Despite her current marginal position, the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Delphine von Schauroth (1813–1887) once ranked among the most prominent virtuosos of the nineteenth century and had connections with Fanny Hensel, Ferdinand Hiller, Josephine Lang, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and others. Drawing on large body of music criticism, as well as compositions, letters, images and literary works, this article presents a portrait of Schauroth as an artist, with an emphasis on the role of improvisation and the improvisatory in her pianism. In particular, the article fleshes out Robert Schumann's characterization of Schauroth as a ‘Corinna-sister’, a reference to the improvising poetess of Madame de Stäel's novel Corinne, or Italy. The article suggests that Schumann's comparison highlights key facets of Schauroth's status and character as a pianist and composer. Firstly, like Corinne, Schauroth was widely renowned as an eminent performer and was celebrated as a genius by critics, which was particularly notable for a woman musician in the early nineteenth century. Secondly, Schauroth was received as a creator, not only for her compositions, but also for her performances: in the late 1820s and early 1830s, in particular, critics responded to these performances with images of magical creation and an emphasis on the newness of her performance over the composer's work. Thirdly, Schauroth displayed a varied practice of improvisation, and her compositions were understood as having an improvisatory character.

Print created the urge to innovate new modalities of musical knowledge production and dissemination in nineteenth-century Bengal. Publication of music books made the bifurcation between music theory and practice clearer, but only as a textual category. As the literature suggests, these were two categories for organizing musical knowledge, intimately entwined, where one produces the other and also doesn't exist without each other. The technology of ‘swaralipi’ (musical notation) used in the modern printed books materialized the project of disseminating music to the reader who could now ‘read’ the music from the book. For some book writers, music books were meant to be a replacement for the oral tutelage, published as ‘self-instructors’. But, on the contrary, the most prolific book-writers of the time used their books as the basis of oral tutelage in the music school. In the modern setting of the music school, the person of the ‘guru’ or ‘ustad’ was replaced by the formalized, systematic teaching of the ‘professors’ of music. Music books, as the medium of modern music pedagogy, thus changed not only the way students learned – making it possible to learn from the book with no instructor – but also the role of teachers, whose teaching was validated by the book. The music books came to function as the ‘modern shastras’ – to exercise regulatory authority over music practice, and how music is learned and taught. The ‘orality’ of music emerges as a liminal space in the gap between the writings on music and the writing of music. What emerges is an unlikely milieu where a new form of musical education is devised, the possibility of an education without a guru is conceived, and the schema of musical notation brings the entire process to life.

The two recently recorded CD sets of Hrabina (The Countess) and Straszny dwór (The Haunted Manor) in complete concert versions with eighteenth-century instruments add enormously to the Polish operatic repertoire in the nineteenth century, and offer a fresh listening experience for those who have long wished for first-rate recordings of lesser-known, yet brilliantly executed, works of the hitherto neglected composer, Stanisław Moniuszko (1819–1872). Born in the Minsk district of modern Belarus, Monisuzko was gentry, and his nostalgia for the customs, the fields and forest, and the rural community that shaped his childhood years, fuelled his enthusiasm for modern operas set in the eighteenth century. These stellar concert versions of The Countess and The Haunted Manor provide a fascinating glimpse into the provocative and glittering salons of the eighteenth-century Warsaw nobility, whose inhabitants stand firmly in contrast to the more modest and self-effacing life of the peasants and the country gentry. In both operas Moniuszko successfully provides a romanticized portrayal of pre-Partition courtly life in Poland. While these two operas were highly regarded as national treasures in Poland, they were not particularly well known outside of the country. Polish opera at that time was largely overshadowed by Italian, French, and German composers, and the nation's subjugation to the Hapsburgs, Prussians, and Russians throughout the nineteenth century contributed mightily to the neglect of staged works by Polish composers. Additionally, singers needed to be trained in the nuances and inflections of the language. Prior recordings were either incomplete or were not available with English translations of the librettos. With the Biondi and Nowak recordings, Moniuszko's vision of expanding his art to a global audience has finally been achieved. These recordings are accessible to all opera enthusiasts on an international playing field.

