Expressions such as ‘author’, ‘work’, ‘text’ and ‘repertory’ are used constantly in writings about Italian opera; they stand for concepts that seem uncontroversial and unproblematic. However, these terms acquired the value we currently grant them only through a long process, one inextricably linked to the century-long formation of an Italian ‘operatic repertory’ between about 1750 and 1850. At the beginning of this period, a select number of literary texts received new musical clothing each time they were revived; by its end, the text of a successful opera could not be set to music again, because music and text were indissolubly linked in the audience's perception. There were exceptions, of course, and the process of change was gradual and differed according to genre: in the late eighteenth century some drammi giocosi had European careers that lasted as long as thirty years, much longer than the most successful drammi per musica. What is more, although we can speak of a ‘repertory’. with reference to the whole of Europe or to Italy, if we narrow the focusto a single city we may have to move into the nineteenth century to amass a body of works sufficiently large to merit the term. However, the fact that this process lasted for a century, far fromdiminishing its importance, is in one sense proof of its relevance. for an understanding of Italian opera that fully embraces its cultural, social and political context, ‘facts’ will indeed last as long as a century.

Genealogies persist in the writing of histories, if not to suggest lineages then to delight or dismay us with the effects of accident and circumstance. The first generation of Italian operas were all court, that is private, entertainments, whether produced in Florence, Mantua, Rome or Turin. When this new form of entertainment first emigrated, it spoke Italian in foreign courts (except in Madrid), perhaps because it was so identified in its novelty with still novel Italian musical styles, with the dramaturgy of Italian spectacle and above all with the Italian way of singing. It travelled to the Habsburg imperial court early, in Prague, 1627. Like this performance, later occasional stagings in Vienna and Innsbruck remained in Italian and at first by Italians, though eventual progeny included scores by Gluck and Mozart. The court in Madrid, however, heard in 1627 a version of opera with a libretto by Lope de Vega, La selva sin amor; its score was by a theatrically inexperienced Tuscan lutenist, Filippo Piccinni. Madrid did not essay opera again until 1660. The court of Sigismund III in Warsaw heard Italian opera beginning in 1628, possibly with a Mantuan score. Opera made its way to Paris only in 1645, where, after acquiring a French text and French dancing and singing, it became one of the glories of the royal court. The cradle of opera, in all these cases, was the court, with all its resources in terms of money, an obligated audience and more than willing professionals, whether imported or local.

What is music in opera? In Monteverdi's Orfeo, his first opera, music is arguably the protagonist, whether La Musica in the prologue, whose ritornello guides Orfeo to and from the Underworld, or embodied in the legendary singer himself, who uses his musical prowess to charm the guardians of Hell. In Il ritorno d'Ulisse, however, there is no such protagonist, no single embodiment of musical power. In the largest sense, of course, and in contrast to straight drama – the plays of Euripides, Shakespeare or Calderon may have some music in them but are essentially spoken – all of Il ritorno d'Ulisse, all of most operas, is music. But in Monteverdi's sense (and in the librettist Badoaro's), that music is divided into ‘speech’ and ‘song’ – or, speech-like and musical utterances.

A number of scholars have drawn attention to the importance of Parisian popular theatre for an understanding of Verdian dramaturgy, especially in the operas leading up to Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. According to Giovanni Morelli, in Paris, Verdi frequented the popular theatre not for the sake of participating in the active milieu of Romantic cultural thought (Milanese circles had adequately fulfilled that need), but in order to mingle with a typical metropolitan theatre audience in the venues dedicated to the dissemination of a watered-down, middlebrow form of Romanticism.

One of Così fan tutte's more amusing episodes occurs in the first-act finale when Despina marches on stage disguised as a doctor and, in a spoof on Mesmerism, produces a magnet to heal the stricken Albanians. She introduces this little scenario with a ridiculous salutation: ‘Salvete, amabiles, bones puelles’. The source of this mangled Latin is interesting: it is present in Mozart's autograph, but not in Da Ponte's libretto, where the Latin appears in its proper form, ‘bonae puellae’. Only two words, to be sure, but they have attracted attention because of the rare glimpse they offer of Mozart's direct intervention in a Da Ponte text, of a parting of ways between composer and librettist. Mozart's change has traditionally been interpreted not as an error at all, but as a kind of ‘correction’ of Despina's character: since the servant Despina lacks the status and education to know proper Latin, Mozart portrays her in a way that is true to her station. As one commentator says, she ‘understands only half of what she says; she imitates what she has picked up from frequent doctor's visits to her masters’.

In 1823, Alessandro Manzoni engaged a continuing debate over the merits of ‘Aristotelian’ unities of time and place with his Lettre à M. C*** sur l'unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie, a manifesto that synthesises and amplifies earlier polemics by Berchet, Pellico and Visconti. Dramatic expression, coherence and realism, Manzoni argued, are best served by giving priority to unity of action while ignoring the traditional restrictions of time and setting. Although discontinuities might occur between adjacent scenes, the focus on cause and effect and the exclusion of unrelated incidents would provide a coherence that had previously depended on physical and temporal proximity. Manzoni suggested that formal preconceptions be set aside and the action allowed to shape dramatic design. Characters could be introduced throughout a play rather than together in the first act, their motivations and goals allowed to evolve as the situation unfolds. These shifts would encourage writers to cultivate motifs other than love intrigues, which had traditionally held sway because they took little time to develop. In particular, historical plays could enact all important events instead of only the climax, and depict true causes and resolutions rather than ones invented to fit conventional constraints.

