Mozart's ability to craft music closely suited to his singers took a remarkable turn with the soprano Adriana Ferrarese del Bene. This singer's career, from sporadic prominence in serious opera to notoriety as a prima donna in Viennese opera buffa in the late 1780s, was capped by her association with Mozart and Da Ponte in Così fan tutte (1790). Certain reports notwithstanding, Ferrarese seems to have been far from a great artist; her successes were modest and she never before or after attained the artistic triumph she achieved in the Mozart–Da Ponte opera. Reviews and contemporary comments suggest that her comic and dramatic skills were uneven, her vocal equipment impressive but incomplete and her performances less than inspiring. Mozart's achievement was to transform a particular set of vocal skills and limitations into something of exceptional artistic value; Fiordiligi was fashioned out of the temperament, vocal style and dramatic abilities – and limitations – of his soprano.

An assumption widespread in twentieth-century analyses of Mozart's operas is that ‘high-level tonal planning’ – that is, a network of relationships among the tonic keys of separate numbers of an opera – contributes significantly to structure and meaning. A relatively recent example can be found in writings by Daniel Heartz and Tim Carter on Act I of Le nozze di Figaro, which concludes in C major with Figaro's aria ‘Non più andrai’.

Paisiello's Nina ‘is sentimental comedy at its worst…. Its sentimentality is to modern ears perfectly unbearable, and we cannot understand how the whole of Europe was reduced to tears by these infantile melodies.’ Edward Dent's opinion might well be shared, though perhaps less frankly expressed, by more than one musicologist of following generations. Yet the fact remains that eighteenth-century Europe was indeed reduced to tears by operas on the story of Nina: an attempt to ‘thicken’ our understanding of that cultural phenomenon is the aim of the present essay. In its first part – focusing on Marsollier's and Dalayrac's Nina, the source for Paisiello's opera – I try to reconstruct a web of relationships between the practices of psychiatry emerging in the late eighteenth century and the theatrical and aesthetic cultures of the time. In the second part, aspects of Paisiello's setting are read as a composer's effort to create an operatic language responsive to the culture of ‘sensibility’ shared by eighteenth-century humanists and physicians.

As anyone who has worked in the theatre will know, the journey from deciding to stage a work to its performance has two characteristics: the close interdependence of various artistic and organisational forces, and unpredictability. It should thus come as no surprise that a collection of documents concerning Felice Romani, a figure central to early nineteenth-century operatic life, presents an image both complex and constantly shifting; nor that in such sources the tasks of the librettist, even one of distinction, are always interwoven with those of other theatrical personalities: impresarios, singers and composers, administrators, executives, mediators, journalists, dancers, set-designers, craftsmen and factotums. This exploration of Romani and his trade seeks to describe these collaborations, while remaining sensitive to those fundamental aspects of nineteenth-century librettistic work that were their raison d'être. It will therefore be useful to proceed in two stages: first, to reflect on the nature and function of Romani's dramatic-poetic creations; then to provide synchronic sketches of his working relationships, dwelling on three of the most important – with theatrical institutions, with singers and with composers.

The several contradictory, and even apologetic, explanations that were put forward concerning the origins of Mozart's Così fan tutte, ossia La scola degli amanti in the years following its première in 1790 reflect both the dearth of hard information concerning the commission to Mozart, and the unease with which the post-Josephinian era greeted this most unsettling of comic operas. One of the composer's first biographers, Franz Xaver Nêmetschek, wrote:

In the year 1789 in the month of December Mozart wrote the Italian comic opera Cosi fan tutte, or ‘The School for Lovers’; people are universally amazed that this great genius could condescend to waste his heavenly sweet melodies on such a miserable and clumsy text. It was not in his power to refuse the commission, and the text was given expressly to him.

Il crociato in Egitto was the last in a series of Italian operas written by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1817 and 1824. Although his Emma di Resburgo and Margherita d'Anjou had been successful in Venice and Milan, it was Il crociato that put Meyerbeer in the first rank of internationally renowned composers of Italian opera. The work's contemporary popularity makes it an important element in the history of early nineteenth-century Italian opera, and the abundant source material that survives for the opera permits a reconstruction of its early history. Furthermore, the publication in facsimile of a copyist's score from the première at La Fenice and the recording of the work by Opera Rara have encouraged a modern revaluation.

