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?

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.

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.

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.