INTRODUCTION: OPERA AND THE

AC A D E M I C T U R N S

Victoria Johnson

Opera, created in Florence in the 1580s by a group of artistically inclined

noblemen and other city notables, has been in continuous production
for more than four centuries in Europe, and three in the Americas.
Throughout its history, creators and audiences alike have understood
opera as a multi-media art form, one that includes music, text, visual
elements, and (often) dance. Because of the great expense of opera
performance, local political and economic elites have wielded consid-
erable power over its creators, with the strength of these ties depend-
ing on the demands of artistic and institutional conventions. Though
the distribution and differentiation of labor in opera performance has
varied somewhat according to the historical moment, it has nearly
always included – even at its sparest – singers, a stage with a set, instru-
mentalists, and an audience. And even in the context of quite modest
production values, opera has required an enormous variety of material
and human resources.
The complexity entailed by opera’s combination of multiple artistic
media – a complexity which arguably surpasses that of any other art
form – means that the study of operatic history demands the analytical
tools of a variety of academic disciplines. Nevertheless, until recently,
scholars for decades pried opera apart into the discrete fragments
most susceptible to their preferred methods of analysis: music, words,
singers, theatres, directors, audiences. The operatic unity thereby lost
is not the unity of words and music, nor is it the sense of dramatic unity
sometimes invoked by critics in favorable reviews of individual opera
performances. It is, rather, the original historical unity of the specific
practices comprising the production and consumption of something
conventionally labeled “opera.”
Over the last decade and a half, however, the terrain of opera studies
has been dramatically altered by an explosion of interest in opera across

1
2 Victoria Johnson

disciplines as well as by an increased interdisciplinarity in approaches

to opera. In the wake of the cultural and historical “turns” that trans-
formed the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s,
musicologists in particular have turned in increasing numbers to the
study of opera, and in doing so they have often drawn heavily on the
methods of literary criticism and cultural history. Scholars in a range
of disciplines beyond musicology have also made important contribu-
tions to this wave of new work on opera. Despite this blossoming of
opera studies, however, scholars from the various disciplines concerned
have had few opportunities to juxtapose and compare their differing
approaches to their common object. The present volume aims to cre-
ate just such an opportunity and, at the same time, to extend it to a
broad audience of readers.
The short introductions to each of this volume’s three sections dis-
cuss and compare the various approaches taken by the contributors to
the task of re-embedding opera in its social, political, and cultural con-
texts of creation and reception. In the present introduction, however, I
have a different purpose: to situate the current major themes and meth-
ods in opera studies through a brief examination of the recent history of
the academic disciplines involved, including musicology, history, liter-
ature, and sociology. To this end, I offer a series of maps: first, a map of
the current division of academic labor in the study of opera; next, a map
of the recent intellectual developments – the so-called “turns” – that
have helped to transform opera studies in highly promising ways; and,
finally, a map of the major paths of inquiry evident in recent work on
opera. Depending on the reader’s disciplinary home turf, the territory
covered in this introductory essay may at times be quite familiar; more
often, I hope, the reader will find the brief introductions to the concerns
and recent histories of less familiar disciplines useful and informative.

O P E R A A N D T H E D I V I S I O N O F AC A D E M I C L A B O R

For more than a century, musicology has been the natural repository of
opera scholarship, despite the somewhat marginal position accorded
the operatic form in a discipline that has often considered “pure” music
 Introduction 3

a more legitimate concern.1 Opera has, until relatively recently, been

thought of by many musicologists as a poor relation in the musical fam-
ily, in large part because of its commingling of music and text. It is pre-
cisely this textual element, of course, that has sometimes made opera
seem more accessible to non-musicologists than purely instrumental
music. For example, literary scholars concerned with drama have occa-
sionally opened libretti to ponder such questions as how Shakespeare’s
plays were altered when they were wedded to music or how the dom-
inant literary conventions of a given historical epoch were translated
into the libretto form.2 But, in a parallel to the somewhat marginal
status of opera among musicologists, the libretto has long occupied a
marginal position among the genres studied by scholars of literature,
in part because of a perceived subordination of text to music and the
concomitant decrease in the libretto’s value as “pure” literature.3
Other academic specialists who might fruitfully contribute to the
study of opera have been even less attentive than musicologists and
literary critics to the history of opera. The most important reason for
this inattention is the timidity with which non-musicologists approach
musical works. The apparent non-representational nature of music
(itself the subject of centuries of heated debate) and the technical dif-
ficulty of learning to read music have combined forcefully to discour-
age scholars not fluent in the language of music from putting their
analytical tools to work in this area. And a further obstacle to the pro-
duction of rigorous non-musicological work on opera, as the historian
William Weber has pointed out regarding his own discipline, is the
long-standing habit among humanities scholars of examining artistic
movements from within a narrow “history of ideas” paradigm.4 This
paradigm has limited the ability of historians to examine thoroughly
the relations between the political and the philosophical ideas of a his-
torical era and the translation of these ideas into artistic movements,
including those that have structured the world of opera over the cen-
turies. Where opera has seemed to bear explicit political messages, or
where its composers were themselves directly implicated in national
politics, historians have indeed ventured to comment on opera.5 But
they have largely remained unable or unwilling to come to terms with
4 Victoria Johnson

