamesh (1972) and Nuit des hommes (1996) can be perceived as mirror images that embody visions of universal harmony and discord, and of spiritual wholeness and disintegration. This article analyses Nørgård's use of mythic paradigms and Jungian archetypes to structure the operas. It also examines Nørgård's use of dialectical polarities, including creation and death, the human and the divine, and self and others. In particular, it discusses two concepts derived from the work of Joseph Campbell, the ‘hero's journey’ and the ‘cosmogonic cycle’, linking them to Jung's theory of individuation. While Gilgamesh embodies a successful realisation of the hero's journey, the characters in Nuit des hommes become directionless wayfarers in a hostile world.

This book has been in my bag for a long time and, on reflection, I am glad that I have read it gradually. When the central premise is so simple – Grand Opera Outside Paris is, indeed, about Grand Opera outside Paris – the payback comes in the detail of individual chapters and the slow emergence of a Europe-wide survey of encounter and exchange. The volume's editor, Jens Hesselager, provides an erudite and generous introduction, beginning with the familiar difficulty of defining grand opera and the importance of attending to specific performance contexts. In the first instances, of course, this meant the Paris Opéra, and Hesselager draws our attention to Sarah Hibberd's observation that the coherence of the genre was initially established ‘more through the licensing requirements of [this] institution than by [any] specific dramatic content’ (1). From here, the introduction gently encourages us to look outward.

[Liszt] was not only a musical genius, but could probably have achieved the heights in another profession too. When a diplomat at the Berlin court once asked him, ‘What would become of you if you suddenly lost your hands?’ he replied composedly: I could still be the world's greatest diplomat’.

A mythical giant, a Malagasy slave, a song, an accomplished baritone, an outraged critic; these seemingly incompatible figures are bound together in the Paris premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'Africaine in 1865. They are the fundamental elements of my story of the opera's third act, a narrative web binding together early modern nautical history, epic poetry, grand-opera dramaturgy, and the nineteenth-century politics of operatic performance and listening in an exploration of how the opera's rather fictionalised account of Vasco da Gama's first sea voyage to India five centuries ago bears witness to the strength of the historicist project in grand opera.

Leonardo Vinci's Li zite 'n galera (The Newlyweds on the Galley) has been afforded a moderate degree of attention by musicologists because it is the first Neapolitan commedia per musica to survive with music almost completely intact. It is also Vinci's first extant opera, and has thus been considered in terms of the light it sheds on the style of his later drammi per musica for which he is better known today.

Stories, whether true or calculatedly false, have played at best an ancillary role in the evolution of Berio's approach to musical theatre. Indeed, to find a straightforward example of story-telling in his output, one would have to go back some twenty years from La vera storia to his previous collaboration with Italo Calvino, Allez Hop (1959), an ironic parable narrated in mime. But as soon as subsequent commissions offered Berio the resources of the human voice, he turned away from the seductions of a central narrative core, and instead built his vision of the potential of musical theatre around a more allusive and multi-layered conception. Narratives are still skeletally present – for instance, in Passaggio (1962), which employs the barest outlines of a scenario, spelt out explicidy only at the end, as a frame on which to hang a complex web of poetic and theatrical imagery, or indeed Opera (1970), with its intertwining myths of the ancient and modern worlds evoked through concentrated imagery, but not acted out. But the narrative twists and turns that are the chief pleasure of the story-teller – and the chief impetus behind the lyric outbursts of the operatic tradition – were no longer his concern.

This article examines the new finale by Luciano Berio for Puccini's Turandot, commissioned by the Festival de Musica de Gran Canarias and prèmiered in 2002. This finale constitutes a priviledged point of view from which to revisit not only the composer's life-long engagement with musical works of the past, but also his theatrical aesthetics, thrown into sharp relief by the particular challenges of this endeavour. Berio's compositional process is carefully reconstructed, from his interventions on the libretto to his respectful yet creative use of the numerous sketches left behind by Puccini. Particular attention is then paid to Berio's choice of reminiscences from earlier scenes of the opera, as well as to his citations from Wagner's Tristan, Mahler's Seventh Symphony and Schönberg's Gurrelieder. A separate section is devoted to Berio's most original contribution: a long orchestral interlude at the moment when Calaf kisses Turandot. The article concludes with a detailed scrutiny of Berio's orchestration.

Although widely perceived as untraditional and unpatriotic, Sondheim’s 1991 Assassins is neither; it is in fact based securely on themes and strategies developed within the mainstream tradition of the American musical. In both respects, it shows particular affinity to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, a relationship that becomes especially evident when considering the latter’s basis in Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs. The author examines related background, dialogue and individual songs from each musical, the latter including ‘Pore Jud’, ‘Lonely Room’ and ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ from Oklahoma!, and ‘Everybody’s Got the Right’, ‘The Ballad of Booth’, ‘Gun Song’, ‘Unworthy of Your Love’, ‘Another National Anthem’ and the book depository scene from Assassins. Yet Assassins departs from the mainstream in one important respect: by failing to foreground adequately a sympathetic viewpoint (despite the addition of ‘Something Just Broke’), the show seems to place its dominant characters in opposition to the audience, who represent its real protagonist, the American people.