This essay explores the artistry of the nineteenth-century Italian singer Giuditta Pasta within the broad context of an ‘artwork’ (Goehr) and ideas of ‘presence’ (Gumbrecht). Pasta was the acknowledged diva del mondo during the 1820s, famed not only for an extraordinary if flawed voice, but also for the physicality of her performance modes. Her innovative practices contributed to the development and reconceptualisation of opera’s dramatic potential on the early Romantic stage. Making her reputation in roles such as Medea (Mayr) and Semiramide (Rossini), Pasta later inspired the composition of three of the most striking operatic heroines of the period: Amina in La sonnambula (Bellini) and the title-roles of Norma (again Bellini) and Anna Bolena (Donizetti). Focusing on her performance as Norma, I consider a polemical debate in 1835 in the Italian periodicals Il Figaro and Il corriere delle dame that illuminates aspects of Pasta’s gestural style in relation to those of her younger colleague and rival, Maria Malibran, and ultimately raises questions about the ‘authenticity’ of performance in the emerging economy of the operatic marketplace.

Although Eugen d’Albert’s later works were a staple of new opera during the Weimar Republic, they have since been considered at best partially successful attempts to adapt his earlier and more successful ‘verismo’ idiom to the new post-war aesthetics. His 1926 opera Der Golem, however, helps to challenge this reputation. Its similarities to one of the most famous early German films, Robert Wegener’s 1920 Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, point to an intriguing relationship with one of musical modernism’s most controversial nemeses: the cinema. An analysis of critical responses to d’Albert’s opera, read in the context of characteristic early twentieth-century debates about popularity, shows how Der Golem encouraged more complex responses to mass appeal than the clear rejection often attributed to better known figures of modernism. Although the opera both flirts with and problematises different modes of audience appeal – most notably in an early scene, which has a direct parallel in Wegener’s film – its reception avoids easy alignment with mass culture. Der Golem’s unmistakeable debt to its modernist context suggests that narratives of modernism should be able to account for d’Albert’s post-war works, rather than treating them as a throwback to the nineteenth century.

The undoubted cause célèbre of the 1969 Holland Festival was the large-scale music theatre piece Reconstructie, jointly authored by a team of five young composers and two librettists. The work, which took as its subject ‘the struggle against US imperialism in Latin America’, and revolved around the figure of Che Guevara, embodied the authors’ dual commitment to political engagement and artistic experiment. My account examines the work through the lens of recent scholarship that stresses the politically reactionary function of avant-garde experimentation within the cultural Cold War. In the process, attention is given to broader factors affecting the work’s production and reception: these include contemporaneous debates about cultural popularising and the Holland Festival; the complex motives of the work’s governmental patrons; and the influence upon the authors of Cuba, Castro and Guevara himself.