The longstanding practice of building opera librettos on stories from classical antiquity (especially Greece and Rome, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, Persia and Babylonia) waned in the early 1800s, as impresarios began to favour plots with more obvious current-day resonance (though sometimes set a few centuries in the past, to skirt objections from government censors and, in some lands, church authorities). Still, imaginative librettists and composers found ways of rejuvenating an ancient setting and producing an opera that spoke to the day's audiences instead of feeling stuffy or academic. One of the biggest successes in French serious opera of the 1850s was Félicien David's Herculanum, set to a text primarily by the renowned playwright and poet Joseph Méry. Widely hailed, not least by composer-critics Hector Berlioz and Ernest Reyer, the work freshened the ‘ancient Rome’ conventions by locating the action far to the south, near what is today Naples, and by including, as the main characters, two powerful aristocrats from the Euphrates valley, and two young adepts of the nascent Christian movement – and a fifth character, Satan himself, come to wreak havoc in the world. All of this would seem a stewpot of a librettist's wild imaginings were it not for the quality and impressive variety of David's music – and the opportunities that libretto and music together give to imaginative performers, as has been demonstrated in the work's three major revivals beginning in 2014 (in Belgium/France, Ireland and Hungary).

This study of Camille Saint-Saëns's opéra comique Phryné (1893), representing the famous Greek courtesan in the title role, outlines how the composer made the case for the continued viability of the opéra comique genre in a context where lighter opérettes by Jacques Offenbach on classical subjects were much celebrated on French stages. Saint-Saëns's efforts are seen through both his dislike of Offenbach's music and the flexible use of generic name markers in musical comedies of the period. In marking out an aesthetic space for new musical comedy that was not Offenbach's, Saint-Saëns and his librettist Lucien Augé de Lassus conjoined their Hellenic subject matter not only with a canon of painting and sculpture but also with musical qualities deemed classical in the fin-de-siècle environment.

This article is in essence a study of intertextuality in two musico-dramatic genres in Paris of the 1850s: the comédie-vaudeville and straight plays with incidental music. The ‘texts’ that are considered here are interpolated songs in the comédie-vaudeville and purely instrumental interpolations in plays. Their intertextuality depends on the age-old process of contrafactum. Yet a problem arises when the listener cannot recognize the original source of the contrafactum and cannot perceive the intertext.

The article traces such an intertextual problem. It illustrates how the attempt to answer what would appear to be a minor question regarding music in a comédie-vaudeville led to consideration of an aspect of Jacques Offenbach's output that has received very little attention and which in turn poses some problems of its own. I begin by discussing how intertextuality and musical memory were exploited in the nineteenth-century Parisian comédie-vaudeville. I then discuss how my inability to identify a ‘text’, in this case a particular tune used in a production in a Parisian theatre was so bothersome that it caused it to stick in my memory, which in turn allowed me to recognize it in a work by Offenbach. This in turn led to consideration of a short story and a play in which intertextual musical memory plays a large role, and to the music that Offenbach composed for the performance of that play which surprisingly led to the solution of the problem, the identification of the tune. I end with further comments.

Giuseppe Verdi's first French opera, Jérusalem (1847), has often been described as a French version of his fourth opera, I lombardi alla prima crociata (1843). It is hardly a straightforward translation, however; the process of adapting the source to the French stage involved substantial rewriting of the libretto, thoroughly recasting the storyline and therefore requiring numerous changes in the music. Thus, Verdi not only provided several entirely new sections for the score of Jérusalem, but also reused material from I lombardi in radically different dramatic settings.

