The hugely discrepant valuations of the alterities of opera and racial slavery – differing additionally between the period under consideration and our own – would seem to preclude their being addressed in the same article. The former has been lauded as the ne plus ultra of human artistic expression. The latter was embraced as an essential economic driver, and morally, spiritually and legally sanctioned by the finest Anglo philosophical, religious and legal minds of the time. That the enslaved decried and rejected their capture and enforced labour – through suicide, rebellion, flight, sabotage and cultural separation – has long been clear. The use of the profits, obtained through the sale of commodities that slave labour produced, to fund musical activities, including opera, has remained hidden. By using the published lists of subscribers (issued as books and fans) for the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, and combining that information with what can gleaned from demographic, genealogical and slavery sources, the extent to which the opera was dependent upon families whose wealth lay in plantation ownership or other forms of profit allied to it is established. The proportion is higher than might be supposed. Three families – Lewis, Young and the Heywood sisters – are spotlighted in case studies of box subscribers.

This article examines Sebastián Durón’s opera La guerra de los gigantes (c. 1701–3) in the context of the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) and Philip V’s reign (1701–46), as well as the development of opera in Madrid. It presents three main arguments. First, I argue that the character of Minerva in this opera was intended to symbolise Maria Luisa Gabriela of Savoy (1688–1714), the bride and future queen consort of Spain. The aristocrat who commissioned La guerra de los gigantes sought to portray Maria Luisa not only as an ideal wife and woman but also as a powerful military and political ally to King Philip V during the war. Second, I propose that La guerra de los gigantes is part of a broader ‘theatre of loyalty’ that emerged during the early years of Philip V’s reign and the War of the Spanish Succession. This type of theatre allowed Spanish noblemen, particularly the grandees, to express their allegiance to their new king, gain his favour, and enhance or solidify their power. Finally, I suggest that La guerra de los gigantes represents one of several attempts by the Spanish high nobility to develop the genre of opera in Madrid, at a time when partly sung musical dramas such as the zarzuela were the dominant theatrical forms.

In March 1830, travelling troupe director Henri Delorme staged the local premiere of Daniel Auber’s grand opéra La muette de Portici in the northern French town of Valenciennes. The production marks a turning point in the circulation of operatic repertoire across France, kickstarting a thriving but as yet unacknowledged phenomenon of touring grand opéra that persisted into the 1860s and beyond. In this article, I reconstruct the artistic and working practices of this phenomenon, and demonstrate how the arrival of the genre in the northern touring circuit allowed local individuals, such as the director, theatre-goers and local critics, to voice their expectations – in musical, dramatic and staging terms – of the appropriate artistic parameters for the emerging genre when seen from a provincial perspective. I suggest that grand opéra’s adjusted scale, status and performance practices on tour had the potential to reconfigure the genre’s meaning for nineteenth-century French audiences and theatrical performers as local agents negotiated shifting sets of centre–periphery dynamics, at once seeking operatic imitation of the capital and rejecting it in favour of locally defined practices and values.

In this article, I consider the 2012–13 productions of The Magic Flute in Lagos, Nigeria, by the Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON), as a means of rethinking broad conceptions of opera performance in postcolonial Africa. I explore the extent to which visual representation in this production creates cultural contact, exchange and hybridity, affording a pathway for experiencing opera from both Western and African perspectives without homogenisation or a clash of differences. Arguing against notions of race that pit Africa against the West, this study privileges Achille Mbembe’s writings on Afropolitanism as a framework for examining the multiple modes of meaning and identity created through this production. By scrutinising the textuality of visual elements and conceiving them as sites of localised ideological or identity struggles, I argue specifically that opera in Nigeria requires a critical framework that moves beyond notions of ‘whiteness’ and indigenisation. I will show that this staging invokes indigenous knowledge from Nigerian traditional religious and socio-cultural conceptions. In other words, mixed codes of visual elements operate as cultural signifiers that perpetuate an Afropolitan identity through which audiences interact with this art form.

