Alongside the model embellishments Mozart composed for various keyboard works, he also wrote embellishments for contemporary arias including ‘Ah, se a morir mi chiama’ from Lucio Silla, the concert aria ‘Non sò d'onde viene’ K.294 and ‘Cara, la dolce fiamma’ from J.C. Bach's Adriano in Siria. Although these have been overlooked in the critical literature, they shed light on many aspects of Mozart's art of melodic decoration. In this article, I begin by examining these notated operatic embellishments: their textual histories, the styles of elaboration they evince, the pacing with which they unfold, and their motivic construction, as well as their relation to broader trends in Mozart's style. I then explore the embellishments Mozart composed into the texts of his other operas, arguing that these served not only a musical but also an aesthetic purpose, furthering elements of characterisation and drama, particularly in Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. I end with brief remarks on the challenges facing modern-day interpreters who wish to embellish Mozart's operas.

The Zhu Maichen story originates as a case of ‘female-initiated divorce' in an ancient Chinese biography, before later becoming a familiar late imperial narrative. In the last hundred years, it has featured as a prominent part of the narrative heritage available for operatic reworking. The absence of a canonical authorial version gives more space for playwrights and performers to incorporate their current perspectives of gender and sexuality into various renditions. We have seen a continuance of older patterns where the wife is demonised for her desire to divorce, as well as productions tending to reconsider the travails of the wife. The Hokkien-language genre liyuanxi draws on local narrative versions to arrive at a happy ending, enabling Zhu to remarry his wife, while a new jingju (Beijing opera) version at the turn of century even enables the disillusioned wife to liberate herself from the hypocritic Confucian family. Yet in liyuanxi the wife is taken back, having retained chastity during their parting, while in jingju the wife's materialistic motivations led to criticism in the press. The female-initiated divorce thus provides no escape for Zhu Maichen's wife, who is condemned even when tragedy is averted or the narrative’s patriarchal morality subverted.

Premiered in London twelve years after the unsuccessful return of the first British embassy to China, led by Lord George Macartney, Domenico Corri's five-act ‘dramatic opera’, The Travellers, or Music's Fascination (1806), is a unique work exhibiting concrete connections to the embassy in its dramatic concept, musical and visual sources. This article explores how the subject of the opera – tracing the ‘progress of music’ from China to Britain – reflected the contemporary discussion about Chinese music, articulated most clearly by Charles Burney, who held a significant interest in the embassy's musical exchange. By incorporating a Chinese melody and ‘realistic’ visual representation connected to the embassy, the opera reconstructs certain ceremonies and musical experience witnessed by the members of the embassy. Interestingly, the opera balances first-hand knowledge of Chinese music and culture with an emerging imperialist view, and dramatises the aim of the embassy to show British advancement in the arts and sciences.

Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is a film that not only represents a performance of Mozart's opera but also reflects on the experience it generates in the theatrical audience. The opera becomes the means through which Bergman explores the magic of theatrical illusion by displaying the artifice behind it. I examine the film's take on the representation of theatrical illusion from two perspectives. First, with reference to the famous sequence of the overture, I demonstrate the crucial role of the audience's imaginative engagement. Second, I zero in on Bergman's role as omniscient director who not only uncovers the artificiality of the theatrical source but also plays tricks with the film audience. Yet our observing the ‘constructed naturalness’ of the magic flute and Papageno or the theatricality of the Queen of the Night's performance does not hinder the film's ability to engage us. Rather, witnessing the workings of illusion strengthens its grip on us.

Although the Takarazuka Revue is technically a musical company, its founder's ambition was to create a uniquely Japanese form of opera or operetta, merging elements from Western and Japanese forms. Like opera, and unlike musicals in general, trouser roles play a central part in the all-female Takarazuka Revue, and are typically cited as its main appeal. Research from a Japanese-studies perspective tends to discuss the Takarazuka Revue trouser roles, otokoyaku, as a gender-reversal of all-male kabuki, or put them in the context of androgynous or cross-dressing Japanese idols. This article addresses their connection to trouser roles in non-Japanese music theatre, specifically opera. It does so through three lenses: first, the Takarazuka Revue's opera loans and adaptations; second, the shared aesthetic appeal of trouser roles in these two theatre forms; and finally, the singing styles employed in the Takarazuka Revue, including their change over time and relation to classical singing.

Around 1900, Engelbert Humperdinck and Adelheid Wette's Hänsel und Gretel was one of the most widely performed operas in Europe. The critical discourse prompted by its Paris premiere provides an opportunity for exploring the political dynamics of nineteenth-century fairy tales and for elucidating the piece's considerable historical significance. Although Humperdinck's opera was a prime vehicle for perpetuating Franco-German cultural competition, a prominent strand of its Parisian reception emphasised transnational commonalities linking French and German cultural heritage – an emphasis facilitated by the fairy tale's nationalist ideologies. According to some Parisian critics, the opera's wildly successful representation of childhood explained its international success. Certainly, Hänsel und Gretel embodied an influential perception of childhood that also animated late nineteenth-century French literary and political spheres. In so doing, the opera also gave musical and dramatic shape to some highly restrictive aspects of the Romantic image of the divinely protected child.

This article considers the parallel histories of the opera houses in Cairo, Egypt and Cape Town, South Africa. Their respective stories reflect common and divergent experiences of the colonial and postcolonial and the emergent national and nationalist identities at the terminal cities of Africa. Considered separately from the content performed on their stages, the article traces the significance of the buildings as part of their cities. In each city the opera house has been destroyed and rebuilt, under new regimes with new purposes. The discursive value of opera houses is considered more broadly, with evidence presented for the houses as functionaries of the ‘operatic state’ or impresarialist institutions. Who is welcomed in and courted at the opera house is investigated as part of the phenomenon of a nominally public space with conventionalised issues of access.

Contemporary opera exhibits a wide range of motivations for and approaches to making musical allusions to the past, more so than in any other period in the genre's history. I find, contrary to common definitions of musical postmodernism, that allusions are typically meaningful and symbolic in recent postmodern operas. I briefly consider musical collage in operas that represent a proverbial ‘postmodern’ approach to the past, with operas by Cage and Corigliano serving as extreme cases. The core sections of the article are devoted to three of the most prominent contemporary composers whose operas illustrate the range of forms and motives musical allusion has taken over the past few decades: John Adams's Nixon in China (1987), Louis Andriessen's ‘film opera’ La Commedia (2008) and The Exterminating Angel (2016) by Thomas Adès. By detailing musical allusion in these works, I offer evidence in support of a revisionary understanding of these operas and the aesthetic stances of these composers, who each engaged extensively in musical allusion to varying degrees. I conclude with rather unexpected examples of operatic allusion by composers (Glass, Nova, Mazzoli) who typically do not reference the past in their works. For numerous recent composers, opera appears to function as a particularly powerful magnetic attraction to the past, pulling into its orbit the most unlikely figures and warping their proclaimed aesthetic profiles. For opera audiences, allusion is experienced differentially and shapes popular perceptions of the genre as a whole.