From 1748 onwards, the marvellous made a comeback in opera seria via the Königliches Opernhaus in Berlin. The striking resurgence of myth and magic in the predominantly historical operatic genre appears to bespeak a growing interest in Lullian tragédie en musique, which in turn can be associated with Frederick II's French orientation in literary and philosophical matters. But how did deities, sorcerers and Louis quatorzien imports chime with Frederick's notorious resistance to superstition and divinely ordained kingship? The juxtaposition of the relevant operas with theoretical writings from Friderician Prussia yields a multi-faceted, somewhat paradoxical answer, revealing that the marvellous, alongside nourishing a new type of operatic spectacle, served Frederick as a vehicle to impart his philosophical agenda to his state, a former centre of Pietism.

By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the typical Metastasian two-stanza aria text could be set to music in one of two ways: in the ternary form typical of the earlier da capo aria (stanzas 1–2–1) or in a binary one (stanzas 1–2–1–2). Why did Mozart choose one form over the other in Idomeneo (1781); what does this tell us about the role of his librettist, Giovanni Battista Varesco, both before and after the composer left Salzburg for Munich to finish composing the opera and to prepare its performance; and how might these issues enable some rational inquiry into questions of music and drama?

While the political impact of Italy's 1936 Ethiopian invasion has long been recognized, its cultural history has only recently come under scrutiny. This paper investigates one musical legacy of Mussolini's colonial project by means of a case study of Alfredo Casella's Il deserto tentato (The Attempted Desert, 1937). Performed on the first anniversary of the Empire's founding and dedicated to ‘Mussolini, fondatore dell'Impero’, the work depicts the arrival of a group of Italian airmen in Ethiopia and their welcome by the indigenous peoples. I set the text against contemporary propaganda such as speeches, visual imagery and popular song, exploring tropes central to fascist imperialist rhetoric: virility, civiltà and aeronautical prowess. The opera's integration of historical musical references into a modern musical setting not only represents the theme of endowing the Ethiopian people with a history, in this case embodied by the Italian musical past, but also exemplifies a contemporary desire to make the past present in everyday fascist life. The historiography of Casella's work, what is more, characterized by the same ‘missing debate’ as the broader discussion of Italian colonialism, raises questions about the effects of Italy's ‘memory wars’ on accounts of twentieth-century Italian music history.

This article presents a reading of Gian Francesco Busenello's and Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'incoronazione di Poppea in light of seventeenth-century theatrical practices. Reconstructing the doubling plan from the opera's premiere in 1643 on the basis of contemporary doubling practices and the correspondence of the Ferrarese music patron Marquess Cornelio Bentivoglio, the author argues, adducing circumstantial evidence, that Ottavia and Drusilla were conceived as a double role for the operatic quick-change artist Anna Renzi. While Renzi is known to have created Ottavia, this part is half the size of all other roles written for her, which invariably involve dramatic, emotional and musical variety to a much greater extent than does Monteverdi's tragic Empress. Renzi was admired for her command of both tragedy and comedy, and the essay develops the hypothesis of the double role as an intertextual interpenetration of the title heroines from the pseudo-Senecan tragedy Octavia and Girolamo Bargagli's sixteenth-century comedy La pellegrina.

This essay aims to find a unifying thread amid the eclectic works of Bruno Maderna, and also to situate his compositional philosophy in relation to his more famous colleagues of the Darmstadt Summer Courses. More than any of the other composers at Darmstadt, Maderna was committed to its ‘project’ and to the values it placed on musical discourse, in spite of the fact that he seemed to abstain from its often-heated polemics. In contrast to many of his colleagues, Maderna was not one to speak at length about his compositions, preferring to express himself through his music. However, one work – his 1969 radio documentary, Ritratto di Erasmo – makes a poignant statement both about his music and the post-war generation as a whole. By championing Erasmus's equivocation, the work reveals something of Maderna's relationship to the arguments at Darmstadt. Just as Erasmus was situated between Luther and the Catholic Church, Maderna seemed to sit silently in the middle, while the more ideologically inclined composers swarmed at the periphery.

