This article looks at representations of masculinity in Italian operatic performance in the 1820s and 1830s, with a particular focus on the ways in which male characters were transformed through the practice of aria and scene substitutions. Upon his retirement in 1833, the tenor Nicola Tacchinardi chastised musico performers – women who sang male roles – for their unconvincing portrayal of operatic heroes. Rather than complain about their high-lying voices, he chose to criticise these women's feminine appearance and idiosyncratic stage behaviours as unmasculine. Tacchinardi's criteria for gender performance, then, sidestepped embodied vocality and centred on performer appearance and behaviour in specific narrative situations. My study explores how Tacchinardi and his contemporaries employed aria substitution in heroic roles as a means for plot substitution, forgoing arias of dramatic stasis for dynamic scenes that showcase decisive action and augmented narrative significance. In this pre-Duprez milieu, before the onset of predetermined physiology in operatic discourse, male singers across the 1820s achieved an explicitly masculine self-definition not through voice, but as masters of textual control. Aria substitutions in the operas La Sacerdotessa d'Irminsul, La donna del lago and Norma demonstrate how singers established the components of masculine-heroic conventions through sensitive consideration of dramaturgy. I stress that the singing voice before 1830 was under-assimilated as an index of gender, and that rethinking the history of the ‘rise of the tenor’ may be crucial to understanding the history of the vocalic body.

This article explores operatic costumes from a perspective of cultural exchange, with a focus on Giuseppe Sarti, first director of the permanent opera theatre in Copenhagen. Sarti's Danish audience had almost no prior exposure to opera and little understanding of Italian. After a disastrous first season, he took measures to realise more successful productions of Italian opera in a context of migration, notably by focusing on the costumes to bypass language differences. I argue here that the theatrical costumes commissioned by Sarti were crucial tools for transmitting and adapting the operatic genre to its new context, functioning as visual signifiers and as body technology. They represented the audience's first encounter with the character and conveyed crucial information about dramaturgy.

Musicologists have tended to assume that Berg's ‘translation’ of Büchner's play was an unproblematic affair and have felt free to set about uncovering how the music articulates the drama and the themes as if the meanings of play and opera were identical. In this article I listen to Wozzeck as a dialogue between Büchner's original fragment and Berg's operatic translation in a manner that acknowledges the differences between them. In particular I propose an alternative way of hearing nature in the opera that accords with Büchner's and Berg's own valorisation of the creative power of Life, rather than focusing on the political power of the idealist subject like many earlier appraisals of the opera. I first argue that, with Woyzeck, Büchner was opening up an exploratory space in which he asked his audience: ‘If the autonomous self-identical subject is indeed illusory, what is the mechanism through which social progress can take place?’ Second, I challenge the assumption that Berg managed to set the text in a neutral way, arguing that he imposed upon the fragments an alien set of aesthetic values and inadvertently dismantled the mechanism Büchner had designed to provoke audiences into thinking about volition and creativity. In the final two sections of the article, I argue that, despite the violence Berg did to Büchner's plan, the music in the opera's nature scenes can be heard to generate the philosophy of potential that Büchner was searching for in the original fragments.

In the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.

‘Spain is different’, the Spanish tourist board famously declared in the 1960s as part of its strategy to attract mass tourism to the country. The campaign played a key role in opening up Spain's economy during the later years of Franco's regime – the so-called apertura – following two decades of autarchic rule that had left the country geopolitically isolated. As the slogan suggested, however, exoticism was a key part of Spain's nation-branding. Ideas of Spanish difference were now marketed for their tourist appeal, with images of gypsies and flamenco joined by sizzling beaches and ice-cold sangria.