Ravel's comic opera L'Heure espagnole (1911) has often been criticised for a certain coldness and lack of sentiment. Such characteristics, however, might profitably be seen in light of Ravel's modernity, an art where surface is privileged over depth. Parallels between Ravel's approach and Henri Bergson's nearly contemporaneous theory of laughter developed in Le Rire – in itself an articulate explication of the surface/depth binary – provide insight into Ravel's aesthetic. This orientation unfolds in the detached adaptation of two historical models in L'Heure espagnole: secco recitative from opera buffa and leitmotivic writing from Wagnerian opera.

Franz Schreker's opera Der ferne Klang is usually discussed using the term ‘phantasmagoria’, as a guiding thread. This article argues that this term names not one but two phenomena: as used by Theodor W. Adorno in his analysis of Wagner, the term denotes the repression of musical production in order to create a music without origin. In a lesser-known piece Adorno uses the term slightly differently, in a sense pioneered first by his friend Walter Benjamin. This second sense is interested in the repression not of musical production, but of the acoustic means of production that conspire to create a unified, synaesthetic experience (rather than an aesthetic object). This second sense, the denial of any sense data outside of the one experience to be had in an opera house, is exceedingly fruitful when applied to Der ferne Klang, since its hero is questing for the titular sound which is located in that very space the aural phantasmagoria has to pretend does not exist. Reading Schreker's opera keeping both senses of the term in mind may allow us to overcome Adorno's own somewhat negative assessment of Schreker's modernism and to locate within the opera a certain self-consciousness of phantasmagoric production.

Premièred at Glyndebourne in October 1994 and subsequently performed in the UK, Austria, Germany and Holland, The Second Mrs Kong was the result of a collaboration between the American writer Russell Hoban and British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The opera's reception has tended to emphasise the disparity between Hoban's diverse and eclectic interests, which emerge not only in the libretto but also in his novels and essays, and Birtwistle's more introspective and linear approach. Possible connections between Hoban's aesthetics and Birtwistle's music have generally been disregarded. I argue, however, that the opera's main aesthetic concerns – namely, the mediation of images through ideas and the workings of image-identification in diverse media – are shaped by a productive exchange between librettist and composer. The clearest expression of this interaction is the love between Kong, who embodies ‘the idea of’ King Kong from the 1933 RKO film, and Pearl, a character drawn from Vermeer's iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The representation of these visual icons in The Second Mrs Kong is inflected by Birtwistle's own views on images, by his attempts to find musical analogues for visual techniques, as revealed especially in his sketches, and by his lively engagement with Hoban's ideas.

Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, singers famous for their 1720s London rivalry, were not necessarily the warring protagonists history has made them out to be. While opera historians have long acknowledged the role audience factions played in creating the rivalry, the contribution made by the opera company itself has not been considered. Working from the premise that the Royal Academy shaped its operas around this important aspect of its stars' public personae, I focus on Handel's Admeto (1727) to examine both the way opera was structured to take account of the rivalry and the concomitant play with the singers' identities provided in the work. I argue that, in employing the miniature portrait and female disguise as its two central plot devices, and in the theatricality of its music, Admeto explores notions of authenticity and identity, female mutability, and anxiety and disavowal.