Theodor Adorno thought Parsifal unique, in many respects incongruous when compared with Wagner's earlier operas and music dramas. In a 1956 essay, ‘Zur Partitur des Parsifal’ (‘Concerning the Score of Parsifal’), he noted the ‘continually strange newness’ of Wagner's last work, concluding: ‘From out of the waning of his original inventive powers, Wagner's force produces the virtue of a late style; a style that, according to Goethe's dictum, withdraws from appearance’. More recently, Werner Breig paused appreciatively over Adorno's remark about the ‘continually strange newness’, but pursued a different argument. Breig claims that Parsifal was recapitulatory, stylistically homogeneous with the earlier works, and he is supported by Wagner's assertion to Cosima that he had written ‘nothing new’ since Tristan (CWD II, 26 March 1879), a conviction redolent of one the composer had earlier expressed (albeit in entirely different circumstances) in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 2 May 1860: ‘I can now only repeat myself … I have no other significant characteristics to offer’. Breig summarises his position in the Wagner Handbook: ‘The musical structure of Parsifal contains no fundamentally new elements, but rather follows directly upon the achievements of the Ring and Tristan’, thus nodding to the Wagner who cheerfully confessed having ‘take[n] up the old paint pot’ of the Tristan style for Act II of Parsifal (CWD II, 5 April 1878).

It is sometimes remarked that Wagner's prose works would not be of much interest if their author had not also turned his creative energies in a very different direction. What is not often observed, however, is the influence this truism has exerted on critical approaches to the theoretical writings. A tacit consensus dictates that these texts be seen as marginalia, ancillary documents whose value lies in the light they shed on immeasurably more important achievements. We have inherited the prose works in the form of useful gnomic tags: Gesamtkunstwerk, ‘endless melody’, ‘deeds of music made visible’ – fragments of text extracted from their context and pressed into service as authoritative pronouncements about the operas. More extensive analysis has usually been concerned with the relation between the written theories and the works they are understood to describe. There is a powerful hierarchy implicidy at work: text (theory) is subservient to music (practice); the former is at best an interpretative tool.

In a recent number of 19th-Century Music, Allan Atlas offered a complex analytical reading of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, hinging on a pair of keys forming what he called ‘crossed tonal areas’. The tonality G flat major in the second-act trio ‘Io so che alle sue pene’ plays a crucial role in Atlas's reading, and he had to account for the fact that the trio was originally conceived a halfstep higher, in G major, and was so performed at the première in Milan. He asked:

can we assign a significant role to the Gb of the trio when it represents not Puccini's original – and presumably well-reasoned – intention, but what might be little more than a compositional accident necessitated by the practicalities of performance, and a specific one – Brescia, May 1904 – at that?

And in his footnote 13 to the foregoing, Atlas listed six studies discussing halfstep transpositions, three in Verdi and three more in Puccini.

Finally, love, – love retranslated again into nature! Not the love of a ‘cultured maiden’! No Senta-sentimentality! But love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel, – and thus true to nature! Love, which in its expedients is the war of the sexes, and in its basis their mortal hatred.

In Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Brutus Jones undertakes a fatal flight through the jungle, near the end of which he stumbles into a clearing and ‘incoherently mumbles’: ‘What is – dis place? Seems like – seems like I ben heah befo’.’ He's right – he has been there. Jones's frantic run has brought him full-circle, leading him to roughly the same place where he began. However, Jones retraces his steps in more man just O'Neill's drama: he repeatedly rushes through die same jungle in the numerous adaptations of the play that followed its successful 1920 première. The first progeny of die Emperor – Louis Gruenberg's opera performed at the Metropolitan and Dudley Murphey's film starring Paul Robeson – appeared in 1933. Surprisingly, given die dated and, to present-day audiences, offensive racial depictions, the work is still being translated into other media, including Sven-David Sandström's 1985 opera and a 1986 dance version by Donald McKayle set to music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

One of the central events of the film Moonstruck (1987) takes place in a performance of La bohéme at the Metropolitan Opera. Loretta (Cher) is puzzled by what seems to be Mimì's unexpected death, which takes her by surprise, even though the explanation by her friend Ronny (Nicholas Cage) reveals that she suspects its cause. Most of us will smile indulgently at a first-time opera-goer's ingenuous conflation of character (‘coughing her brains out’) and voice (‘keep singing’). But we might pause for a moment on a more intriguing twist in Loretta's surprise at Mimì's death – the fact that our antibiotic age has largely forgotten the devastating epidemic formerly known as phthisis or consumption.

In the age of AIDS, few would be surprised to find sexuality connected to suffering and disease; in the age of syphilis – from its arrival in Europe in 1492 to today, when it is on the rise once again – the connection is equally strong, though many of us have forgotten this. The brief respite offered by the discovery of a cure for syphilis (through the use of penicillin) in the 1940s ended with the appearance of AIDS. Over the last five hundred years, the Christian reading of syphilis as the scourge of God directed against the sexually sinful has merged with societal sexual anxieties about the effects of syphilis on the general social fabric and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the family in particular. The perhaps surprising focus of this discussion (by a literary theorist and a physician) of suffering and social decline in the context of sexually transmitted disease is Richard Wagner's last music drama, Parsifal, finally completed in 1882 and called a Bühnenweihfestspiel (a stage consecration festival play) for his Bayreuth theatre.