It is well known that mounting large-scale productions at the Paris Opéra during the 1830s and 1840s was a highly collaborative effort. The nature of so-called ‘grand opera’ demanded that composer, librettist and stage designer work closely together for the sake of a creation larger than the sum of its parts. Above them loomed the directeur, who laboured to ensure that his creative team had the means to produce their æuvres both in materials and human resources, and to guarantee that the Opéra made a profit from the finished products. A fifth collaborator, the singer, is not often cited as such in the literature, but in many ways wielded the greatest power in the creation of Parisian operatic works. By the 1830s, European singers had achieved professional status, and a singing artist of high calibre could find the Opéra a perfect venue in which to flex muscle. During the Opera's ‘golden age’, a bourgeois public, tired of political upheaval and economic uncertainty, found escape in the new ‘romanticè fare of the Opéra, and elevated the singers who strode its boards to what today is called ‘star status’. The Opéra became a temple and its singers, adored gods and goddesses. A beloved singer could – and did – ensure an opera's success simply by appearing in it, or doom it to failure by refusing to appear. With such power a singer could easily hold a new opera for ransom, forcing the composer and librettist to revise, excise or otherwise alter the work to some self-serving end. To secure a place for their stage works at the Opéra and to guarantee a public triumph, therefore, it is not surprising that composers such as Donizetti, and especially Meyerbeer, the leading composer of French grand opera, composed or revised their operas for particular singers.

In little more than a year, between October 1892 and November 1893, the Italian operatic repertory acquired two ambitious and monumental works, similar in their choice of a national–historic subject and in their dramatic form: Alberto Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo and Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici. After a few revivals scattered over several decades, both disappeared from circulation, and recent productions have confirmed doubts about their stageworthiness, notwithstanding some convincing passages (particularly in Colombo) and the enormous investment of intellectual and historical reflection that had attended their birth. Ideological motivations determined the musico-dramatic structures of the two operas, and are closely related to the failure of their projects.

Few things are more comforting to those with a tendency to procrastination than the knowledge that the fault is hardly unique. Few examples of procrastination are as magnificently extended, or should offer more solace to an author who has missed a deadline, as the history of Liszt's Sardanapale. Not only is the protracted gestation of this ultimately abandoned opera fascinating in its own right, and central to our view of Liszt's early Weimar years; it also illustrates a familiar maxim that in music, as in other human activities, the amount of talk is often in inverse proportion to the action.

In the early part of this century Italian musical critics were bemoaning the decadence of the national lyric stage. No inspired figure had come forth to claim the mande of Verdi; new Italian opera was becoming artistically irrelevant. In an effort to reclaim a ‘lyric spirit’ from Wagnerian Germany, Gabriele D'Annunzio ‘rediscovered’ the early seventeenth century as the birthplace of opera. Specifically, he fashioned Monteverdi – ‘il divino Claudio’ – as visionary proto-lyricist, a nostalgic move seconded by many other Italian authors through the 1920s and 30s.

Benjamin Britten's television opera, Owen Wingrave, first broadcast on the BBC on 16 May 1971, is probably the least known of his sixteen operatic works. Based on an equally obscure tale of the same name by Henry James, it concerns the last scion of a military family who decides to abandon his calling and embrace pacifism. After fierce family opposition and disinheritance, Owen agrees to spend the night in a haunted room in the family mansion of Paramore – a room in which an ancestor was found dead ‘without a wound’ after accidentally killing his son while disciplining him. Several hours later, his body is discovered – dead, without a wound, like that of his forbear. Despite the compeffing nature of the story, Owen Wingrave has never found a secure place in the Britten canon, largely owing to a lingering dissatisfaction aroused by the ending. In what follows, I should like to explore this dissatisfaction and propose a context within which to approach the opera.

One of the final scenes of Farinelli, Il Castrato, dir. Gerard Corbiau (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994), shows a solar eclipse witnessed, eighteenth-century style, by members of the court of Philip V of Spain around 1740. Restless spectators squint through pieces of tinted glass prepared in the smoke of a small fire. It is a precious visual detail, a jot of history in this sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed film that offsets the melodrama to follow. Without warning, a wind, helped along by corny, time-lapse photography, ushers in a sea of Goya-like clouds. A murmur passes through the entourage; eerie blackness falls on the court.