Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the performance and reception history of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), but as this article will demonstrate, the opera played an indispensable role in the repertories of Weimar-era opera houses. Despite an evident desire on the part of some Weimar Republic directors and designers of Die Meistersinger to draw on staging innovations of the time, productions of the work from this period are characterised by scenic conservatism and repetition of familiar naturalistic imagery. This was not coincidental, I will argue, since Die Meistersinger served as a comforting rite for many opera-going members of the Weimar-era middle classes, at least some of whom felt economically or socially beleaguered in the aftermath of World War I. But no matter how secure the conservative theatrical conventions surrounding the Weimar Republic Meistersinger appeared, the repressed turmoil of the period seeped into ideas about the work, haunting the performance and reception of constructed German stability.

With its combination of gestures and music, instrumental sections, a narrator who occupies most of the composition, and two characters who sing for very short sections while acting and dancing for the rest of the piece, Monteverdi’s Combattimento defies genre definition. Starting from Tim Carter’s reading of the composition as a salon entertainment and responding to Suzanne Cusick’s call for the untangling of Combattimento’s multiplicity of meanings, this article investigates Combattimento in its ritualisation and performance of mutually defining relations that are mediated by the social and ideological implications of its immediate performance space, the salon – or portego, in Venetian dialect – the main entertainment hall of Venetian palaces. Using this as a key framework, the article explores the Combattimento’s associations with Venice itself as the broader performance space. Within that context, the choice of a particular episode from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata for Monteverdi’s composition – with its mixture of love and violence, assimilation and confrontation, personal identity and agency, history of winners and history of victims1 – proves as crucial to seventeenth-century Venice, at the crossroads between Western and Islamic civilisations, as it does for today’s culture.

Italian singer Giulia Grisi was imagined and ‘possessed’ in various ways by members of diverse social groups in London during the 1830s. Audience members could bring different versions of the diva home: through reports (or experiences with her) as a guest or entertainer at parties, through gossip about her personal life reported in newspapers and through pieces arranged ‘as sung by’ her. The fluid and constantly negotiated relationship between the diva and her audience offered a locus for expressing social relations in London during a period of changing class and national definitions. It is neither possible nor desirable to recover a singular idea of Grisi as a celebrity or as a woman; instead, the multiple images of Grisi must be read as negotiations of identity on the part of the consumers as they participated in the nascent celebrity culture of the 1830s.

This article examines the first production and early reception of Verdi’s Ernani in Vienna in relation to cultural processes supporting strategies of imperial representation promoted by the Habsburg Court. By discussing newspaper reviews, archival documents, sketches of the sets for the first Viennese production, I show how the opera responded to official narratives of the Habsburg Empire and to specific facets of the local culture of monumentality. I argue that particularly the Act III Finale functioned along the lines of memorial practices that projected the Habsburg dynasty as the source of unity of the empire and its peoples. Finally, I consider the Viennese reception of Ernani in the broader context of its Italian dissemination, suggesting how fluctuating political readings of the opera depended upon (rather than undermining) multidirectional cultural exchanges.