the importance of opera as a site of social, cultural, and political inter-

action in modern European history.
Still other disciplines have been no more proficient or prolific in
the analysis of opera, sometimes for the same reasons that confront
historians, but sometimes for reasons specific to particular disciplinary
trajectories. For example, despite Max Weber’s early contribution to
the sociology of music and Theodor Adorno’s extensive mid-century
writings, sociologists have shied away from examining the specifi-
cally musical content of musical works in favor of explaining the
social and economic structures behind their production.6 In this sense,
sociologists have been no more confident than historians about directly
confronting the difficult questions surrounding the relation between
musical content and social context. Despite the textual element of
opera, this sociological reluctance towards the study of music in gen-
eral has done nothing to encourage attention within the discipline to
the operatic form. And there is a further obstacle to the study of opera
facing sociologists, an obstacle that derives from the discipline’s own
history. Having once (in the 1960s) taken up the gauntlet thrown down
by the Frankfurt School in its diatribes against the American “culture
industry,” sociologists of art have for decades been engaged, on the
one hand, in the fruitful work of specifying the precise mechanisms by
which commercial interests shape popular culture, and, on the other,
in documenting the liberating powers of popular culture.7 “High”
culture forms such as opera have largely remained in the shadows,
except when they have appeared in their modern incarnations in orga-
nizational studies of non-profit institutions.8 European and American
operatic history has therefore received almost no attention at all from
American sociologists since at least World War II.9
Disciplinary divisions of labor, internal disciplinary concerns, and
the apparent impenetrability of musical works have thus served to
hamper the analysis of opera production and consumption by special-
ists in literature, history, and sociology who in principle have much to
contribute to such an analysis and whose own disciplines stand only
to gain thereby. In the last twenty-five years, however, a set of linked
transformations in scholarly concerns and methods throughout the
 Introduction 5

humanities and social sciences has laid the groundwork and provided
the inspiration for a wave of innovative new works on opera, including
musicologist Jane Fulcher’s The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as
Politics and Politicized Art (1987), musicologist Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung
Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and
literary critic Herbert Lindenberger’s Opera in History (1998). The
Cambridge Opera Journal, launched in 1989 with an inaugural issue
featuring contributors from the disciplines of philosophy, musicology,
literary criticism, and history, heralded – and has since nurtured –
the new spirit of opera scholarship. These scholarly undertakings, and
others like them, bear witness to the interest within many disciplines in
new kinds of cultural and historical analysis as well as to a new degree
of disciplinary cross-fertilization. The intellectual developments that
made these and other similarly innovative works possible are often
referred to today as the cultural and historical “turns.” In the following
section, I briefly trace the origins and effects of these developments
in history, sociology, literary criticism, and musicology – all key dis-
ciplines in the study of opera – before examining the major lines of
inquiry that have emerged in opera studies with the help of the turns.

THE TURNS IN THE HUMANITIES AND

SOCIAL SCIENCES

These turns, by no means smooth or unilinear processes, are the

unevenly achieved result of a set of loosely linked critiques of tra-
ditional methods and objects of study that cut a swath through a wide
range of disciplines from the 1970s onward. However contradictory
and fitful these developments have been, their end product has been
a massive reorientation of scholarly concerns and methods in history,
sociology, and literature.

History

History’s “cultural turn” took place in the 1970s and 1980s and
had its origins in a reaction to two important currents of historical
6 Victoria Johnson

scholarship: traditional political history and the social history inaugu-

rated by the Annales school in the 1930s and carried on in a more
Marxist vein by a second generation of French historians such as
Albert Soboul and George Rudé.10 The success of this reaction is evi-
dent in the broad influence of the school of historical studies known
as the New Cultural History, whose most prominent representatives
are the French historians Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel and the
American historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, and Lynn
Hunt.
In the 1970s and 1980s, these French and American scholars found
themselves dissatisfied with the huge gaps left in the explanation of his-
torical processes and events by historians’ dependence on two sources
of historical information: on the one hand, the published, learned
texts of politically and socially prominent figures, and on the other
(with the inception of the Annales school), quantifiable information
about social and economic life. Influenced by E. P. Thompson and
Michel Foucault, among others, the new culturally oriented histori-
ans began to explore alternative ways to capture the experience of the
past by mining unconventional historical sources such as accounts of
popular festivals or visual representations of public and private life.
These sources guided scholars toward new answers to old questions –
particularly those that have never ceased to surround the causes, tra-
jectory, and effects of the French Revolution – and they often raised
utterly new questions as well. A central accomplishment of the New
Cultural History has been to show how cultural practices are embed-
ded in a relation of mutual constitution with social and economic
structures, an approach that stands in stark contrast to traditional
understandings of the historical role of “culture” once prevalent among
left-leaning and conservative historians alike.11 The cultural turn in his-
tory was accompanied by another kind of turn, this one – strange as
it might seem – historical. Unhappy with the Annalistes’ failure to
take seriously the power of actors to alter social structures, histori-
ans such as Pierre Nora and Lynn Hunt made the event and other
processual and temporal categories central to historical analysis and
explanation.12
 Introduction 7

