During the Paris Commune of 1871, four spectacular concerts took place at the Tuileries Palace. Although the musical genre most often associated with the Communards is popular song, these Tuileries concerts primarily featured instrumental works and operatic numbers. Indeed, during much of their short reign the Communards sought to nurture elite music, in particular through attempts to control the Paris Opéra and its repertory. This article treats the Tuileries concerts as a starting point for understanding the Commune's brief direction of the Opéra, exploring ways in which the movement's attitude towards elite music at both venues engaged with a number of its central preoccupations. It suggests that Communards, often depicted as merely destructive, were anxious to rehabilitate their reputation and legitimise their status through the appropriation of high culture.

In his final years, Berlioz's name became entangled in debates around Wagnerian ‘music of the future’; but Berlioz was also engaged with conceptions of the future in a much more literal sense throughout his life. An examination of texts such as Euphonia which treat futuristic settings helps us to identify three main technological tropes by which the future is characterised in Berlioz's writings: the industrialisation of space and time; the discourse of gender; and fears around agency. Applying these tropes to the contemporaneous La damnation de Faust enables a new reading of genre in Berlioz's ‘légende dramatique’, which is revealed to dramatise the dialectic of technology and gender on a meta-diegetic level. Performances of La damnation de Faust that stage it as opera or as Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk may blind us to the innovative aspects of the work, for these aspects are most visible when it is the orchestral ‘machine’ that is placed literally centre stage. This new reading of La damnation de Faust through the lens of Euphonia helps us to resituate Berlioz as a musician of the future in a manner that provides an alternative to the more familiar Wagnerian aesthetics.

This essay frames Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die tote Stadt (1920) as a mise-en-abyme narrative containing four nested realms of diegesis: (1) the opera's ‘real’ world, (2) a prolonged dream sequence, (3) a dance troupe's rehearsal of an opera within that dream, and (4) an expressly requested baritone song performed by a ‘Pierrot’ character in the midst of that dreamt rehearsal. I conceptualise the opera's dense meta-theatrics as a reflexive celebration (and also a didactic warning against the escapist pleasures) of sung spectacle. Excerpts from my interviews with Inga Levant – director of the 2001 Strasbourg production of Die tote Stadt – are used to supplement my broader examination of the ways in which Korngold's reputation as a ‘problemless’ and ‘apolitical’ child prodigy has impacted critical, dramaturgical and hermeneutical orientations towards this opera since its earliest post-war performances.

During March 1588, Maria d'Aragona, the Marchesa of Vasto, sponsored a set of four intermedi at her palazzo in Chiaia, Naples. The centrepiece of the entertainment was the intermedio entitled ‘Queen Cleopatra on her Ship’. This article explores d'Aragona's role as sponsor of the entertainment, particularly in relation to her interest in the historical figure of Cleopatra. Drawing on sources that informed perceptions of the Egyptian queen during the early- to mid-Cinquecento, it will be shown that within a performance context governed by a strong-willed female patron, the often negatively depicted Cleopatra could be cast as a positive role model, particularly for d'Aragona-related noblewomen who themselves had experienced strong female mentorship and enjoyed the relative autonomy of widowhood. D'Aragona's decision to cast the Neapolitan virtuosa Eufemia Jozola as Cleopatra reinforced the female-orientated nature of the intermedio, and sheds new light on mid-Cinquecento Neapolitan performance practice.

The 1859 revival of Gluck's Orphée, reworked for the occasion by Berlioz, was one of a series of operatic résurrections staged at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris during the Second Empire. Starring Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) in the title role, it was the first major revival of Gluck's opera since the 1820s and attracted considerable attention in the press and elsewhere. Critics and others were fascinated by Viardot's dramatic presence on stage, producing images (both in pictures and words) of her Orpheus that are often striking in their awareness of time past. Indeed, ambivalence about the past and its artefacts might be said to haunt the reception of a work – and performer – many designated as the epitome of the classique. Contextualising this Orphée within the changing meanings of the term classique in the mid-nineteenth century, the article focuses on a particularly revealing moment in the transition between an operatic culture based on new works and one ever more reliant on revivals of acknowledged masterpieces.

