As the historian (and contributor to this volume) Michael Steinberg has astutely noted with specific reference to the Catholic “Baroque” world, “the theater represents the world, but more than that it reflects the authority to represent and thus to order the world.” This observation, of course, is just as valid in other cases in which power employs the theatre, and in particular opera, to represent either the authority and social order that sustains it or that which it aspires eventually to ensconce. Theatre, however, and particularly opera, is neither transparent in its agenda nor entirely instrumental: it is a form of representation – “unique and irreducible, and in a constant, complex dialogue with the world of discourse that surrounds it.”

We must, then, be aware of what Louis Marin has described (with reference to painting) as “the gap between the visible – what is shown, figured, represented, staged – and the legible – what can be said, enunciated, declared.” Each mode of communication, including those of the arts, embodies a different “register” of representation, and although they “intersect, connect, and respond to one another” they never merge, which makes opera a uniquely complex enunciation.

Several of the chapters in this section concern attempts to use this inherently semiotically unstable genre to implement a world of symbolic domination – both social and political – and the distinctive articulation that results.