Let's start with where opera happens: the opera house. For the 2022/23 season, Opernhaus Dortmund, known for its fine instinct for rare gems on the operatic stage, decided to mount Jacques François Fromental Halévy's La Juive. Having been introduced to this grand opéra as a first-year musicology student, I was excited to see the premiere of Sybrand van der Werf's production on a Sunday night in November 2022 – while preparing this review. As it turns out, the performance transferred me straight into the core arguments of each of the three books under consideration here: the intense co-presence unfolding between the performer and audience, generated as in Clemens Risi's account by a briefly indisposed singer; the inclusion of visual codes evoking SM erotic play on stage, which also informs Axel Englund's investigation; and finally, the production of a hypermedia spectacle, which is Tereza Havelková's central concern. A single performance demonstrated the relevance and applicability of each of Risi's, Englund's and Havelková's studies.

In 1828, five years after the premiere in Venice of Rossini's final Italian opera, Semiramide, Gaetano Rossi's libretto was again set to music, this time by the famed bel canto tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City. The opera, one of the first to be composed in Latin America after the collapse of the Spanish empire, was intended to demonstrate independent Mexico's ability not just to import Italian opera from Europe but also to produce new works. Instead of proving Mexico's credentials as a successful operatic nation, however, García's Semiramide became a problematic space for bringing to light tensions between underlying colonial resistance and the new liberal influence of France, England and Italy. This article contextualises this momentous operatic event within the wider frame of Mexico's nation building and investigates how the manifold political tensions and cultural contradictions of Mexico's postcolonial transition were absorbed and amplified by both García's composition and its staging.

This article interrogates how Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten and its early reception reflected an uneasiness about the confines of manhood. As an opera with a complex genesis and a difficult reception history, Die Gezeichneten's allure comes from its resistance to being reduced to only one thing. I nevertheless seek to locate this opera around the time of its premiere towards the end of the First World War. I contend that Die Gezeichneten and its immediate reception charted a key transition in Austro-German masculinity. Specifically, the opera's early performances marked a move away from the period's normative models of bourgeois masculinity (and their corresponding ideas about appearance, health and nationhood) and towards an alternative masculinity preoccupied with degeneracy. I focus on the opera's masks, arguing that, through acts of concealment and disclosure, the opera's two male protagonists struggle to negotiate expectations of an emotionally controlled modern manhood, calling attention to wartime anxieties about what it meant to be a man. Such anxieties resulted in a hardening of attitudes towards the masculine gender, which influenced contemporary music criticism too. Die Gezeichneten's highly sensationalist early reviews relied on a language of degeneracy. Yet I suggest that the opera's initial reception captured a critical moment in this language's history before it was subsumed under Nazi ideology.

This article retraces Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) to the great Italian mattatori (star actors), particularly Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915), whose ground-breaking performances of the Moor of Venice, in a translation by Giulio Carcano, coincided with the time when Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, were collaborating on their Otello. The grandi attori enjoyed a reputation for realistic immediacy and impulsiveness readily associated with cultural stereotypes about Italy's perceived ‘otherness’. In the ethnographic context of nineteenth-century Italy, it is argued here that the actors’ interpretation of Shakespeare's Moor not only synthesised the multilateral cultural threads of the Jacobean Othello, but also partnered this racial alterity with a new dramatic language, which went on to influence Verdi's opera and prompt book, and, ultimately, to perpetuate an exoticised ‘brand’ of Italian artistic culture on stage at a time when Italy was fashioning its own national identity.