With a diverse and colourful cast of animals, birds, insects and human villagers, Příhody lišky Bystroušky (known in English as The Cunning Little Vixen), is one of Leoš Janáček's most popular, if peculiar, operas. Though nowadays Bystrouška is typically characterised as a charming portrayal of the continuous renewal of life in nature, this idea emerged only gradually from a tangle of competing and occasionally contradictory views in which, however, the complexity of the moral laws by which the opera's inhabitants live was frequently central. By tracing the history of the opera's stagings in the Czech Republic; drawing out themes that developed in the journalistic and critical discourse around those performances; and reading the opera's music and stage action closely, this article argues that the amoral codes of Bystrouška's world not only inhere in the story, its text, and even, perhaps, in the idea of nature's cycle of life itself, but that at certain times in the opera they are also given expression through particular correlations and disjunctions between the opera's music and the physical actions and gestures of the singers on stage.

Through investigating the production and reception of Death in Venice (1973), this essay considers the ways Britten and his audiences responded to the fraught discourse surrounding opera in the twentieth century. If the genre as a whole often threatened to fall on the wrong side of contemporaneous aesthetic oppositions – between abstraction and immediacy, the intellectual and the visceral, the high and the low – early critics of this particular work tended to translate its visual spectacles and musical rhetoric into more rarefied terms. Taking my cue from elements of contradiction and ambivalence in this sublimating criticism, I will examine how Britten's opera resists the very suppressions it promotes. I will suggest that, in simultaneously staging and confounding oppositions at the heart of contemporary operatic discourse, Death in Venice offers a powerful case study of the way composers, directors, critics and audiences responded to and overcame the terminal illness with which opera had been diagnosed in the middle third of the twentieth century.

The French legislation of 6 January 1864 which deregulated spoken and lyric theatre nationwide showed little sensitivity to the distinctive financial ecology of regional theatre. Its effects were precisely the opposite of those its architects intended, and caused most disruption to the very constituencies the legislation was intended to help. Comparative analysis of the immediate aftermath of this ‘liberté des théâtres’ reveals a state of near chaos across France. Town councils oscillated between abandoning to the market their traditions of theatre as artistic social service, and pouring in yet more taxpayers' money just to maintain the status quo. Opera, as the most expensive art form, was the immediate casualty, ceding considerable ground to a vigorous entertainment sector based around the operetta repertory (including opéra-bouffe) and the café-concert chanson.

Once Wagner's most popular opera, Lohengrin has suffered scholarly neglect in the post-war period. This essay re-engages with the work from the novel perspective of game theory analysis. Centring on Elsa's breach of the Frageverbot, it offers a close epistemological study of the opera's main characters. As an alternative to traditional interpretations of the heroine's fatal decision, we propose a complex and psychologically more compelling account. Elsa asks the forbidden question because she needs to confirm Lohengrin's belief in her innocence, a belief that Ortrud successfully erodes in Act II. This interpretation reveals Elsa as a rational individual, upgrades the dramatic significance of the Act I combat scene, and, more broadly, signals a return to a hermeneutics of Wagnerian drama.

Catherine Tofts, ‘the first English prima donna’, was the female lead in the all-sung operas in the Italian style performed on the London stage from1705, but little has previously been known about her early life or musical training. This article draws on various sources, including her father's will, a petition she wrote in 1704 and Delarivier Manley's Memoirs of Europe to show that her family background was Scottish and that she grew up in the household of Bishop Gilbert Burnet. It names possible singing teachers and lovers, and shows that she did not leave the stage in 1709 because of mental instability, as has been assumed, but because of debt and the consequent need to escape from her creditors. The end of her career shows the difficulties faced by a leading English singer when Italians, particularly the castrati, came to dominate the operatic scene in London.