The purpose of this article is to review changing attitudes toward Jérusalem through the twentieth century, and to assert that it may be perceived both as a reworking of the earlier opera and as a new work in which Verdi, under unique circumstances, deployed strategies of self-borrowing. The first part addresses the historiography of Jérusalem, tracing changing attitudes of commentators gradually recognizing the importance and worth of the French work, and the second part examines in detail the transfer of selected passages that Verdi borrowed from I lombardi and adapted to vastly changed contexts.

Self-borrowing was a common practice in primo ottocento opera. Even though commentators of the era could find it somewhat troublesome, composers indulged in the practice. Drawing on existing scholarship, and reflecting on the work of my co-contributors to this journal issue, I ponder a few sundry notions about the procedure and its context, addressing theoretical, historical and practical perspectives relating to composers, historical commentators, listeners and modern-day scholars. I begin with a survey of terminology that has been applied in discussions of self-borrowing and a review of the manner in which selected present-day scholars have characterized the practice. I then consider the nature of self-borrowing in the ottocento opera repertory against a backdrop of contemporaneous theoretical discussions about how to compose opera, and I contemplate the extent to which self-borrowings in this repertory can be deemed to bear meaning. I conclude by raising the possibility of applying concepts from cognitive theory to operatic encounters with self-borrowing, proposing that the practice served as a tool for composers to fuel expectation, predictability, anticipation and even surprise to enhance musical pleasure. My purpose is to prompt reflection on the reasons behind as well as an appreciation for the value of this oft-maligned compositional ‘tool’ in the interest of gaining insight into its impact on the listening experience and the evaluation of musical works.

Between 1812 and 1816 Rossini took Italian stages by storm and performances cycles of his operas soared in an unprecedented way. The present essay investigates the fundamental role played by self-borrowing in this achievement. As it will be preliminarily clarified, at least for Rossini, self-borrowing does not represent a sub-category of borrowing (i.e. from others: he seldom resorted to other composers’ works), but a peculiar characteristic of his compositional habit, a weapon used to spread his signifiers throughout different stages and genres.

This article focuses on a case study: La gazzetta, an opera deeply rooted in the tradition of the opera comica in Neapolitan, whose authoriality normally resided more in performers (in this case, in the well-known actor/singer Carlo Casaccia) than in poets or composers. Special attention will be given to the use of self-borrowings in some key pieces of the opera, including the recently rediscovered Act I quintet. The essay aims to demonstrate that self-borrowings, far from being a mere time-saving device, helped Rossini to overpower Casaccia's distinctive way of expression, depriving him of his authoriality and of his own voice. With La gazzetta, Rossini conquered the last outpost; after 1816, the mastery of Italian stages (and genres) belonged only to him.

Self-borrowing and Rossini: music theatre scholars are well acquainted with this topic. Many publications have been dedicated to it, most of which concentrate on compositional-analytic aspects, the artistic and communicational nature of self-borrowing and its reception in nineteenth-century periodicals. At present, however, no study has attempted to question the relation between Rossini's self-borrowings and the critical edition of his works. This is the issue to which this contribution is dedicated.

Beginning with the operating indications summarized by the editorial criteria provided for the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini – first published in 1974, and revised and updated in 2015 – this study compares the various methodological approaches adopted while preparing critical editions and dealing with the specific features of each passage in which self-borrowing appears. This comparison furthermore allows us to formulate a general overview of the entire editorial undertaking. This in turn will give us a glimpse of how principles such as the autograph's centrality and concepts such as authenticity and originality have often become problematic and have been put into question. Knowing that Rossini often rewrote the pieces he self-borrowed is fundamental for philologists working on the critical edition of his works. Decoding the modus operandi Rossini adopted in each case of self-borrowing is therefore equally important, and can help choose the sources closest to Rossini's idea of the self-borrowed pieces at the time of their reuse.