Sociology

Like history, American sociology has also undergone both a cultural

and a historical turn, though these were initially separate lines of influ-
ence which have only in the past decade begun to join into a single
current of sociological inquiry. Sociology, deeply historical in the hands
of its founding fathers, had by the 1960s become focused on contem-
porary American social structure and social problems. However, a new
school of sociology, initiated in large part by the historian and sociol-
ogist Charles Tilly, imported some of the concerns and methods of
the Annales school (itself deeply sociological in its methods) into the
study of perennial sociological questions such as the origins of rev-
olutions and the nature of modernization.13 Tilly, along with Theda
Skocpol and other influential historical sociologists, has since trained
several generations of students to think about sociological questions
from a historical perspective.14 However, some of these students (and
in fact some of the teachers) came to believe that historical sociology as
practiced in the 1970s was not “historical” enough. A major complaint
of this “third wave” of historical sociologists was the ahistoricity of
the quantitative and comparative methods initially developed in order
to help legitimize historical sociology as a sociological subfield.15 In
the 1990s, historical sociologists such as Andrew Abbott and William
Sewell, Jr., argued that historical sociology had not yet taken time
and temporality seriously, while Craig Calhoun suggested that histor-
ical sociology had allowed itself to be “domesticated” instead of using
its tools to analyze the “historical constitution of basic theoretical
categories.”16
This historical turn in American sociology was accompanied by
a cultural turn. By the time Tilly began trying to acquaint sociolo-
gists with historical methods and concerns, American sociology had
already experienced a small revolution against the dominant socio-
logical paradigm of the mid-twentieth century, American structural-
functionalism. Sociologists of culture were appropriating the revision
of Marxism generated from within British Cultural Studies, along with
the work of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, as they attempted
8 Victoria Johnson

to develop convincing critiques of the critics of mass culture.17 Some

sociologists of culture gradually began to revise their own assumptions
about their central concept and to expand the definition of culture
to include practice, discourse, and symbols. From France, the various
poststructuralist critiques of Levi-Straussian and Saussurian structural-
ism, especially those of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, made
their way into American studies of popular culture and also inspired
culturalist studies of social spheres that had previously been considered
outside the purview of cultural sociology, such as banking, railroads,
or the insurance industry. For certain American sociologists, “culture”
has become as ubiquitous and powerful a tool for explanation as it has
for the founders and the inheritors of the New Cultural History, no
longer viewed as a mere emanation of economic and social structures
nor as a severely circumscribed sphere of artifacts in modern society.
The multiple influences of poststructuralism, Geertzian anthropol-
ogy, feminism, and cultural studies have combined to produce a set of
aligned, if not always compatible, definitions of culture in sociology as
a potential locus of political struggle and as a producer in its own right
of social and economic structures.

Literary criticism

For its part, the discipline of literary criticism, by definition already

a deeply “cultural” one in the narrower sense, underwent a histori-
cal turn marked by the ascendancy of the “New Historicism” in the
early 1980s. Literary criticism’s historical turn was, in spite of indi-
vidual differences in emphasis and outlook, above all a reaction to
the brand of literary analysis that had dominated since the late 1920s,
the “New Criticism.”18 American literary scholars working in this tra-
dition, whose foremost representatives were Cleanth Brooks, John
Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, chose to bracket the histor-
ical context of literary works in favor of attention to the texts alone.
These scholars shared a conviction that literary works held the key
to appropriate understanding between their covers and that criticism
should be deployed for the close analysis of texts without recourse to
 Introduction 9

extra-textual information. Attention to historical context was largely

eschewed in the quest to understand the work on its own terms, an
approach which often served to identify innovation or creativity as
emanating from the author alone.
The “New Historicism” marked one current of reaction to this sort
of autonomous understanding of the text. Scholars working in this
vein began to explore the historical contexts in which literary works
were created to examine how their authors were beholden to con-
temporary modes of discourse and other collective social phenomena
for the structure and content of their supposedly autonomous literary
creations.19 Meanwhile, another strain of reaction to the New Crit-
icism was triggered by the influential reinterpretation of Saussurian
semiotics by Roland Barthes, which opened up a whole new range of
“texts” to be “read” by critics, including pictures, social practices, and
the objects of daily life.20 To this expansion of subject matter, British
Cultural Studies and the many varieties of French poststructuralism
contributed a revised understanding of the individual text as permitting
multiple and equally valid readings and as thus exhibiting “multivo-
cality.” By the 1980s, the kind of textual interpretation practiced by
the New Criticism had largely been replaced by a new flexibility (or
laxness, depending on one’s perspective) of method, a new set of ques-
tions, and a new range of literary “sources.” As we shall see, it was
these developments in literary theory that were to have the heaviest
impact on the study of opera, contributing to a wave of new works
on the subject in the 1980s and 1990s, both within musicology and
beyond its borders.

Musicology

It has frequently been noted that musicology has been the discipline
most resistant to, and even ignorant of, the dramatic changes in the
humanities and social sciences that began to make themselves felt in
the 1970s.21 The transformations in methods, sources, and concerns
that were profoundly altering the study of literature hardly touched
musicology for at least a decade, as the discipline remained curiously
10 Victoria Johnson