Since the establishment of permanent public theatres in Brazil – known as opera houses from at least 1746 – the presence of Black and biracial artists was predominant. Enslaved individuals also participated in music, performing in orchestras and opera companies, though primarily within private contexts. During the same period, public opera houses employed singer-actors on a permanent basis. These positions were scarce and particularly significant for women, who often lacked financial independence in the Luso-Brazilian world. Many of these artists pursued parallel occupations, including tailoring, seamstressing, lacemaking and, in some cases, prostitution. Although biracial performers were required to conceal their faces with white make-up, they were nonetheless contracted for entire seasons under agreements that afforded a degree of social security, including provisions for illness. Contemporary records also document theatrical artists who succeeded in acquiring considerable wealth, enabling them to own property and, in some cases, enslaved persons. This paper examines the conditions of the first professional actors and actresses employed in eighteenth-century Brazilian opera houses, drawing on archival sources and foreign travellers’ accounts to contextualise their social, ethnic and educational backgrounds within a society profoundly shaped by slavery and racial prejudice.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s early opera Oprichnik is overdue for rediscovery as one of the composer’s most overt forays into the queer themes that critics and scholars have long appreciated in his mature works. Oprichnik features the composer’s most extensive and provocative employment of travesti in its depiction of a historical figure mostly remembered for his rumoured sexual relationship with tsar Ivan IV. This paper takes a detailed look into this and other queer features of the opera within their cultural, historical and biographical contexts. These contexts, including the development of trouser roles in Russian opera, transformations in public discourse on sexuality and gender, and Tchaikovsky’s relationship with his pupil Vladimir Shilovsky, help bring into focus the special appeal the sixteenth-century Muscovy of Ivan the Terrible and his oprichniki had as a topos for a Russian artist experimenting in the artistic depiction of sexual and gender variance.

Geopolitical tensions escalated between the USSR and the Republic of China over control of the Chinese Eastern Railway during the late 1920s, resulting in a brief war in which several thousand people were killed. Given the violence in Manchuria in the months preceding direct military engagement, it is surprising that Soviet authorities sent an opera tour to the zone of conflict. This article examines the two seasons spent by visiting Soviet opera vocalists at the Railway Assembly Hall (Zhelsob) from September 1927 to February 1929, attending to the staging, reception and political goals of the tour. I argue that the opera stage in the city of Harbin transformed into a temporary zone of informal extraterritoriality, where unpredictable collaborations transpired between ideological enemies on either side of the military clash. The Soviet opera tour to Manchuria prompts us to reconsider the agency and intentionality of musicians in armed conflict.

Recent scholarship at the crossroads of opera and Habsburg studies has emphasised the centrality of Italian opera within the political agenda of the Congress era (1814–22). It was a particularly effective means to project prestige, cosmopolitanism and belonging within a new geopolitical order, as the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia was integrated under the Habsburg Crown. While much attention has been given to performances of Italian opera at the Viennese court theatres, the role of suburban venues has so far been largely neglected. This article aims to demonstrate the ‘weight’ that the so-called ‘light’ genres carried within the cultural life of the capital and across the Habsburg lands. Two parodies written by Adolf Bäuerle for the Theater in der Leopoldstadt in Vienna – Tankredi (1817, music by Wenzel Müller) and Die falsche Prima Donna in Krähwinkel (1818, music by Ignaz Schuster) – serve as case studies for a discussion of the fluidity of genres, operatic voices and audiences, and the role of such singers as Gentile Borgondio, Angelica Catalani and Ignaz Schuster as ‘aural ambassadors’ of the Habsburg cultural project.

Ever since the beginning of opera, the scenografo’s role has fluctuated between invention and execution, conceptual creation and manual realisation. Initially considered an art in the old, Latin sense of the word – a craft or trade – the profession gradually gained social and aesthetic respectability, shedding its associations with the technical skills of artisans and acquiring the prestige of modern artistic expression. By the early 1800s, prominent scenografi were hailed as ‘men of genius’, although their ennoblement was never quite as complete as some renowned commentators seemed to suggest. Indeed, while we may be tempted to view the scenografo’s transformation from craftsman to artist as an uninterrupted, linear development, the debates on operatic staging that accompanied the 1930s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino challenge this inclination.

This article examines the role and status of operatic scenografi in 1930s Italy, with a particular focus on Florence and the intersection between cultural and institutional histories of the profession. What was Italian operatic set design at the time? What did this theatrical art mean, represent, produce in Tuscany’s foremost Renaissance city? Is it possible to develop a specifically urban approach to the history of set design before World War II, and where might this leave our understanding of opera production labour both during the Fascist period and today?

