This article examines the first production and early reception of Verdi’s Ernani in Vienna in relation to cultural processes supporting strategies of imperial representation promoted by the Habsburg Court. By discussing newspaper reviews, archival documents, sketches of the sets for the first Viennese production, I show how the opera responded to official narratives of the Habsburg Empire and to specific facets of the local culture of monumentality. I argue that particularly the Act III Finale functioned along the lines of memorial practices that projected the Habsburg dynasty as the source of unity of the empire and its peoples. Finally, I consider the Viennese reception of Ernani in the broader context of its Italian dissemination, suggesting how fluctuating political readings of the opera depended upon (rather than undermining) multidirectional cultural exchanges.

Italian singer Giulia Grisi was imagined and ‘possessed’ in various ways by members of diverse social groups in London during the 1830s. Audience members could bring different versions of the diva home: through reports (or experiences with her) as a guest or entertainer at parties, through gossip about her personal life reported in newspapers and through pieces arranged ‘as sung by’ her. The fluid and constantly negotiated relationship between the diva and her audience offered a locus for expressing social relations in London during a period of changing class and national definitions. It is neither possible nor desirable to recover a singular idea of Grisi as a celebrity or as a woman; instead, the multiple images of Grisi must be read as negotiations of identity on the part of the consumers as they participated in the nascent celebrity culture of the 1830s.

Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the performance and reception history of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), but as this article will demonstrate, the opera played an indispensable role in the repertories of Weimar-era opera houses. Despite an evident desire on the part of some Weimar Republic directors and designers of Die Meistersinger to draw on staging innovations of the time, productions of the work from this period are characterised by scenic conservatism and repetition of familiar naturalistic imagery. This was not coincidental, I will argue, since Die Meistersinger served as a comforting rite for many opera-going members of the Weimar-era middle classes, at least some of whom felt economically or socially beleaguered in the aftermath of World War I. But no matter how secure the conservative theatrical conventions surrounding the Weimar Republic Meistersinger appeared, the repressed turmoil of the period seeped into ideas about the work, haunting the performance and reception of constructed German stability.

With its combination of gestures and music, instrumental sections, a narrator who occupies most of the composition, and two characters who sing for very short sections while acting and dancing for the rest of the piece, Monteverdi’s Combattimento defies genre definition. Starting from Tim Carter’s reading of the composition as a salon entertainment and responding to Suzanne Cusick’s call for the untangling of Combattimento’s multiplicity of meanings, this article investigates Combattimento in its ritualisation and performance of mutually defining relations that are mediated by the social and ideological implications of its immediate performance space, the salon – or portego, in Venetian dialect – the main entertainment hall of Venetian palaces. Using this as a key framework, the article explores the Combattimento’s associations with Venice itself as the broader performance space. Within that context, the choice of a particular episode from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata for Monteverdi’s composition – with its mixture of love and violence, assimilation and confrontation, personal identity and agency, history of winners and history of victims1 – proves as crucial to seventeenth-century Venice, at the crossroads between Western and Islamic civilisations, as it does for today’s culture.

To turn to 1830s London is to explore a time and place newly obsessed with the eye and with lighting technologies. Understanding how opera was experienced at this time, therefore, requires that visuality be brought to the fore. One staging in particular, that of Gustavus the Third, adapted from Daniel Auber’s Gustave III for Covent Garden in 1833, reveals how new discussions about light and vision were influencing responses to opera. While London adaptations of French grands opéras in the nineteenth century have often been dismissed as shabby imitations, critics insisted that the spectacle in Gustavus outstripped anything that had ever been done in Paris. The reason, I propose, was the source and focus of that spectacle: light.

When the grands opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer were introduced to London audiences as a cluster in the mid-1800s, critics identified moments of understated musical and dramatic expression, and made little mention of more sensational dimensions, such as their impressive staging. With a focus on the 1849 staging of Le Prophète at the brand-new Royal Italian Opera in London, this article demonstrates that numerous critics were keen to endorse this new opera house, where most of the composer’s works were mounted, and that, to this end, they zeroed in on the most bare and restrained elements in his works so as to invest them with moral and intellectual relevance for Victorian audiences. Approaching Le Prophète as various London critics did is to see it anew and to consider alternatives to recent narratives which have taken material excess as a starting point for understanding the success of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras on the continent.

Grand opéra occupied a prominent but fraught position in the life of New Orleans in the 1830s, where it became a focus for debates surrounding contemporary cultural and political issues. In 1835, the city’s rival theatres – one francophone, the other anglophone – raced to give the first performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, bringing tensions between their respective communities to a head. This article explores Robert’s arrival in New Orleans, arguing that the discourses that grew up first around this work and later Les Huguenots provided a means through which opposing linguistic and cultural factions within the city could negotiate their local, national and international identities.

This article examines the political and cultural circumstances leading to the Italian premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s posthumous opera L’Africaine at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in November 1865. Meyerbeer’s death in May 1864 and the French premiere of his last opera the following year combined to produce a striking moment of transnational cosmopolitan sentiment that built on the composer’s reputation for writing music that had the capacity to communicate across national and political boundaries. Shortly after the Unification of Italy, Bologna was keen to capitalise on these emotions and used the Italian premiere strategically in order to position itself as one of the cultural capitals of the new Italian nation state.