Gaetano Donizetti's versatile production unfolded over three decades (1818–43) and was staged in the foremost Italian and European theatres. In this article I question his self-borrowing as a chiefly economic practice, offering novel keys to reading his re-use of existing materials. In the introductory section, I offer a preliminary discussion of the coeval discourse on Donizetti's self-imitation as it surfaces in the press, which appears to follow in the footsteps of that on Rossini's. I then look at his self-borrowings across genres, dwelling on the ways in which he re-functionalized earlier serious passages within comic frames, almost inevitably to achieve a parodic effect. After discussing the links between parody and diegetic music – one of his favourite contexts for employing older materials – I turn to Donizetti's serious production, advancing the hypothesis that his recourse to self-borrowing could take on semantic connotations. In so doing, in the second part of the article I focus on selected case studies grouped into three thematic areas, which – similarly to, and occasionally in connection with diegetic music – all involve the suspension of a character's habitual idioms: deception, rituals and madness. The article includes extended examples from the composer's Linda di Chamounix (Vienna, Kärntnertortheater, 1842), Sancia di Castiglia (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1832), Il paria (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1829), Marino Faliero (Paris, Théâtre-Italien, 1835), Enrico di Borgogna (Venice, Teatro San Luca, 1818), and Anna Bolena (Milan, Teatro Carcano, 1830). My ultimate concern is to demonstrate that Donizetti's use of self-borrowing could perform a dramatic function, deliberately connoting the altered modes of expression of the characters to which the earlier piece is associated.

Franz Schubert's final attempt at a Singspiel was Die Verschworenen (The Conspirators, D. 787), a loose adaptation of three comedies by Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae (Assemblywomen) and Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria). Composed in 1823, but not premiered until 1861 (in Vienna), the work was successfully revived for its United States premiere 18 months later, in Hoboken, New Jersey, for a thriving German-American cultural community at the time of the American Civil War. The historical conditions of early performances in Hoboken and the Kleindeutschland neighbourhood of Manhattan, and the reasons for the work's programming by its conductor, Friedrich Adolf Sorge, a prominent German-American political and labour leader who wanted the arts to ‘shake up the people’, are addressed. Schubert's Singspiel had several layers of meaning for its audiences of mostly German immigrants living in the New York City area: as an adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, set in the Crusades, it was a comic plea for peace both in the early years of the Civil War and amid the violent political strife on the path toward German unification. Its use of parts of Aristophanes’s Ecclesiazusae suggested relevance to labour disputes that Sorge had been involved in since the 1850s and would eventually lead himself after establishing the New York Section of the International Workingmen's Association. In this context, Schubert's work becomes both Germanic and Hellenic, medieval and modern, thereby becoming an assurance of Old-World culture for its varied German-American audiences.

Rossini's Ciro in Babilonia, ossia, La caduta di Baldassare (Cyrus in Babylon, or, The Fall of Belshazzar) was performed during Lent in 1812 at Ferrara's Teatro Comunale. This study examines how the opera's librettist Francesco Aventi synthesized disparate sources that included the Greek historian Herodotus and the Biblical prophets, ancient and early modern prose treatises on the Persian king Cyrus the Great, and baroque operatic representations of imperial power; and how Rossini responded to those sources musically for the particular historical moment in March of 1812. The piece is of interest as the first serious opera for the librettist and the composer both. It displays innovative approaches to classicizing material familiar from the eighteenth-century, as exemplified in Metastasio's Ciro riconosciuto and Sarti's Giulio Sabino, and it presents the secular hero Cyrus as a Christological figure that suffers and then triumphs with divine help. Musically it anticipates developments in Rossini's own Mosè in Egitto and Semiramide. The title “Under cover in Babylon” refers first to Aventi's and Rossini's use of the standard operatic plot device of the disguised lover to motivate Cyrus's entry into the enemy city of Babylon. Second, by calling the piece an “oratorio” and including Biblical material, they disguised an opera as an entertainment appropriate for Lent. Finally, the piece carries possible but subtly expressed messages connected with Napoleonic Italy and the Ferrarese Jewish community.