impervious to the kind of cross-pollination that made sociologists and

literary critics alike claim Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes
as their own, or that made Foucault at one and the same time an
anthropologist, a literary theorist, a historian, and a sociologist. One
of the long-standing exceptions to this rule of disciplinary insular-
ity, Leo Treitler, has suggested that musicology, troubled by its lack
of documentary sources before the medieval period – compared, for
example, to the ancient documentation available to scholars of liter-
ature and the visual arts – has been resistant to the new academic
currents because it has focused most of its energy on securing its own
tradition through the painstaking reconstruction of historical facts
and sources.22 Though these studies have vastly expanded our his-
torical record of musical life, they have usually made only a limited
contribution to questions about the place of music in the history of
human societies. While many musicologists have moved beyond the
traditional “internalist” study of musical works to the documentation
of extra-musical phenomena such as markets and politics, many of
these same musicologists have continued to treat the musical works
themselves as objectively autonomous entities, rather than examining
the way such autonomy is socially constituted (or blocked). Like non-
musicologists who may romanticize music as a fundamentally difficult
and mysterious art form, musicologists have often implicitly endowed
music with a timeless autonomy that discourages them from posing
questions about the relations between musical form and content and
extra-musical context at all.
Gradually, however, beginning in the mid-1980s, a series of unusual
conferences and the research of a few bold musicologists resulted in
the publication of several pathbreaking volumes that have questioned
the assumptions behind the dominant concerns and methods in Amer-
ican musicology as well as exploring possible approaches to questions
rarely posed by musicologists about music/society relations. These
works include (but are not limited to) Contemplating Music: Challenges
to Musicology ( Joseph Kerman, 1985); Music and Society: The Politics of
Composition, Performance and Reception (edited by Richard Leppert and
Susan McClary, 1987); Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality
 Introduction 11

(Susan McClary, 1991); Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons

(edited by Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, 1992); Musi-
cology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (edited
by Ruth A. Solie, 1993), and Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge
(Lawrence Kramer, 1995).
The titles of these books clearly signal that musicology itself has
undergone a turn of sorts in the last fifteen years. And while musi-
cology might appear to be a discipline that is cultural and historical
by definition, it has acquired a new historicism and culturalism that
have transformed research methods and concerns. Many musicologists
have become more truly “historical” in their methods and conclusions
by building contingency, path dependence, and links to non-musical
features of given historical conjunctures into the analysis of the musi-
cal work itself. Whereas they had previously been (and many still
are) more comfortable identifying the historicity in a work as a ques-
tion of strictly musical influence, a handful of musicologists are now
working to re-embed musical life and musical works in their specific
extra-musical historical conjunctures. This re-evaluation of the social
processes shaping the history of musical works has also led to a revision
of musicological assumptions about the nature of “culture” by encour-
aging the analysis of music as social practice and discourse rather than
as a set of largely self-contained artifacts.
These currents in musicology, which have touched methodology
and subject matter alike, parallel and draw on the developments of
the last three decades in sociology, history, and literary criticism. Musi-
cologists have found inspiration in sociology and cultural history for
analyses of canon construction, for studies of the economic, politi-
cal, social, and cultural structures in which musical life is embedded,
and for investigations into the social functions of classical music. In a
move reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s French application in Distinc-
tion (1979) of anthropological methods usually reserved for “primi-
tive” cultures, some scholars of Western classical music have begun to
take their cues from the subfield of ethnomusicology.23 Following the
lead of the New Cultural Historians, musicologists have explored
the ways in which music not only mirrors, but also contributes to,
12 Victoria Johnson

the production and reinforcement of social structure, social practices,

and systems of meaning. And just as cultural historians have expanded
the repertoire of legitimate archival sources, musicologists have sup-
plemented the common tools for studying music – namely, the analysis
of scores and the interpretation of biographical details of composers’
lives – with such unorthodox sources as pictorial representations of
musical production and consumption.24 In a similar vein, composers’
sketches for works in progress, used heretofore in a fashion that has
tended to buttress the notion of the isolated, inspired, creator, have
been recast as evidence for the contingent, even haphazard, nature of
musical composition.25
Musicologists have been more directly influenced by developments
in literary criticism than by those in any other discipline, in part because
the literary concern with a particular form of artistic creation demon-
strates most directly the possible advantages for the study of music
of applying the assumptions and methods of the new culturalist work
in sociology and of the new cultural history. But besides mediating
between musicology and these other disciplines, literary criticism has
itself been the source of a number of promising new approaches to the
study of music. Theories of reception in music have been modeled on
literary reception theory to reveal the multiple meanings available to
listeners and to contest the usefulness – and sometimes the possibility –
of reconstructing artistic intentions. Feminist scholars have examined
the distribution of gender work in various musical cultures, and some
have argued for the interpretation of musical works as themselves
“gendered” or as reflecting and reinforcing gender hierarchies in the
extra-musical world.26 Semiotics has made great strides with some
musicologists, who have employed its principles and methods to exam-
ine how “linguistic” codes tie musical works to their social contexts
through the notes themselves.27
It is important to note that these developments represent a double
movement away from traditional musicology. First, progressive musi-
cologists have firmly embedded what is often known, misleadingly, as
“musical culture” or “the music world” into a larger and more complex
set of social structures, thereby paving the way for the historicization
 Introduction 13

of the implicitly claimed autonomy of this sphere. And more daringly,

they have bared the musical work itself to the new ways of thinking
about history and culture, dismantling the ideas that musical works
are inherently autonomous and that they are locked in an eternal and
insulated dialogue among themselves. Such traditional approaches to
the study of music have in some quarters given way to an assessment
of the ways in which even “pure” music is the carrier of extra-musical
symbols and codes and is the producer of meaning and social structure.