Two King's Bench lawsuits in The National Archives of the UK contain new information about the activities of castrati working in mid-eighteenth-century London. Monticelli v. Sackville (1748) confirms Horace Walpole's testimony that singers employed by the Earl of Middlesex's opera company received enormous salaries. Manfredini v. Geminiani (1751) preserves details of a contract of employment between singer and impresario that went disastrously wrong for both parties. An account of the London careers of the main protagonists is supplied to contextualise the new information.

Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow, 1917) was conceived as Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's ‘chief joint work’, and its central message has been read as an allegory of artistic collaboration and social engagement. This article calls upon Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory to enrich such an interpretation and unravel the opera's positive conclusion as an inadequate cure for the artistic melancholy of the fin de siècle. While Strauss successfully engaged with allegory to portray two of the opera's characters – the infertile Emperor and Empress – he was unable, for his own philosophical reasons expressed in the contemporaneous Eine Alpensinfonie (1915), to ratify Hofmannsthal's hope, rooted in his ‘Chandos Crisis’, of creating an aesthetic totality, of reconstituting the symbol that Benjamin, in his later writings, pits against allegory.

France receives little attention in narratives about the sublime in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This article will argue that the cataclysmic tableau at the climax of Cherubini's first opera for the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris, Lodoïska (1791), can be understood as part of a coherent and distinctively French discourse of the sublime, rooted in revolutionary experience that can be understood in relation to wider European trends.

After the premiere of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960 at Venice's Teatro La Fenice in 1961, the critical press began a series of debates and redefinitions in response to what struck them most: how noisy the opera was. Although they agreed that Nono's work was unlikely to be popular with a broad public, many immediately recognized that Intolleranza could serve to recall the horrors of Fascism and the sounds of war – to offer, in other words, a warning call that history must not repeat itself. In a debate in the Communist newspaper L'Unità, the sonic hubbub was interpreted as a new kind of realism, formed in order to use memories of the Fascist regime as an allegory of contemporary oppression. The potency of the opera's noise was seen as in part due to Nono's incorporation of the auditory experiences of cinema and television, thus providing an insight into how traditionally elite genres such as theatre and opera could respond to the emergence and increasing hegemony of new mass entertainments. This article seeks to place Intolleranza within these fraught and conflicting discourses on mid-twentieth-century Italian modernity, and show that postwar reconstruction was as much about a concern for the past as it was with a coming to terms with the present.

The preparation of the critical edition of Verdi's I due Foscari has drawn attention to two overlooked sources: an early scenario attributed to Andrea Maffei and an early manuscript copy with various layers of corrections. This article questions the scenario's attribution to Maffei, revising the opera's early history. It furthermore identifies one of the layers in the manuscript copy as being in Verdi's hand, showing that the composer's role in fine-tuning a libretto at this early stage in his career was greater than has so far been possible to show.

This article explores how Peter Maxwell Davies uses thematic and structural devices to chart the means by which the title character in Mr Emmet Takes a Walk is led towards suicide. Discussion centres on how Davies integrates use of quotation and trademark musical gestures into the development of characterisation in order to explore different states of ‘reality, dream and waking fantasy’ by which he seeks to explain the reasons for Emmet's suicide.

Dario Fo worked with La Scala only once, in 1978–79; the occasion was an adaptation of Ramuz and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat (1918). This brief, pointedly anti-operatic work connected the dissident artist and a leading cultural institution at a time when both were re-evaluating their means of addressing the public. For Fo, as well as for the Italian Left at large, 1978 marked the ten-year anniversary of the 1968 riots and a time of deep doubt about the possibility of collective political action. For La Scala, 1978 was not only the tenth year under the bold musical directorship of Claudio Abbado, but also involved celebrations of the theatre's bicentenary. In this article we weave together the Left's crisis with a close reading of Fo's adaptation, using the notion of vocal address as an interpretative linchpin. By considering the myth of Risorgimento opera as vox populi, the figure of Stravinsky's songless soldier, the sound of babbling crowds and the recorded speaking voice of Antonio Negri, we offer a new exploration of the cross section of art and left-wing politics in the Italy of 1978.