Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s early opera Oprichnik is overdue for rediscovery as one of the composer’s most overt forays into the queer themes that critics and scholars have long appreciated in his mature works. Oprichnik features the composer’s most extensive and provocative employment of travesti in its depiction of a historical figure mostly remembered for his rumoured sexual relationship with tsar Ivan IV. This paper takes a detailed look into this and other queer features of the opera within their cultural, historical and biographical contexts. These contexts, including the development of trouser roles in Russian opera, transformations in public discourse on sexuality and gender, and Tchaikovsky’s relationship with his pupil Vladimir Shilovsky, help bring into focus the special appeal the sixteenth-century Muscovy of Ivan the Terrible and his oprichniki had as a topos for a Russian artist experimenting in the artistic depiction of sexual and gender variance.

The story of opera in what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire tends to be particularly convoluted, given the complexity of the region’s history and its political twists and turns. It is perhaps not a stretch to say that nowhere else in Europe had the same level of interest in opera and art music combined with the remarkable mutability of borders, governments and nationalist allegiances across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; indeed, as the three books discussed here show in great detail, opera was a key reason for, and indicator of, the social and political ferment of Habsburg Central Europe. Ranging across a chronological scope that stretches from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, each book explores operatic life in one of three important regional capitals: Vienna, Prague and Budapest, with occasional departures to other places like Brno/Brünn, Sarajevo and Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg. Each volume focuses on the work of a single canonic composer: Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), though in the final case calling the works discussed Offenbach’s is tenuous at best. Finally, each book uses the lens of reception history, exploring the context for operatic creation and performance, and how the meanings of the various operas examined here – Die Frau ohne Schatten (1917), Don Giovanni (1787), Orphée aux enfers (1858) and others – changed according to the shifts in various political, cultural and social environments over time.

In March 1830, travelling troupe director Henri Delorme staged the local premiere of Daniel Auber’s grand opéra La muette de Portici in the northern French town of Valenciennes. The production marks a turning point in the circulation of operatic repertoire across France, kickstarting a thriving but as yet unacknowledged phenomenon of touring grand opéra that persisted into the 1860s and beyond. In this article, I reconstruct the artistic and working practices of this phenomenon, and demonstrate how the arrival of the genre in the northern touring circuit allowed local individuals, such as the director, theatre-goers and local critics, to voice their expectations – in musical, dramatic and staging terms – of the appropriate artistic parameters for the emerging genre when seen from a provincial perspective. I suggest that grand opéra’s adjusted scale, status and performance practices on tour had the potential to reconfigure the genre’s meaning for nineteenth-century French audiences and theatrical performers as local agents negotiated shifting sets of centre–periphery dynamics, at once seeking operatic imitation of the capital and rejecting it in favour of locally defined practices and values.

Ever since the beginning of opera, the scenografo’s role has fluctuated between invention and execution, conceptual creation and manual realisation. Initially considered an art in the old, Latin sense of the word – a craft or trade – the profession gradually gained social and aesthetic respectability, shedding its associations with the technical skills of artisans and acquiring the prestige of modern artistic expression. By the early 1800s, prominent scenografi were hailed as ‘men of genius’, although their ennoblement was never quite as complete as some renowned commentators seemed to suggest. Indeed, while we may be tempted to view the scenografo’s transformation from craftsman to artist as an uninterrupted, linear development, the debates on operatic staging that accompanied the 1930s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino challenge this inclination.

This article examines the role and status of operatic scenografi in 1930s Italy, with a particular focus on Florence and the intersection between cultural and institutional histories of the profession. What was Italian operatic set design at the time? What did this theatrical art mean, represent, produce in Tuscany’s foremost Renaissance city? Is it possible to develop a specifically urban approach to the history of set design before World War II, and where might this leave our understanding of opera production labour both during the Fascist period and today?

Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (1958) was arguably the first community opera with an environmental message. It explored the potential extinction of animal and human life, and since then environmentalism as a social issue has begun to emerge in community operas as a distinctive trope. This article examines some more recent examples produced in the UK, from The Split Goose Feather (1979) by Christopher Brown, to Timber! (1990) by Timothy Kraemer, to Russell Hepplewhite’s Till the Summer Comes Again (2012) inspired by Glyndebourne’s wind turbine. It concludes with some reflections on the questions that arise in relation to contemporary opera, the environment and sustainability – notably how the professional operatic world can respond to concerns about the environment, and what steps are necessary to ensure the sustainability of opera for the future.

This article examines the evolution of Soviet operatic conventions during Khrushchev’s Thaw. The first opera to be prematurely cancelled from the Bolshoi Theatre since Stalin was Rodion Shchedrin’s 1961 opera Not Love Alone, and as such, it set the standard for what would be deemed unacceptable in Thaw-era opera. Using this opera as a case study, I employ extensive archival material, including never-before-accessed audience surveys and internal Bolshoi Theatre meeting minutes, to analyse the opera’s path to official acceptance – and then official rejection. I thus illuminate the competing demands that composers, Party bureaucrats, and audiences expected of the Soviet opera project, and the convergences and divergences with the Stalin-era. Finally, I demonstrate why the project of creating a robust repertoire of contemporary-themed Soviet opera failed during the Thaw, never to be revived with such fervour, and demonstrate why Shchedrin’s opera was the attempt closest to achieving enduring success.