In 1988, during the abolition centennial in Brazil, Verdi’s Aida and Carlos Gomes’s Lo schiavo were perceived and pitched as abolitionist operas thanks to events that unfolded at their stagings one hundred years earlier in Rio de Janeiro. Both operas stirred controversy by being recreated in productions intended to correct historical inaccuracies and unjust erasures, primarily in the context of African slavery, but with unexpected cultural and political repercussions. This article examines connections between operatic performances and social activism, discussing the role of opera singers in promoting an aesthetic of sensibility within the abolitionist movement of the 1880s, but also considering how the most controversial aspects of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement resonate with issues debated in the 1988 productions.

Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (1958) was arguably the first community opera with an environmental message. It explored the potential extinction of animal and human life, and since then environmentalism as a social issue has begun to emerge in community operas as a distinctive trope. This article examines some more recent examples produced in the UK, from The Split Goose Feather (1979) by Christopher Brown, to Timber! (1990) by Timothy Kraemer, to Russell Hepplewhite’s Till the Summer Comes Again (2012) inspired by Glyndebourne’s wind turbine. It concludes with some reflections on the questions that arise in relation to contemporary opera, the environment and sustainability – notably how the professional operatic world can respond to concerns about the environment, and what steps are necessary to ensure the sustainability of opera for the future.

This article examines the evolution of Soviet operatic conventions during Khrushchev’s Thaw. The first opera to be prematurely cancelled from the Bolshoi Theatre since Stalin was Rodion Shchedrin’s 1961 opera Not Love Alone, and as such, it set the standard for what would be deemed unacceptable in Thaw-era opera. Using this opera as a case study, I employ extensive archival material, including never-before-accessed audience surveys and internal Bolshoi Theatre meeting minutes, to analyse the opera’s path to official acceptance – and then official rejection. I thus illuminate the competing demands that composers, Party bureaucrats, and audiences expected of the Soviet opera project, and the convergences and divergences with the Stalin-era. Finally, I demonstrate why the project of creating a robust repertoire of contemporary-themed Soviet opera failed during the Thaw, never to be revived with such fervour, and demonstrate why Shchedrin’s opera was the attempt closest to achieving enduring success.

Recently, over the course of a month in Taipei, I took in twenty-five opera performances, each opening a window onto the vast and varied world of Chinese opera.1 The performances were drawn from different genres: Peking opera (both canonical repertoire and new works), Taiwanese opera (kua-á-hì, or gezaixi), Hakka opera, Beiguan opera, Kunqu opera, Yu opera (Henan opera) and glove puppet opera (pòo-tē-hì). Although I was well aware of Taiwan’s vibrant operatic and theatrical scene – indeed, it was the very reason I pursued this residency – I was nonetheless surprised by the volume, variety and vitality of the performances I experienced. My visit coincided with one of the peak periods in the ritual calendar (the third lunar month), during which one could easily choose from more than ten outdoor opera performances each day, held at various temples throughout the greater Taipei area. In addition, meticulously crafted and lavishly mounted productions were featured at formal venues such as the Taiwan Traditional Theatre Center and Dadaocheng Theater. The performing culture of Chinese opera in Taiwan nowadays remains vibrant, imaginative, colourful and remarkably robust.

The story of opera in what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire tends to be particularly convoluted, given the complexity of the region’s history and its political twists and turns. It is perhaps not a stretch to say that nowhere else in Europe had the same level of interest in opera and art music combined with the remarkable mutability of borders, governments and nationalist allegiances across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; indeed, as the three books discussed here show in great detail, opera was a key reason for, and indicator of, the social and political ferment of Habsburg Central Europe. Ranging across a chronological scope that stretches from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, each book explores operatic life in one of three important regional capitals: Vienna, Prague and Budapest, with occasional departures to other places like Brno/Brünn, Sarajevo and Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg. Each volume focuses on the work of a single canonic composer: Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), though in the final case calling the works discussed Offenbach’s is tenuous at best. Finally, each book uses the lens of reception history, exploring the context for operatic creation and performance, and how the meanings of the various operas examined here – Die Frau ohne Schatten (1917), Don Giovanni (1787), Orphée aux enfers (1858) and others – changed according to the shifts in various political, cultural and social environments over time.