Despite the number of musicological studies that have focused upon Wagner's theories of tempo modification, the basic speeds adopted in early performances of Wagner's music dramas have been more difficult to identify. This article focuses upon an important new source of information concerning Wagnerian performance – a list of metronome timings made by Edward Dannreuther at the first dress rehearsal of Das Rheingold at Bayreuth in July 1876. After considering the practical difficulties of tempo measurement, and briefly placing the broad implications of Dannreuther's timings in the context of Wagner's theories and practice, the dress rehearsal tempi are examined in more detail in terms of their potential for practical realisation in performance. Six readings of Das Rheingold from the recorded canon (Bodanzky, Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Solti, Karajan, Boulez) provide a suitable comparative perspective from which to discuss how these tempi might affect perceptions of physical distance, the nature of motifs related to characters or events, tempo relationships within a musical scene, and larger-scale tempo connections in Das Rheingold as a whole. In particular, the very quick tempi identified by Dannreuther (especially in relation to modern sensibilities) might encourage a reassessment of practical possibilities in the realisation of Wagner's scores, along with a reconsideration of Wagner's music and its meanings.

This essay explores the roots of Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers (1903–04), composed to a libretto by H. B. Brewster, in fin-de-siècle debates on the legal and religious regulation of morality. Taking into account Smyth's jaundiced use of Cornish history, the contribution of Brewster's professed individual anarchism and sexual libertarianism, and Smyth's willingness to parody and manipulate musical conventions in order to reinforce radical ideals, it views the work both as a reflection of its authors' engagement with modernism and as a herald of Smyth's subsequent contribution to militant feminism.

Russian composer Arthur Vincent Lourié (1881/2–1966) dedicated his The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1948–1961), an opera based on Pushkin's story about the poet's African great-grandfather, to ‘Russian culture, the Russian people and Russian history.’ Neoclassical in its subject matter, reliance on conventional musical forms, and adherence to tonality, Lourié's Blackamoor is nevertheless also an exemplary symbolist opera. This article explains three symbolist aspects of the work: the sources of its libretto (Lourié's librettist Irina Graham interspersed the libretto with symbolist texts), its multi-layered cultural associations, and Lourié's decision to liberate and embody the erotic drive of the main character Ibrahim by representing it as the figure of Eros. Eradicated during the years of Stalinist terror, the culture of Silver Age Russia thus continued to find a voice in the emigrant Lourié's last opera.

Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, to a libretto by David Harsent, was premiered at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in April 2008. This article offers a synopsis, a diary of rehearsals for the opera (for all of which the composer was in attendance), and an analytical essay. The diary chronicles the development of the production, with its diversions from, and clarifications of, the text as well as the composer's reaction to these. The essay presents The Minotaur as a departure for Birtwistle, from narrative (as in the earlier Gawain) to characterisation, its basis being a trio of protagonists. While a predictably heroic Theseus and tragic Minotaur are characters fashioned by the libretto as much as the music, a multi-faceted Ariadne is primarily the composer's creation.