A P P R OAC H I N G O P E R A A F T E R T H E T U R N S

Both directly and indirectly, the turns have helped effect a profound
transformation in opera studies. Opera scholarship within musicology,
for example, has been a major beneficiary of the new movements in that
discipline in part because musicologists specializing in opera, given
their inevitable confrontation with the text of the libretto, have been
more likely to be aware of developments in literary criticism than
have musicologists specializing in instrumental music. Another group
of musicologists working on opera has found in cultural history the
inspiration and models for approaching opera with new methods and
questions. And beyond musicology, the expansion of acceptable subject
matter in both literary criticism and cultural history has freed scholars
in those fields to take opera seriously as a topic of intellectual inquiry.
A review of opera scholarship published in all disciplines in the last
decade and a half reveals three major lines of inquiry, which can be
roughly classified as the “critical” approach, the “systems of mean-
ing” approach, and the “material conditions” approach. The “critical”
approach, pursued mainly by musicologists and literary critics, involves
a search for present meanings, either social or personal, in operatic
works. The “systems of meanings” approach, practiced mainly by
musicologists and historians, betrays the influence of the New Cultural
Historians in its concern with the historical meanings available to the
creators and consumers of operatic works. Practitioners who are pri-
marily engaged in the second line of inquiry often also take up the
third line of inquiry (although the opposite is not as likely). This third
14 Victoria Johnson

line, the “material conditions” approach, involves the reconstruction

and analysis of the organizational, political, and professional structures
underpinning opera production and consumption in specific historical
contexts.
The “critical” approach in opera studies traces its roots to a work
that long predates the “turns”: Joseph Kerman’s pathbreaking Opera
as Drama, first published in 1956 and reissued in 1988. As the musicol-
ogist Susan McClary has noted, early critical works such as Kerman’s
“remained more or less isolated voices calling for the grafting of criti-
cal projects onto the mainstream of the profession.”28 It was not until
the 1980s and the pioneering work of McClary herself that musicolo-
gists began to question traditional musicological approaches to opera,
which privileged close readings of musical passages and excluded con-
siderations of the music’s expression of social relationships and mean-
ings. McClary’s innovative writings, which deal with both instrumental
and operatic works, have centered on the expression of gender rela-
tions in these works. Musicologists inspired by her critical approach
have often similarly focused on gender and sexuality in opera. Aiding
this double shift toward criticism and gender issues in musicological
studies of opera was a spate of books on opera by literary critics,
among the most influential of which has been Catherine Clément’s
Opera, or the Undoing of Women, first published in French in 1976 and
published in an English translation, with a foreword by McClary, in
1988. This work draws on anthropology, semiology, and psychoanaly-
sis to analyze the fatal end that awaits the heroines of so many operas.
Arguing that the sumptuous music accompanying their deaths encour-
ages forgetfulness of the true nature of the events unfolding on stage,
Clément focuses her analysis on the frequently morbid plots: “What
awarenesses dimmed by beauty and the sublime,” she asks, “come to
stand in the darkness of the hall and watch the infinitely repetitive
spectacle of a woman who dies, murdered?”29
Clément’s and McClary’s studies have inspired a wave of research
on representations of sexuality and gender in opera. And encouraged,
perhaps, by the success of literary critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s The
Queen’s Throat, research on sexuality and gender has expanded beyond
 Introduction 15

specifically feminist criticism to include analyses of lesbian and gay

musical experiences and musical meanings.30 By searching for such
unorthodox meanings, this work on gender and sexuality goes beyond
traditional musicological readings of musical scores and libretti. But
it is not the subject matter – gender and sexuality – that distinguishes
these studies from other scholarship on opera, both past and present.
More significant for our purposes here is their treatment of operatic
works not as historical artifacts but as texts that invite contemporary
and often avowedly personal readings.31
The second line of inquiry evident in recent opera scholarship –
one that is quite distinct from the “critical” approach – is largely the
product of the transformation of political and cultural historiography
in the last three decades, although it also owes a good deal to the
comparativist Edward Said’s work on orientalism and opera.32 Studies
in this vein, which have come primarily from musicologists and his-
torians, focus on reconstructing the “systems of meaning” (musical as
well as extra-musical) that have shaped the production and reception
of operatic works in specific historical contexts.33 It is no accident that
some of the musicologists most attentive to the turns in cultural and
political history are scholars of French opera, since it is historians of
France (British and American as well as French) who have been the
prime catalysts for this set of turns. The musicologist Jane Fulcher,
for example, states at the outset of her 1987 study of French grand
opera that she is offering “not narrowly a ‘reception history’ but . . .
a cultural history. For what interests me,” she writes, “is how grand
opera was implicated in a social and cultural context – how it arose
within these larger structures and in turn reacted back finally upon
them.”34 Similarly, in her book French Cultural Politics and Music from
the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, Fulcher offers an analysis of
Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise that again shows deep affinities
with the defining concerns of the New Cultural History:

By focusing on stylistic codes of meaning as understood within the

period, this study seeks to avoid imputing political meanings on the basis
of our current perceptions of political homologies or metaphors. Such an
16 Victoria Johnson

“essentialist” approach . . . must be replaced by the historical and

anthropological study of meaning. We must attempt to excavate the
systems of meaning in which specific works were both conceived by
composers and then understood by audiences of the time – which were
not necessarily identical. In the case of Louise, we shall find that the two
were indeed substantially different; moreover, the context of
performance played a central role in determining how the contemporary
public and critics “read” the work . . . [A]lthough politics was not always
present in the messages or modes of communication of the music, it
affected conditions of both presentation and reception.35

Like many cultural historians working today, Fulcher’s explicit pur-

pose is to reconstruct, as far as possible, past “systems of meanings” –
what sociologists often refer to as “cultural schemas” – in order to
understand the constraints and possibilities shaping musical expres-
sion and reception at particular historical conjunctures. Otherwise,
one runs the risk of reading into musical works what was not there for
the composer, or – since the relevance of the composer’s intentions
have been called into question by so many scholars – for both initial and
subsequent historical audiences. In his 1995 study of musical reception
in Paris between 1750 and 1850, Listening in Paris, the historian James
Johnson – taking aim at Susan McClary – points out the stakes of the
same problem far more polemically:

