We publish here, by permission of Cornell University Press, two excerpts from Michel Poizat's L'Opéra, ou le cri de l'ange, a book that first appeared with the Parisian publisher A. M. Métailié in 1986. The extracts are taken from Arthur Denner's translation, which is due out with Cornell University Press in the spring of 1992 under the title The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Poizat's book is an ‘essay on the jouissance of the opera lover’ – an exploration of the experience of being an opera ‘fan’. It begins with interviews that the author conducted on the steps of the Paris Opéra in 1985. On the night before the première of Marek Janowski's production of Tristan und Isolde, Poizat spoke to some fans devoted enough to wait all night for a standing-room ticket, and asked them what motivated their dedication. In both our extracts, we hear more from these fans – Claude, an art history student, and Renaud, a twenty-one-year-old judo instructor.

The Pantheon Opera remains among the least known of the major theatrical ventures in eighteenth-century London. It came into being amidst the conspiracies that flourished after the King's Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Conceived as a kind of English Court Opera, the Pantheon was backed at enormous expense by the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury. It struggled through the 1790–91 season, accumulating ruinous debts, and then on 14 January 1792 it too burned to the ground, just four nights into its second season.

From time to time the question has been raised: ‘Is the character of Beckmesser an embodiment of Wagner's notorious anti-semitism?’ Theodor Adorno, who stated with reference to Beckmesser, Alberich and Mime that ‘all the rejects of Wagner's works are caricatures of Jews’, is frequently invoked, but the question is generally brushed aside, or answered summarily in the negative. Yet neither Adorno nor, to my knowledge, anyone else has examined the question in the depth it deserves. A fuller investigation of the evidence leads, I submit, to the conclusions that anti-semitism is woven into the ideological fabric of Die Meister-singer, and that the representation of Beckmesser incorporates unmistakable antisemitic characteristics. If this is indeed the case, then the implications for our understanding of the opera are profound.

Opera is rich in works that construct visions of the non-Western world and its inhabitants: Rameau's Les Indes galantes, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles, Verdi's Aida, Strauss's Salome, Puccini's Turandot. In these operas the representation of what recent critical theory calls ‘the Other’ is most clearly announced in the basic plot, in characters' names, and in costumes, sets and props. But to what extent do the libretto and the music also participate in this project?

The question easily lends itself to a narrower formulation: to what extent do these operas signal Otherness – Turkishness, Indianness, Chineseness and so on – through musical materials that depart from Western stylistic norms or even reflect specific musical practices of the region in question? Scholars and critics have repeatedly posed the problem in these terms, only to find themselves frustrated by three limitations: general stylistic aberrations are often applied indiscriminately by composers to vastly different geographical settings; borrowed tunes and the like tend to lose distinctive features by being uprooted and transplanted; and whole stretches of these operas are written in an entirely Western idiom.