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.

Chapter 3 explores how the letters patent authorizing the duopoly laid the groundwork for a theatre of lavishness and innovation, thereby affiliating the restored stage to the costly improvements sweeping London after the Great Fire of 1666. Theatrical amelioration bolstered national pride – England was finally catching up with continental stagecraft – and made available luxurious viewing conditions previously reserved for court audiences. To realize these ends, management chose newly developed, upmarket neighborhoods to site their equally expensive baroque playhouses. Despite these improvements, the companies risked disappointing the very consumer expectations aroused by the culture of improvement. They simply could not afford new scenes, machines, and special effects for every play. Moreover, their playhouses were ruinously costly to operate – they required enormous manpower compared to early modern stages – and personnel expenses skyrocketed further whenever the companies ventured upon a dramatic opera or spectacle-heavy production. Not until the 1690s were strategies finally devised to escape the culture of improvement.

This chapter balances practical advice with aesthetic considerations to give an overview of a composer’s numerous roles in writing music for opera, dance, and theatre. The chapter begins with an overview of collaborative techniques and language, before understanding a bit more about how to shape musical ideas both by yourself and then through workshopping and rehearsal processes.

This chapter explores the voice as a complex, expressive instrument. It begins by outlining voice types, techniques, and styles – ranging from opera to musical theatre and popular music –  before looking at the relationship between language and music, and finally exploring the nature of idiomatic vocal writing and so-called extended techniques. The chapter finishes with a nod to the future of vocal music by briefly thinking about the voice in conjunction with electronics.

Debussy’s operatic aesthetic is defined as much in relation to the traditional genres of French opera as in relation to Wagner or naturalism. His style is built by both assimilation and opposition – the two processes can be simultaneous. The assimilation process, considered as a more or less visible and conscious form of appropriation, is the most commented on in the case of Pelléas et Mélisande: what Wagnerian processes does Debussy retain in his score? How does he integrate earlier styles into his writing? What elements of Russian music may have influenced him? And so on. The opposition process is less often analysed, for it is not confined to the rejection of a work, but hinges on this work by responding negatively to its musical concepts. With Debussy, negation becomes a powerful creative operation. One of the peculiarities of his personality is radicalism, amplified by the search for an ideal and uniqueness. To write is to gradually eliminate the easy solutions, the surplus, the conventions.

Chapter 34 surveys Goethe’s extensive influence on the musical world. It considers his own musical background, his relations with contemporary composers, notably Carl Friedrich Zelter, and focuses especially on Goethe’s reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, his influence was most evident in the Lied (art-song), most famously those of Franz Schubert, and in opera, where Faust proved especially powerful. Twentieth-century composers were less likely to set Goethe’s literary texts, but both Richard Strauss and Anton Webern engaged intensively with his thought in their own creative activity.

In 1907, fresh from his studies with Ravel, Ralph Vaughan Williams returned to Cambridge for a performance of his recent Towards the Unknown Region, and was captivated by the ‘new spirit’ revitalizing its cultural institutions. His music was warmly received, and at that critical point in his life, encouraged, while its academic dimension helped him to confirm his self-belief and refine his ideas. His music was played, discussed, and appreciated through local performances of his recent compositions, the Wasps, early chamber music, and his first opera, Hugh the Drover. In the years up to the First World War, he experimented with different styles, and in a sympathetic atmosphere discussed his new compositions, his developing views on teaching, and on the place of music in everyday life. His early Cambridge connections continued to play active roles throughout Vaughan Williams’s long creative life.

Early on, Bernstein often conducted operas (Cherubini, Bellini) and other sung stage works (Blitzstein, Weill). He would later make renowned opera recordings in New York and Vienna. His greatest contributions to the genre are three quite varied compositions. The short, all-sung Trouble in Tahiti (1952) is bitingly satirical. Candide (1956) is an operetta, with plentiful spoken dialogue. The words were provided by a half-dozen collaborators, partly for later productions (each production included a somewhat different selection of musical numbers). The entirely serious A Quiet Place (1983−86) deals with family tensions and disappointments. Its style is highly eclectic, ranging from blues to twelve-tone. A Quiet Place has one official version (in which Trouble in Tahiti becomes two interludes in Act 2) and one in which the orchestration has been reduced by Garth Edwin Sunderland. The latter omits Tahiti but restores important passages that the official version omits.

Bernstein loved to conduct works (e.g., by Liszt, Mahler, Ravel) inspired by dance rhythms and folk songs of various lands and peoples. His own compositions, similarly, often invoke distant places and their musics. Fancy Free and West Side Story include such Latin American dance-types as danzón, mambo, and cha-cha-chá. The soprano in Trouble in Tahiti sings about a film full of stereotypical Pacific-island ‘natives’. Other references to various Elsewheres occur in Songfest (a rhythmically adventurous Latin American sound for ‘A Julia Burgos’; Middle Eastern stylistic allusions in ‘Zizi’s Lament’), On the Town (the Congacabana nightclub scene; the humorously klezmer-ish, rather than Arab-sounding, call of Rajah Bimmy), Wonderful Town (‘Conga!’), and two works inspired by visits to Palestine/Israel: ‘Silhouette (Galilee)’, based on a well-known Arab song (including some Arabic words); and Four Sabras, no. 2, for piano (‘Idele, the Chasidele’), which abounds in typically East European Jewish musical traits.