In the famous monologue from Act II scene 5 of Lully and Quinault's Armide (1686), the title character attempts to slay the sleeping hero Renaud but, overcome by his beauty, falls in love with him instead. As commentators have noted, the monologue departs from the opera's source material, Tasso's epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata (1581). In contrast to the placid scene recounted by Tasso in canto 14 of the original work, the libretto depicts Armide's transformation from enemy to lover as a moment of struggle and psychological doubt. While scholarship has generally credited Quinault with having recognised the dramatic potential of the encounter, this article argues for a broader contextualisation of the scene in seventeenth-century French artistic production. A review of the major translations and adaptations of Tasso's poem published in France before 1686 reveals that Quinault's libretto represents not a decisive break with the past but rather one contribution to a much broader tradition of literary and musical experimentation.

When London's new Pantheon Opera opened in 1791, the artist Henry Tresham, not long returned from Italy, was paid to paint the ceiling and proscenium of the new auditorium and to provide a drop curtain. The curtain provided a focus for the new institution's aspirations and for the audience's attention on those inspirations when they arrived at the theatre. Its elaborate nature – the zodiac, the music of the spheres, ancient and modern composers, the passions, and with a centrepiece of the apotheosis of Pietro Metastasio – was the subject of a series articles in the press explaining the curtain's allegory. All visual material was thought to be lost, but the recent identification of a preparatory watercolour of the apotheosis has offered an opportunity to re-examine both its place in the context of late eighteenth-century iconography and the place of Metastasio in the late eighteenth-century London opera house.

Active at the height of the apartheid regime, the Eoan Group treated South Africans to operas ‘in the true tradition of Italy’. The group relied on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings and the most stereotypical of operatic conventions to construct a hereditary link between itself and Italy, thus creating an alignment with the cultural ideal of Europe and its colonial representative – whiteness. This article offers a materialist reading of the Eoan Group's first operatic endeavour, La traviata in 1956, to argue that their invocation and emulation of the ‘Italian tradition’ served to situate them within a class-based discourse of racially inscribed civility. Drawing on archival records relating to props, costumes, advertisements and funding, it shows how the group constructed an imagined Italian heritage both to emphasise the quality of their productions, and to create an affinity with their white audiences. In this reading, the construction of an Italian operatic tradition functions not as a neutral aesthetic category, but as a historically situated politics of race and class.

In his autobiography, John Adams mused that his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, challenges directors and conductors owing to its ‘abstracted treatment’ of time and space. This abstraction also challenges scholars. In this article, I bring the cross-disciplinary field of sound studies into the opera house to demonstrate that Adams's obfuscation of operatic space–time is achieved primarily through the use of a spatialised electroacoustic sound design. Drawing on archival materials and new interviews with director Peter Sellars and sound designer Mark Grey, I outline the dramaturgical, epistemological and hermeneutic ramifications of sound design for opera studies and advocate for disciplinary engagement with the spatial dimensions of electroacoustic music generally, and within opera specifically.

Young Millie Dilmount arrives in New York City during the jazz age, shingles her hair and looks for a job with a rich, handsome boss she can marry. The musical-film Thoroughly Modern Millie (dir. George Roy Hill, Universal, 1967) may have been a spoof of the 1920s but various twists and turns in its plot nonetheless reveal its middlebrow scaffolding. Social aspiration is written into the plot, as is the ambiguity of its signifiers: although Millie (Julie Andrews) falls for the penniless Jimmy Smith (James Fox), she sets her sights on the seemingly more appropriate Trevor Graydon (John Gavin) only to discover that, of course, Jimmy was a millionaire all along. This is a narrative as much about cultural and social as financial capital. Through its ‘second-order parody’ of racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes, Angelo Pao argues, Thoroughly Modern Millie – along with other American musicals – ‘has played a significant role in the formation of a national persona’. The middlebrow, though, is not necessarily about identity politics, storylines or style; it is also closely bound with modes of dissemination and their relative costs and, because of that, with questions of class. Indeed, the Broadway musical was (and continues to be) a mainly middle-class affair, from its makers to its consumers, who David Savran points out have long needed ‘a good deal of disposable income’, given that ticket prices have always outstripped cinema, spoken theatre – and, on occasion, opera.