I cannot doubt McClary when she claims to hear a narrative of rape and
murder in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony . . . [b]ut such a view of musical
meaning, which I think neglects the actual musical features that frame
our perceptions and delimit possible musical content, is arguably as
one-sided as its opposite extreme, which dismisses listeners’ own
aesthetic and ideological expectations as irrelevant in deriving some
supposedly fixed musical meaning.36

At least in part, the third major line of work in opera studies sidesteps
such contentious debates by turning from the works themselves to the
material conditions of operatic production and reception. Among the
most prominent research in this line is a series of institutional studies
of Italian operatic history by the historian John Rosselli, including The
Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario;
 Introduction 17

Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy; and Singers of Italian

Opera: The History of a Profession. A 1998 volume on Opera Production and
Its Resources (part of a series entitled History of Italian Opera), edited by
the musicologists Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, similarly aims
to document the organizational and professional contexts in which
operatic works have historically been created and consumed. A major
and quite recent contribution to the institutional approach is Beth
and Jonathan Glixon’s 2006 study Inventing the Business of Opera: The
Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice.
Although a great deal of such work has centered on Italian opera,
a handful of historians and musicologists have posed the same ques-
tions in studies of French operatic history. In an early article on the
eighteenth-century Paris Opera (one that can itself be considered a con-
tribution to the cultural turn in French history), the historian William
Weber, for example, argues that the unusually dated repertoire on
offer to the Parisian public up until the mid-1770s was the result of
a combination of institutional factors, including royal cultural pol-
icy, the geographical concentration of the French aristocracy in and
around Paris, French musicians’ educational and career trajectories,
and the relative expense of the dominant French operatic genre (tragédie
lyrique).37 And the musicologist Elizabeth Bartlet employs painstak-
ing archival research to uncover the precise institutional processes by
which the repertoire of the Paris Opera was altered during the French
Revolution.38
Since scholars concerned with the reconstruction of systems of
meaning often ground this project in the reconstruction of the orga-
nizational and professional structures shaping production and recep-
tion, these second and third approaches – the “systems of meaning”
approach and the “material conditions” approach – are more closely
linked with each other than is either with the “critical” approach.
Nevertheless, while practitioners of the first approach have already seen
their efforts brought together in several interdisciplinary edited vol-
umes, no similar volume has jointly presented the efforts of opera schol-
ars working in multiple disciplines who are committed to reinscribing
opera in its historical circumstances of production and reception.39 It
is for this reason that we have chosen to focus here on interdisciplinary
18 Victoria Johnson

contributions to the second and third approaches. In order to take

advantage of the potential for cross-national comparisons offered by
the history of opera, we have brought together scholars of Italy and
France, yet for the purpose of maintaining focus we have limited the
countries represented to these two.
The first section of the volume (“The Representation of Social and
Political Relations in Operatic Works”) presents readings of French
and Italian operas that firmly ground these works in their specific
historical contexts, while the second section (“The Institutional Bases
for the Production and Reception of Opera”) is devoted to studies
primarily concerned with understanding the conditions shaping the
production and reception of operatic works in France and Italy. The
third section of the volume (“Theorizing Opera and the Social”) brings
together three essays explicitly addressing the question of how best to
approach the analysis of the social dimensions of operatic works and
practices.
The questions addressed by the contributors to this volume include
some of the most central in opera studies today. By what methods
should we analyze and interpret operatic works and operatic practices?
Is meaning in opera fixed or malleable? Do composers’ intentions mat-
ter, and if so, can we know them? Where does the operatic “work” to
be analyzed actually reside – in the score and libretto, in operatic per-
formances, or perhaps nowhere? And how, if at all, are social relations
represented in operatic works? An edited volume cannot pretend to
offer tidy solutions to such complex puzzles. But by juxtaposing a vari-
ety of disciplinary approaches to a wide historical range of operatic
works and practices, we hope to introduce readers to some innova-
tive ways of thinking about these pressing questions. We also hope to
provoke new questions entirely.

n ot e s
1 Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1956), which located opera’s dramatic power largely in its music, did
much to galvanize and maintain interest in opera despite the genre’s
 Introduction 19

subordinate status in musicology. Regarding the status of opera vis-à-vis

“pure” music, see Susan McClary, “Foreword: The Undoing of Opera:
Toward a Feminist Criticism of Music,” pp. ix–xviii in Catherine Clément,
Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xii; see also
Susan McClary, “Turtles All the Way Down (On the ‘Purely Musical’),”
pp. 1–31 in McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Carolyn Abbate
and Roger Parker, “Introduction: On Analyzing Opera,” in Carolyn
Abbate and Roger Parker, eds., Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner
(Berkeley: University, of California Press, 1989), pp. 1–24; see
pp. 3–4.
2 See, e.g, Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977); Ted A. Emery, “Goldoni’s Pamela
from Play to Libretto,” Italica 64/4 (1987), 572–582; Gary Schmidgall,
Shakespeare and Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Paul
Bauschatz, “CEdipus: Stravinsky and Cocteau Recompose Sophocles,”
Comparative Literature 43/2 (1991), 150–170; and Léonard Rosmarin, When
Literature Becomes Opera: Study of a Transformational Process (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1999).
3 The 1988 volume Reading Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press),
edited by Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, offered an important challenge
to the marginal status of libretti among musicologists.
4 William Weber, “Beyond Zeitgeist: Recent Work in Music History,”
Journal of Modern History 66 (1994), 321–345; pp. 322–323. See also Weber,
“Toward a Dialogue between Historians and Musicologists,” Musica e
Storia 1 (1993), 7–21.
5 E.g., Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas from Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985).
6 Max Weber’s fragment on music was first published as Die rationalen und
soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, ed. Theodor Kroyer (Munich: Drei
Masken Verlag, 1921); it has been reissued in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe
as Zur Musiksoziologie 1910–1920, ed. Christoph Braun and Ludwig
Finscher (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2003). The only available English
translation is The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed.
Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). A number of Adorno’s writings
20 Victoria Johnson

