In the mid-nineteenth century, opéra de salon dominated residential entertainment in Parisian salons. As these short, comedic operas were adapted for household receptions, librettists and composers faced a choice: adhere to staging conventions or adapt their works to fit the idiosyncrasies of residential space. Focusing on the salon of Anne Gabrielle Orfila, who was a proponent of opéra de salon and who hosted at least ten unique productions, this study examines how opera was adapted to salon space. It shows how stage action was not always contained by a single room, with scenes often spanning adjacent rooms. This affected audience seating and shaped the dramatic experience. The study also considers the significance of salon décor as it harmonized with or competed with the opera scenery. At a time when spectacle and elaborate designs prevailed at the Paris Opéra, opéra de salon presented a contrasting model that challenged theatrical conventions.

In this chapter, I explore a selection of musical games performed at seventeenth-century French literary salons, where members of a coterie quoted recitative, parodied airs, and reimagined entire opera scenes. Though musical conversations were ephemeral, the outlines of the social practices can be reconstructed through a combined study of various types of sources. Letters crystallize conversations interwoven with opera fragments, while plays depict galant men courting women by interspersing sung quotations from contemporary operas into conversations, repurposing voguish spectacles as declarations of love. Manuscript chansonniers preserve parodies of complete opera scenes, substituting operatic characters with recognizable contemporary figures and refashioning the verse. By fostering spaces where participants ascended social hierarchies through their witty abilities as conversationalists, salon hosts transformed opera into an interactive social practice.

This chapter explores the “joint” musical education of the two siblings Fanny and Felix, taking as its point of departure the educational backgrounds of the parents which differentiated little by gender in terms of approach and content, but certainly in the intended paths for the two children. Felix was destined to become a professional composer, and the genres in which he was groomed were thus the “public” ones (opera in particular) while Fanny was expected to excel in the “small” genres: piano pieces and songs.

An examination of Meredith Monk’s 1976 opera Quarry in the context of her other works of music theater and film, as well as selected music compositions from the full span of her career. The analysis reads the opera alongside scholarship on the "post-memory" generation (characterized by its distance from the Holocaust), as well as on photography, monuments and "counter-monuments," and other memorial art.

Chapter 2 places Lucia within the context of bel canto opera in the first half of the nineteenth century and discusses the dramaturgy, voice types and fixed vocal forms that are often found in this style of opera. In addition, going beyond the mere definition of ‘beautifully sung’, Chapter 2 argues that bel canto reflects an operatic work where the singer’s vocal agility (i.e., their coloratura) is the main vehicle that defines the character’s dramatic persona and climactic journey, from an unfortunate individual who, at first glance, is powerless to change their situation, to a fully rounded character with a certain heroic potential. Lucia is unique in this regard owing to the main character’s ability to shape-shift from a quiet and somewhat naïve lover and dutiful daughter to a murderer and usurper of family values. This malleability between a tasteful showpiece for the female voice and a tragic tour-de-force is one of the main factors that keeps Lucia in the repertoire today. Such versatility places Donizetti’s opera more in line with the psychologically rich and often violent works of Verdi and Puccini at the end of the century rather than the operatic works of the 1830s.

Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory developed since the 1990s for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe, this chapter approaches opera as a crucial cultural site for (re)negotiating the relationship with “the West,” Soviet hegemony, and the Global South after 1948. It focuses on the ambivalence in representations of the racialized Other in Czech opera, which highlights the specific, lateral relationship between what was formally known as the Second and Third worlds. The chapter offers a close reading of the opera Jezero Ukereve (“Lake Ukerewe”) by Otmar Mácha, premiered in 1966. Featuring Black and mixed-race characters, the opera generally expresses empathy for and solidarity with the colonized populations, informed by the Czechs’ experience with German oppression, yet it unavoidably reproduces the colonial ideology of a civilizational mission. The opera is interpreted in relation to Czechoslovakia’s official Africa policy and the aesthetic debates about Czech New Music.

Most public music institutions in the Czech lands have been affected by the region’s complex political history. This chapter focuses on the politicization of public music institutions dedicated to opera (both opera theaters and opera companies, such as the Estates Theater, the Czech National Theater, and the New German Theater) and symphonic music (both concert halls, such as the Rudolfinum and the Municipal House, and the ensembles that performed in them). To avoid Pragocentrism, the chapter also explores music history in the north Bohemian spa town Teplice (Teplitz). Unlike Prague, Teplice remained a predominantly German-speaking city until the forced removal of the German population from the Czech lands after World War II. In both cities, musical institutions transformed according to their inhabitants’ social and political preferences, and musical works of the past entered the artistic canon in connection to patriotic and national agendas.

Throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Habsburg court resided predominantly in Vienna. Consequently, the Habsburg monarchs of Bohemia rarely visited Prague, and visits of the entire court were even rarer because they were expensive both for the monarch and the city. Therefore, each coronation of a Habsburg emperor as the Bohemian king was a significant event reflecting both the immediate political context and more general cultural and historical trends, such as the role of music in court ceremonies and the relationship between Bohemian and Viennese musical practices. This chapter sketches the relationship between coronation music and music and operatic developments in Prague in general, particularly in connection to the coronations of Charles VI (1723), Maria Theresa (1743), Leopold II (1791), and Francis II (1792).

During the epochal 1895 Czechoslavonic Ethnographic Exhibition, the musicologist Otakar Hostinský described folksong as “one of the most significant and simultaneously most noble expressions of the people’s spiritual life.” In this chapter, the discourse is explored that gave rise to Hostinský’s statement by analyzing the relationship between Czech folk and art music– and the dialectical interdependence of those two terms– through the case studies of Bedřich Smetana’s operas Dvě vdovy (1874, rev. 1877) and Hubička (1876). These operas, and the reception of Smetana’s music more generally, were crucial components in the larger process of institutionalizing folk music as one of, if not the primary resource for musical nationalism in the toolbox of Czech composers. If we are to appreciate the fullness of Czech composers’ oeuvres in all their complexity, it behooves us to understand, and to dismantle wherever appropriate, the dominant narrative of their reliance on folksong.

In this chapter, Sarah Parker interviews Tom Floyd and Sophie Goldrick of Shadow Opera about the process of creating Veritable Michael, an opera and podcast inspired by Michael Field’s life and work. Tom Floyd is the Artistic Director of Shadow Opera and Sophie Goldrick is the Producer and mezzo-soprano, who sings the part of Katharine Bradley in the show. In this interview, they respond to questions about how they originally conceived the piece, why opera is a suitable form for telling Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s story, how the collaborative creative process worked, and how audiences have reacted to the performance and the podcast.

Performers have played a crucial role not only in communicating Schoenberg’s music and musical thought to a wider audience, but also in framing expectations and reception. This chapter places Schoenberg in a Romantic context of aesthetic, not least emotional, expectations and of exacting extension of performance possibilities and requirements, and suggests that some of the difficulties Schoenberg’s music experienced with audiences may be attributed to inadequate performance or to the unwillingness of musicians to perform it. Various performances of Schoenberg’s music are considered, starting with Schoenberg himself, taking in artists such as Alexander Zemlinsky, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, Eduard Steuermann, Marya Freund and Rudolf Kolisch, and concluding with conductor advocates such as Hans Rosbaud and, posthumously, Pierre Boulez.

In Schoenberg’s Vienna the theatre, more so than music, was central to cultural discourse; unsurprisingly, opera and musical drama interested Schoenberg from early on, and he returned to dramatic genres repeatedly throughout his compositional career. In surveying the lively and varied theatrical life of Vienna around 1900 and after, this chapter examines shifting trends in modernist drama – including changing fashions in staging and set design – alongside the influence of significant authors, artists and innovators. It locates the Viennese stage as a site for cultural exchange with other major European centres, and ultimately argues that, if written from the perspective of the theatre, the history of Viennese musical modernism would look quite different from the story of post-tonal progress that has dominated our narratives of Schoenberg’s creative trajectory.

When Shelley resolved to leave England for Italy with his family, he conceived his expatriation as a voluntary exile. Yet, for several months after their arrival, the Shelleys criss-crossed the peninsula like the Grand Tourists of old, visiting all its major cities and a few minor destinations, which Shelley described at length in his correspondence and often evoked in his poetry. A peculiarity of Shelley’s travel letters is his ambivalent attitude towards Italy, revealed by his constant juxtaposition of the magnificent beauty of its art and nature and the equally striking spectacle of the Italians’ degradation. However, as the first independence movements raised the promise of the country’s political and cultural resurgence, Shelley started to develop a greater appreciation of its inhabitants. At the same time, having finally settled, he turned his attention away from the wonders and contrasts of Italy to celebrate the simple life of his exile community.