‘From Nino and Semiramide, rulers of Assyria, was born a son who carried the name of his father, and so resembled his mother that the people could distinguish them only by means of masculine and feminine clothing.’ Thus begins the argo-mento to the libretto La Semiramide, produced in Venice at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo for the 1670–71 season. The gender ambiguity described in the argomento is evident in the portrait of Semiramide from the frontispiece of that libretto (see Fig. 1). She sits alone at her dressing table, adorning her hair with roses in anticipation of her lover's arrival. She admires herself in the mirror, eternal symbol of female vanity. Her bare breasts and navel contrast strikingly with the metal shield that girds her chest. A high-topped military sandal is displayed prominently beneath the folds of her skirt. Prior to assuming the male disguise that she will wear for much of the opera, Semiramide is already pictured in a manner that is warlike and sexually dangerous, challenging and seductive. This mixture of male and female attributes is critical to her new guise as a Venetian heroine.

‘First performed in 1840 and praised by Liszt for its orchestration and workman-ship, the score does not deny Meyerbeerian influence. The present recording, which sounds as if it has been taken from a live performance in the theatre, has a first-class cast and is altogether fascinating.’ The object of this encomium is La vestale by the Italian composer Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870), the first commercial recording of which was issued on CD in 1989. The quotation, taken from a leading record magazine, seems representative of the response that recordings of Mercadante's works can currently expect: scarcely a single review fails to mention Meyerbeer's positive influence on Mercadante. But how far is one in fact justified in linking these two composers?

Among the more remarkable events of recent intellectual history is that Edward Said, famous avant-garde literary critic, passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, has begun to write about music. Moreover, not just about any kind of music, but about classical music in the élite (and canonical) European tradition – the symphonies of Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the chamber music of Schubert and Brahms. Several years ago Said took over the music column in The Nation magazine, and more recently he has published a book, Musical Elaborations, based on a series of invited lectures at the University of California at Irvine.

In 1903, Otto Weininger, twenty-three, Viennese, Jewish, and an imminent suicide, published his misogynist manifesto Sex and Character and created an international sensation. ‘One began’, reported a contemporary, ‘to hear in the men's clubs of England and in the cafés of France and Germany – one began to hear singular mutterings among men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared.’ Weininger's new gospel tied the spiritual progress of the human race to the repudiation of its female half. Women, said Weininger, are purely material beings, mindless, sensuous, animalistic and amoral; lacking individuality, they act only at the behest of a ‘universalised, generalised, impersonal’ sexual instinct. For humanity to achieve its spiritual destiny, men – particularly ‘Aryan’ men, who had not suffered a racial degeneracy that made the task impossible – must achieve the individualistic supremacy first revealed by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In order to do this, they must both rid themselves of the femininity within them and reject their sexual desires for the women around them.

At the end of the last century opera started to shed elements of its many-sided and hybrid character. Of course there are numerous exceptions, but in general the genre becomes tighter, the expansive five-act form that triumphed at Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century is rejected and several elements, such as the ballet, dismissed as distractions. Musical structures, influenced – among other things – by Wagner's leitmotif system, become denser and even large scores exhibit an exceptional thematic homogeneity. Most striking, all those bandits, pirates, gods and gypsies make way for more conventional figures in mundane urban and rural settings. The fantastic is displaced by the domestic – or, if the old stage-figures survive, they do so, as I will suggest below, in an altered and diluted form that makes them proper subjects for ‘play’.