This article explores the technological affordances of vocal production software in performance through a case study of Shibuya Keīchirō's The End (2012). In the performance of this ‘humanless opera’, desires for pliability and fantasies of control are realised through the affordances of a singing voice synthesis software known as Vocaloid. By reflecting on The End's thematic focus on death and existentialism and on notions of vocal virtuosity, and by exploring the socio-technical processes by which the protagonist, virtual pop star Hatsune Miku, was constructed, the article provides an alternative narrative to vocal production and intermundane collaboration as it relates to the fluid and reversible configurations between voices, bodies and technologies in performance.

It has long been claimed that opera can give expression to the uneasy relationship between the body and the voice. Operatic voices seem to exceed the capacity of the bodies that produce them in a way that conveys a sense of mechanisation or limited agency, inviting metaphorical comparisons to marionettes. Yet recent studies of gesture have suggested that bodies are not simply passively inscribed with meaning but that they also mediate the process of inscription. Investigating the implications of this claim for opera, this article discusses two recent essays by Judith Butler, in which she draws from Walter Benjamin's account of gesture in Brecht's epic theatre to argue for the performative power of incomplete or decontextualised bodily actions. It then traces this idea to a moment in epic theatre's own prehistory, focusing on Ferruccio Busoni's opera Doktor Faust. The article makes both a theoretical point and an historical claim: it highlights how bodies and words that are decontextualised can perform a critical function despite not enjoying the usual citational supports necessary for a speech act; and it argues that Busoni's Doktor Faust and his theory of opera were a part of the intellectual prehistory to Butler's conceptualisation of bodily performativity.

Following the premiere of Tosca in January 1900, Giacomo Puccini's progressive critics generally took issue with two main aspects of the opera: the first was the composer's supposedly unoriginal modes of expression, and the second was the work's scandalous plot. While many attributed the dark tone of Tosca to its French source, Sardou's melodrama La Tosca, I contend that there is an underlying context for both the dramatic and the musical unsavouriness of Puccini's verismo opera: the Italian fascination with criminology. Beginning in the 1870s after Italian unification, positivist criminologists, led by Cesare Lombroso, sought to locate the organic causes of criminality and believed that deviancy was objectively readable through the body. Lombroso further conceptualised the ‘born criminal’ as an exceptional individual that was predisposed to artistic expression. His theories, rooted in deeply troubling stereotypes and conventional wisdom, gained traction with a bourgeois public as well as with contemporary luminaries, including Giuseppe Giacosa, one of Puccini's librettists. Drawing on Lombroso's writings, letters and archived objects, I show how the criminologist's bourgeois version of perversity provides a valuable framework to evaluate the derivative modes of deviant expression present not only in Tosca, but within verismo opera at large.

In 2018, Maria Callas rose from the dead. During a series of tours dubbed Callas in Concert, local orchestras performed with a three-dimensional hologram of the departed diva as she re-sounded arias of her past. This virtual manifestation of Callas put on a convincing show. Listeners were struck by the quality of the diva's voice – ‘from heart-breaking vulnerability to imposing strength’ – and marvelled at foley effects such as the clicking of her heels and rustling of her gown. Notably, however, the performance fell victim to repeated technical failures. In Chicago, a glitch caused her final encore to end prematurely; in Blacksburg, Virginia, audience members were distracted by the transparent nature of the hologram, which gave Callas an ‘especially ghostly appearance’. The performances set the operatic sphere atwitter with questions of ethics and taste, debates over classical music's obligations to the living and devotions to the dead. Anthony Tommasini likened the performances to a grand séance, an act of operatic necrophilia. Catherine Womack interpreted the spectral shows as a sign that ‘in the twenty-first century, living and breathing are not prerequisites for a successful performing career’. However, as Deirdre Loughridge, Gundula Kreuzer and Gabriela Cruz demonstrate in their monographs, Callas in Concert is not a phenomenon unique to the twenty-first century. Indeed, the authors show that technologically mediated resurrections of the dead, operatic appeals to nostalgia, and illusion-busting technical failures are instead part of a long operatic tradition, one which began well before the holographic revitalisations of Maria Callas.

This article examines the production and reception history of C. S. Favart's La fête du château, commissioned by a French noblewoman, the Marquise of Monconseil, to mark her granddaughter's inoculation against smallpox in 1766. The first half of the article situates the vaudeville comedy at the Bagatelle (Monconseil's private theatre), underscoring the gendered tropes that had accrued to the disease in the late eighteenth century and the function of elite sociability in promoting its prevention. The second half of the article reconstructs the public trajectory of the work, which was presented at Versailles after the controversial inoculation of Louis XVI in 1774. Notably, the agent behind this theatrical public-health campaign was the queen, Marie Antoinette. A consideration of La fête du château's popularity and influence broadens our understanding of the conditions under which ancien-régime opera took on political meaning, as well as the role of women patrons and consumers in this process.

Despite the advent of voice studies, opera scholars have yet to develop a thoroughgoing conversation about one of the most familiar elements of operatic vocal culture: voice type (categories such as soprano, tenor and the like). To address this, I suggest opera scholars analyse ideologies of voice type: the complex of ideas and practices that guide how individuals understand voice types and their relevance to the operatic experience. I devote the main part of this article to a historical case study of ideologies of voice type in action, focusing on Maurice Ravel, his 1911 opera L'heure espagnole, and the relatively obscure voice type Ravel assigned to Ramiro, the opera's male protagonist, the baryton-Martin. I argue that the characteristically modern ideology of voice type Ravel adopted in L'heure espagnole was unusual for its time and that this helps explains the work's reception.