In Opera and Drama Richard Wagner promised to abolish the opera chorus. Although the chorus's continued appearance in Wagner's later works seems to belie this pledge, this essay argues that Wagner symbolically made good on his promise in his treatment of the knights in Parsifal. For most of the drama, the knights serve as active, even demanding, participants. Yet as the work closes, the knights simply join the off-stage treble voices to reflect on the action. Their reverent spectatorship now parallels that of the intended audience of Bayreuth itself, the theatrical space that Parsifal– Wagner's Bühnenweihfestspiel– was written to consecrate. This dramaturgical transformation is matched by a musical one, in which the intense chromaticism marking much of the knights' earlier music is abandoned for a mediated yet insistent diatonicism far removed from the chromatic space of the principals. By eliminating the chorus from the active sphere of the drama, Wagner counteracted a Nietzschean ideal of communal authorship ‘from below’ that had previously dominated German theorising of the chorus.

Various commentators on Aida express disappointment that the music for the opera’s main characters is not more distinctive, i.e., does not make much use of the exotic styles that mark the work’s ceremonial scenes and ballets. Others argue that exotic style is mostly confined to female, hence powerless, characters. Much of this commentary draws on the same limited selection of data and observations: the exotic style of those few numbers, the opera’s plot, and the circumstances of the work’s commissioning (by the Khedive of Egypt).

The present study aims to broaden the discussion. Most unusually, it dwells on various aspects of words and music that are not in themselves ‘markers’ of exoticism or Orientalism but that nonetheless here manifestly announce traits of this or that character (or group) and thereby communicate indelible impressions of what Egyptians and Ethiopians supposedly ‘are like’ (or were like in an earlier era). For example, the music of the priests is mostly not, as commentators regularly claim, marked by imitative counterpoint; rather, it engages in several distinct archaicising tendencies, some of which characterise the priestly caste (and hence the Egyptian government) as rigid and menacing.

In addition, this study calls on such varied evidence (rarely if ever examined in this regard) as costume designs, directions in the disposizione scenica for the opera’s first Italian production, relevant remarks by Verdi and early commentators (including two Egyptians writing in 1901 and a late interview with Verdi about European imperialism), some early sound recordings, and Western fears/knowledge of the Wahhabist strain of Islam then expanding across the Middle East. While such a multifaceted exploration certainly cannot be definitive, it can point to new possibilities for exploration.

The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth equivocate between the demons of random malevolence and ordinary (if exceptionally nasty) old women; and both King James I, whose book on witchcraft may have influenced Shakespeare, and A. W. Schlegel, whose essay on Macbeth certainly influenced Verdi, also stress this ambiguity. In his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Verdi uses certain musical patterns associated with the witches; and like the witches, who sound sometimes tame and frivolous, sometimes like incarnations of supernatural evil, Lady Macbeth hovers insecurely between roles: she is a hybrid of ambitious wife and agent of hell.

During the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, Elizabethan culture was insistently invoked as a source of solidarity and renewal. Through the trope of ‘New Elizabethanism’ members of the press and public reimagined Britain's future on the foundations of a most productive period in its past. This article traces forms of ‘New Elizabethanism’ and other complex negotiations between modernity and the past in the music presented for the Coronation. Its central focus is the debate surrounding Britten's Gloriana, an opera based on the life of Elizabeth I, commissioned for the Coronation Gala by the Arts Council. The opera and the debate it inspired reveal both the stakes placed in the Elizabethan period and a marked anxiety about the status of the past in the remaking of the present – an anxiety that arguably plagued the Coronation as a whole.

Early twentieth-century Paris saw an embarrassment of half-naked women dancing with seven veils and papier-mâché heads: ‘Salomania’ had gripped the capital. By 1913 Salome was a regular feature on music hall show-bills, besides the balletic and operatic stage. This study focuses on three variations on Salome's notorious Dance of the Seven Veils, performed by Loie Fuller (1907), Ida Rubinstein (1909) and Maud Allan (from 1906) on music by Florent Schmitt, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss respectively. Such an investigation provides a peculiar line through the cultural and aesthetic determinants of early twentieth-century theatrical dance. In this context music takes on new narrative significance, offering ways of configuring the Dance above and beyond its mere visual surface.

Scholarly consensus denies a real connection between ancient tragedy and early opera because music historians have measured early operas against an idealised conception of Attic tragedy. However, the pioneers of opera were seeking to revive a Euripidean style of musical tragedy as it was performed in the ‘decadent’ theatres of the Hellenistic era. Euripides's tragedies established conventional relationships between musical expression and the representation of the passions. Baroque opera is seen as a strongly complex reading of a set of Euripidean tragedies that enjoyed favour in the Hellenistic era but fell from critical grace in the nineteenth century. These plays hold the key to opera's tragic pretensions; the esteem they long enjoyed should prompt us to reconsider the spirit of tragedy and the nature of catharsis.

Is The Death of Klinghoffer anti-Semitic? Performances of the opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September 1991 were at the epicentre of a controversy that continues to this day; the New York audience was – and remains – uniquely hostile to the work. A careful reception analysis shows that New York audiences reacted vehemently not so much to an ideological position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but to specific nuances in the satirical portrayal of American Jewish characters in one controversial scene later cut from the opera, a scene that must be read closely and in relation to specifically American-Jewish questions of ethnic humour, assimilation, identity and multiculturalism in the mass media. I understand the opera's negative reception in the larger context of the increasingly severe crises that beset American Jewish self-identity during the Reagan-Bush era. Ultimately the historical ability of Jews to assimilate through comedy, to ‘enter the American culture on the stage laughing’, in Leslie Fiedler's famous formulation, will have to be reconsidered. A close reading of contested moments from the opera shows librettist Alice Goodman and composer John Adams avoiding the romance of historical self-consciousness as they attempt to construct a powerful yet subtle defence of the ordinary and unassuming.

This article focuses on two cinematic versions of the ‘Madame Butterfly’ tale. Produced near the beginning of the sound era, the 1932 Madame Butterfly struggles to co-opt Puccini's opera and thereby create a fully cinematic Butterfly. My Geisha, created three decades later, aspires to subvert Orientalist representation by reflecting back upon Puccini's and Hollywood's Butterflies with hip sophistication. Both films work simultaneously with and against the Butterfly canon in intriguing ways and both are shaped by prevailing American perceptions of race and gender. In investigating the relationship between these films and Puccini's opera, I raise broader issues of comparative genre analysis, focusing particularly on exotic representation on stage and screen. Does film, in its bid to project exotic realism in both sound and image, succeed in surpassing the experience of staged Orientalist opera?

The final performances of castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti in London in the late 1820s constitute a particularly rich vantage point from which to explore why the castrato was eventually forced from the operatic stage. What does this historical moment have to say about shifts in vocal style and audience expectations? Why did the question of castration become so loaded under ‘Romantic’ conditions? This article constructs a speculative theoretical framework by bringing together recent insights in the history of vocal science, histories of gender and subjectivity, the history of listening and opera studies. Velluti's hostile reception in the London press is surveyed in detail, alongside a historically informed examination of his vocal manner. Evidence suggests that the castrato quickly became an unthinkable figure, falling from grace in the wake of embodied conceptions of vocality and ‘natural’ expression, newly dominant ideas that projected him beyond prevailing notions of human nature.