on music have recently been reissued in Adorno on Music, ed. Robert

Witkin (New York: Routledge, 1998).
7 Some key early works in the former tradition, known as the “production
of culture” approach, include Paul Hirsch, “Processing Fads and Fashions:
An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems,” American
Journal of Sociology 77 (1972), 639–659; Richard A. Peterson, ed., The
Production of Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976); and Paul DiMaggio,
“Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an
Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass-Culture Theory,” Journal of
Popular Culture 11 (1977), 436–452. The strongest sociological tradition in
the study of art consumption (as opposed to production) has come from
Marxian cultural sociologists generally grouped under the rubric British
Cultural Studies; key works include Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth,
Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Dick
Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979);
Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge, 1978); and Stuart Hall,
Culture, Media, Languages (London: Hutchinson, 1980). Art consumption
studies in the USA have been deeply influenced by British Cultural
Studies; see, for example, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984); and Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the
Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003).
8 Examples of such studies include Richard A. Peterson, “From Impresario
to Arts Administrator: Formal Accountability in Nonprofit Cultural
Organizations,” in Paul DiMaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts:
Studies in Mission and Constraint (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), pp. 161–183; Paul DiMaggio, “Nonprofit Organizations in the
Production and Distribution of Culture,” in Walter W. Powell, ed., The
Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987), pp. 195–220. Important exceptions to the presentist tendency in
sociological work on high-culture production include DiMaggio’s
two-part study on nineteenth-century Boston (“Cultural
Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an
Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and
Society 4 [1982], 33–50, and “Cultural Entrepreneurship in
Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of
 Introduction 21

American Art,” Media, Culture and Society 4 [1982], 303–322) and Tia
DeNora’s study of Beethoven (Beethoven and the Construction of Genius:
Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 [Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995]).
9 See, however, Rosanne Martorella, The Sociology of Opera (New York:
Praeger, 1982) and Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Boundaries and Structural
Change: The Extension of the High Cultural Model to Theater, Opera,
and Dance, 1900–1940,” in Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds.),
Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequalities
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 21–57.
10 Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History,
pp. 1–22; p. 2. As Hunt notes, the journal founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch
and Lucien Febvre is still published today, since 1946 under the name
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. Key works in the Annales
tradition include Marc Bloch, “A Contribution towards a Comparative
History of European Societies,” in Land and Work in Medieval Europe:
Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Harper and
Row, 1967 [1928]), pp. 44–81; Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah
Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans.
Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972–1973). Albert Soboul’s most
influential work is The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution,
1793–4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), while Rudé is best known
for his The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1967).
11 Prominent work in the New Cultural History includes, e.g., Natalie
Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1975); William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and
Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Lynn Hunt, Politics,
Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other
Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and
Roger Chartier, Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
For an excellent critical discussion of history’s cultural turn, see William
H. Sewell, Jr., “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History,
or Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian,” pp. 22–80 in Logics of
22 Victoria Johnson

History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005).
12 See, e.g., Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’événement,” in Jacques Le Goff
and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).
13 See, for example, Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York:
Academic Press, 1981); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A
Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979); and Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in
Social History (New York: Academic Press, 1978).
14 For an overview of major methods and scholars in historical sociology to
the 1980s, see Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For an overview of
more recent trends, see Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola
Orloff, “Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of
Historical Sociology,” in Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann
Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–72.
15 The term “third wave” is borrowed from Adams et al., “Introduction:
Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical
Sociology.”
16 Craig Calhoun, “The Rise and Domestication of Historical Sociology,” in
Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 305–337; p. 328. On the
institutional history of American historical sociology, see also Andrew
Abbott, “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” Social Science
History 15/2 (1991), 201–238.
17 On British Cultural Studies, see above, note 7. By far the most influential
work by Geertz is his “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” first
published in 1972 and reprinted in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
18 For some foundational documents as well as more recent reflections on
the New Criticism, see William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, eds., The
New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and
Continuities (New York: Garland, 1995).
19 For an introduction to the concerns of the New Historicism, see H.
Aram Veeser, “The New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New
Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–32. See also Steven
 Introduction 23

Mullaney, “Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and

Anthropology in Literary Studies,” in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The
Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996), pp. 161–189.
20 Barthes’s most influential work was Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957).
21 See, e.g., Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, “Introduction,” in Richard
Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of
Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. xi–xix; p. xii; and Ann E. Moyer, “Art Music
and European High Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History
39/3 (1997), 635–643; p. 635.
22 Leo Treitler, “The Power of Positivist Thinking,” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 42/2 (1989), 375–402; p. 378.
23 See, for example, the “Prelude” to Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the
Undoing of Women, pp. 3–23; and Bruno Nettl, “Mozart and the
Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture,” in Katharine Bergeron
and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 137–155. On relations
between musicology and ethnomusicology in the 1980s, see Joseph
Kerman, “Ethnomusicology and ‘Cultural Musicology’,” chapter 5 in his
Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985). For a more recent discussion of related issues, see
Philip V. Bohlman, “Ethnomusicology’s Challenge to the Canon; the
Canon’s Challenge to Ethnomusicology,” in Bergeron and Bohlman,
eds., Disciplining Music, pp. 116–136.
24 See especially Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and
Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard Leppert, “Music, Domestic
Life and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in
India,” in Leppert and McClary, eds., Music and Society; and Richard
Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the
Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63–104. Roger
Parker makes novel use of visual representations in “Falstaff and Verdi’s
Final Narratives,” in his Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 100–125. See also
Carolyn Abbate’s discussion of The Magic Flute in her In Search of Opera
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 55–106.
24 Victoria Johnson

25 See, e.g., Roger Parker’s analysis of La forza del destino in Leonora’s Last
Act, pp. 61–99.
26 Key studies and collections on music and gender by musicologists
include Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Ruth A. Solie, ed.,
Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Marcia J. Citron, Gender
and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
and “Feminist Approaches to Musicology,” in Susan C. Cook and Judy S.
Tsou, eds., Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 15–34; and Philip Brett,
Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New
Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994). A rare look at
male (hetero)sexuality is offered by Richard Leppert in chapter 2
(“Music, Socio-politics, Ideologies of Male Sexuality and Power”) of his
Music and Image. For reflections on feminist work by one of its most vocal
champions, see, Susan McClary, “Of Patriarchs and Matriarchs, Too:
Feminist Musicology, Its Contributions and Challenges,” Musical Times
135/1816 (1994), 364–369, and “Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory,
Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism,” Perspectives of New Music 32/1
(1994), 68–85; for a critique of McClary, see Leo Treitler, “Gender and
Other Dualities of Music History,” in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference,
pp. 23–45; see esp. pp. 35–45.
27 Musicological work drawing on semiotic analysis includes Jean-Jacques
Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn
Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Susan McClary,
“Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” in her
Feminine Endings, pp. 35–52; V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic
Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991) and “The Challenge of Semiotics,” in Nicholas Cook and Mark
Everist, eds., Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
pp. 138–160; and Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
28 McClary, Feminine Endings, p. xiii.
29 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, p. 47.
30 See, e.g., Corinne E. Blackmer, “The Ecstasies of Saint Teresa: The Saint
as Queer Diva from Crashaw to Four Saints in Three Acts,” in Corinne E.
 Introduction 25

Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds., En Travesti: Women, Gender,

Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp.
306–348; Patricia Juliana Smith, “Gli Enigmi Sono Tre: The [D]evolution
of Turandot, Lesbian Monster,” in ibid., pp. 242–284; Elizabeth Wood,
“Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts,” in Solie, ed.,
Musicology and Difference, pp. 164–183; Mitchell Morris, “Reading as an
Opera Queen,” in ibid., pp. 184–200; Philip Brett, “Britten’s Dream,” in
ibid., pp. 259–280; and Philip Brett, “‘Grimes Is at His Exercise’: Sex,
Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes,” in Mary Ann
Smart, ed., Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 237–249.
31 For a recent critique of these writings, see David J. Levin, “Is There a Text
in This Libido? Diva and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Opera
Criticism,” in Joe Jeongwon and Rose Theresa, eds., Between Opera and
Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121–132.
32 Writings by Said that have been especially influential in musicology
include his seminal Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and his
analysis of Verdi’s Aı̈da in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage,
1994), pp. 111–132. For musicological responses to Said, see, e.g., Thomas
Betzwieser, “Exoticism and Politics: Beaumarchais’ and Salieri’s Le
Couronnement de Tarare (1790),” Cambridge Opera Journal 6/2 (1994),
91–112; Mark Everist, “Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto: Mélodrame, Opera,
Orientalism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8/3, (1996), 215–250; Steven
Huebner, “‘O patria mia’: Patriotism, Dream, Death,” Cambridge Opera
Journal 14 (1 & 2) (2002), 161–175; and Ralph P. Locke, “Constructing the
Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila,” Cambridge Opera Journal
3/3 (1991), 261–302 and “Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and
Musical Theater,” Opera Quarterly 10/1 (1993), 48–64.
33 Though he is a literary scholar by discipline, Herbert Lindenberger’s
work on opera, particularly his Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), investigates the political and
cultural meanings and contexts of opera in a manner that aligns him
more closely with historians working on opera than with many literary
critics. See also his Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1984).
34 Jane F. Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 9–10.
26 Victoria Johnson

35 Jane F., Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to
the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 8. The
earlier French orientation of much work in this vein has given way to an
increasing number of Italian studies; see, for example, Wendy Heller’s
Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century
Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and Emanuele
Senici’s Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini
to Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
36 Johnson, Listening in Paris, note 4, pp. 287–288.
37 William Weber, “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien
Régime,” Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 58–88.
38 M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Revolutionschanson und Hymne im Repertoire
der Pariser Opera 1793–1794,” in Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt,
eds., Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewußtseins
(Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), pp. 479–510; “The New
Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary
Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Malcolm Boyd, ed., Music and
the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
pp. 107–156; and Etienne-Nicolas Méhul and Opéra: Source and Archival
Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire
(Heilbronn: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 1999).
39 See, for example, Smart, ed., Siren Songs, and Blackmer and Smith, eds.,
En Travesti.